Breathe through your nose, mouth closed. Suck your stomach in! Right leg lift up. Fall back, lean back, more back, way back! Your lower back is supposed to hurt! And eventually you would create the perfect human bridge.
Say what? What on earth is a human bridge? It’s a pose that stretches my hamstrings to their very cores until they burn and that makes me lose sight of why I want to fall back, lean back, way back, more back.
on the way to creating the perfect human bridge; photo from http://www.bikramyoga.com
Ladies and gents, yes, I have been keeping good with my promise to become more active since the turnover to 2012. So far so good, really. One month and 10 days into the year some of my clothes fit better already! There has been some noticeable changes with my body from some people who have not seen me for about a month and that is a big motivation for me to keep going and push through with my new lifestyle.
My routine (for most days) is trying to get up early; a brisk morning walk before heading off to work; then I practise Bikram Yoga after work. As if a regular kind of yoga is not enough I decided to practice the Bikram kind. It comprises of being “tortured” in a steaming yoga studio for 90 minutes where you do 26 poses, both standing and lying down, and concentrate on focusing. I still do not know how Bikram Yoga appealed to me in the first place. The room is heated, I hate heat. Lots of stretching and bending and twisting involved, I could be a contender for the most inflexible person in the world. Focus. What focus? For the first few days all I can focus on was what to have for dinner after the session. Then it slowly improved so I started focusing on counting ceiling tiles. Nowadays it’s getting even better so I focus on my image in the mirror, staring myself in the eye.
Sometimes though I can’t help but hate myself, while doing the dead body pose (savasana), for being too sedentary all these years! Years of sitting down and putting off taking care of my health has finally shown its ugly face to me inside the hot yoga studio. But better late than never, right? Things are slowly improving now and that makes me happy.
This is where I practice Bikram Yoga. I suppose I’m one of them yogis now and I’m loving (almost) all 90 minutes of it.
