Nothing was really that different from my usual yoga class, except this time for some reason everything started to click together. My breath stayed in rhythm with my movements. I was able to focus on my breath rather than the strain of the pose, which meant I was more stable and more flexible in the poses and was able to hold them longer than usual. And, I got uttiyana bandha.
I've been working on getting uttiyana bandha all year long. It sounds simple; on a deep exhale you pull in your stomach muscles to support your spine, then use them to push up your internal organs to almost inside your ribcage. It looks like you lost 10 pounds. Then you hold it as long as you can. The thing is, that last part of pushing up the organs is way harder than it sounds.
Or is it? Yesterday, it just made sense what I was supposed to do. I sucked in my stomach muscles and very effortlessly rolled them up and literally felt my internal organs getting pushed up towards my rib cage. It didn't feel strenuous or weird. It just felt like that was what I was supposed to do the whole time. So I started applying it to every pose that I could (maybe not the best thing, but I was curious how it would feel). What happened was fantastic - I forgot about the physical strain of my poses and got into the rhythm of the breath so much that I could've held the poses way longer than I did. Amazing. And, I found that when uttiyana bandha is engaged my flexibility increases dramatically. Very cool.
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We're headed to Hawaii in 5 days. I'm so excited I might pee my pants. We have tons of activities that we want to do: hiking, kayaking, snorkelling, swimming, zip lines.
Hiking should be, well, hiking. In a jungle. With waterfalls and beaches. I'm stoked. My knee is not. It has been giving me trouble ever since our little jaunt to Tahoe back in October. From my detailed internet self-diagnosis I believe it is a simple case of tendonitis where the quadriceps femoris meets with the patella, so all I really should be doing at this point is stay off of it. But I want to hike, so I'll probably get a knee brace or something just in case. We've cancelled our super-long 11-mile hike that we were hoping to do originally. The Sierra Club rated it as strenuous, and as it's a "hike in 11 miles, camp overnight, then hike out 11 miles" kind of hike we figured that 22 miles on my bum knee would probably not serve me well.
After a week by ourselves, we're moving to a different resort and meeting up with my Dad, brother, his wife and my nephew. We'll be able to snorkel at this point. I've never done snorkelling before, but my dad has, and is going to show us how it goes. He's a certified scuba instructor, which means I kind of have to trust his judgement by default, even moreso because he's My Father. In any case, I bought a long-sleeved rashguard so that I can snorkel all damn day if I want and not worry about a sunburn. At least, on my back. Of course there's always the possibility that Jon and I will just go out by ourselves anyway and have a blast before we meet up with the gang.
The hardest thing about this trip is actually that it's happening just before Christmas. Which means we have to not only get our Christmas shopping done early, we also have to wrap the presents and send them out early as well. This weekend is our last to get our acts together; it seems I'm going to be busy, as I'm making many of the presents that we're sending out. I prefer handmade presents any day to pre-fabricated ones. The effort of making someone a present ends up outweighing the present itself every time, and even if it's not something I would typically want, I end up loving the gift just because it was handmade.
I promise I'll make a more interesting post next time. Sorry this one was a bit on the boring side, I'm kind of tired and not feeling all that funny today.
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