Flattery gets you everywhere

Yoga class last night was awesome. I had been racing to the gym after getting off of work and I got stuck behind an awful fender-bender on Mockingbird Ln., and thusly I missed the 6 p.m. spinning class. I always miss that class. I got to the gym, dejected of course, and suited up to get on an exercise bike. I figured that since I wasn't going to be training intervals in a group, I'll train in intervals by myself. Buckets of sweat and 45 minutes later, I was stretching it all out getting ready for my glorious Hatha yoga class.

Last night, we changed things up a bit, and instead of having all our mats horizontal throughout the room, we rotated them to where we were all aligned vertically. What a difference! It kind of made me feel like I was in class for the first time. We did a lot of complicated hip openers that made some of our newer yogis and yoginis a little uncomfortable. One of these is Pigeon pose. We did a pigeon series, first with just our hands grasping the ball of our foot and our knee, opening our ches and extending our back leg to open the hips. Later, we bent our back knee and pulled up our foot towards our torso, to look like this:



The full pose, which I cannot do yet, looks like this:



I am so self conscious about this pose, so much so that I am usually reluctant to do practice it in my asana routines, although it is a great all-over stretch. But, I think I'll be doing it more, especially since last night, one of our class regulars "Dangerous Debbie," said that my Pigeon pose was looking exquisite, graceful even.

I may not be able to post again until Monday or Sunday. I'll be in Conroe for the weekend for my sister Jessica's bridal shower, and hopefully I won't be a dolt and I'll take lots of piccies!