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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Day 2: Come As You Are

The rain came yesterday with twilight and continued throughout the evening and into this morning. As the day wore on, the rain dissipated but the sky remained gray and a mist rolled in. The temperature dropped and chilled me.

It was an appropriately wintry day.

Since the very idea of running made me shiver and I wanted to wallow a bit in the coldness of the day, I thought I'd stray from my beloved Clara - whose classes are full of beautiful movement - and turn inward, slow down, and take a class with Christine, a certified Anusara instructor.

A Hatha yoga school, Anusara classes are taught with a focus on proper alignment in the poses. When I was first taking yoga classes 2006-2007, I stumbled upon an instructor who was inspired by this school and found her verbal and physical adjustments in these poses to be tremendously helpful and physically inspiring.

Draw my shoulder blades on my back and open my heart? Tilt my sit-bones back, lengthen my side-waist and breathe? Flex my feet, ground my thigh and pull my leg back into my hip?.....Oohhhhh, yes, that's nice.

Since alignment is so important in Anusara, instructors tend to have students pause in poses for longer, giving verbal cues on how to adjust deeper into a pose. I find when I am stressed and holding tension in my muscles, taking a class like this will help me breathe deeper and release those muscles.

Anusara classes will also begin with the instructor giving a meditation on a story or idea.

Christine's class today was appropriate as one of my first classes of my thirty days of yoga.
She says, (and I paraphrase):

No matter how we come to the mat - and there are usually two reasons -
We come to celebrate, when we feel good.
We may also come to lift us again, to bring us back again to the goodness in us, to the goodness in life.
Come as you are.

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