Prenatal yoga videos

I can't believe I haven't posted since May.

Well, I didn't go to that prenatal yoga class again until this week. The teacher remembered my SI-joint issue on the left side. I have not been practicing enough yoga to heal it, apparently. Yesterday I had my first day of a new babysitting gig, watching three kids. It sounds like a lot, but they are pretty mellow, well-behaved kids! All the same, I was bending over to keep the 1.5-year-old from bonking her head while she toddled around the play structure at the park, and the SI area seized up and gave me shooting pain, so I couldn't move for a second and kind of grunted. Not good. Wednesday morning I took a Bikram class again for the first time in a long time, and that was good. The teacher is very therapeutic and used to be a massage therapist so he helped me with my messed-up tense neck as well as the pregnancy modifications. I didn't have to rest out any poses in the standing series, and it felt really good to practice in the heat again.

I now have three prenatal yoga videos, so I have no excuse for not practicing. The cat usually starts attacking me in the first two minutes, so I shut her in the bathroom for the duration! I don't know if I've reviewed the first two yet, so for now, the newest one is Gaiam Prenatal Yoga with Shiva Rea. It's widely available (ie, Barnes & Noble.) I got it from the library to suss it out before I bought it and only did the first 30 minutes but knew I wanted to have it. Shiva Rea could read the phone book and you'd probably relax, such is the nature of her voice! I like the poses, too, they are not too strenuous but you don't feel like you're doing nothing. And she has women with her in their second and third trimesters demonstrating modifications.

A few weeks ago I went on a week-long meditation retreat with my teacher, Venerable Thubten Chodron. The first time I went on this retreat, in 2005, I was persuaded to lead a short yoga class each day, even though I did not want to. It was this experience, and other things ripening on the retreat that led me to become a yoga teacher. Last year, I went on the retreat immediately before I left for teacher training. So it was fun and rewarding to lead the little class again this year! I had four to five students each day. I led a variety of poses, more of a traditional Hatha class with standing/balancing poses, hip openers, back bends, and forward poses (if we had time before our next session in the meditation hall.) Two women came every day. One of these had never done any yoga before, and really loved it. The expressions of relief and bliss on her face when she came out of some of the poses were so meaningful for me, almost made me cry sometimes. It was a reminder of how what I do can be beneficial to others if I do it well, and I came away feeling so grateful to my own yoga teachers for teaching me. The other woman who came every day told me at the end of retreat that she did so even though some days she didn't want to, because the previous year the days she didn't do yoga she felt "wacky" and didn't want to feel that way this year.

One thought that "my" studio owner mentioned a while ago and keeps coming up for me, is that a little bit of yoga is so much better than no yoga at all. I am a perfectionist and I get into an all-or-nothing attitude--I have to take a class in a studio, or do a whole yoga DVD or I shouldn't do it at all. But especially after retreat, where I just kind of cooked things up as I went along, I realized, if you do a few poses one day, you will feel much better than if you did zero! It doesn't have to be "perfect"--there is no perfect yoga, no perfect pose, no perfect yoga class. One reason why yoga is good for my particular brand of neurotic mind....

I hope you are enjoying summer! I may not post again for a while.