Friday, December 14, 2012

A congested, feverish full primary; interesting yoga times; Happy Birthday Mr Iyengar

I was feeling quite under the weather this morning; before I went to bed last night, I took my temperature, and it was 99.8 F. For most of the night, I was in this state of half-sleep in which one part of my body wants to go to sleep, but the other part would wake itself up every other hour, ostensibly because it wants to go to the bathroom (I think needing to go to the bathroom is my body's way of telling me that it doesn't want to go to sleep :-)).

As a result of this disturbed sleep, I decided to allow myself to lie in bed for a couple more hours this morning. Not that it helped much; I still felt very congested and under the weather when I finally got out of bed. And then I was faced with the question: To practice or not to practice? I've heard a few people say that it's not a good idea to practice when you have a fever, but I had this feeling that doing some practice and sweating it out would do me some good. So... guess what? I popped Sharath's led primary CD into my computer, and started doing primary to his count. If you've ever practiced to Sharath's count before, you'll know that it's like a bullet train. His vinyasa count is precise and brisk, and the whole practice takes only 65 minutes. Probably not the best thing to be doing when you are feeling under the weather, but I felt that it would be easier for me to practice in my unmotivated state if I had somebody counting the vinyasa for me. So I decided to do it.

The whole thing went quite well. My breath was shorter than usual, and I was a little more breathless than usual by the time I got to the closing invocation. But I survived. Immediately after the closing invocation, I went to my bedroom, and lay on the floor in savasana covered by a blanket. And I actually feel better now, even though I'm still quite congested.

As I said, doing full primary in 65 minutes is probably not the wisest thing to do when you have a fever. But there's something about Sharath's voice that is really reassuring, and I get this sense that if I follow the vinyasa count to the best of my ability (even though I still can't get into Mari D in one breath), everything will be just okay. I've also discovered that my relationship to Sharath's led primary has changed over the years. When I first started practicing to his count a couple of years ago, I was breathless and scrambling all over the place just to keep up with his count. It's still challenging now, and I still get breathless after Utplutih, but I sense that underneath the breathlessness is something... deeper; a deeper sense of being centered, a deeper sense of being powerful, if that makes any sense.

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In other news: I don't usually troll the web for things of this kind, but this was actually posted on Kino's Facebook page, so I couldn't help noticing. Apparently, this yoga blog out there (definitely one of those 4.0 blogs...) has come up with a list of 10 Amazing Yoga Teachers. Kino is on it; rightfully so, because she is amazing. But it's quite funny that other teachers who I personally wouldn't put in the same league as Kino are also on this list (I won't name any names here; you can go look yourself, and decide if I'm right). But then again, I suppose many people out there probably wouldn't think that Kino is amazing either, in light of the not-so-recent Kinogate and Shortshortsgate (remember those "scandals"?).   

Oh well. Goes to show what interesting yoga times we live in...

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In yet other news: B.K.S. Iyengar turns 94 today. Happy birthday, Mr. Iyengar! Since this is supposed to be an Ashtanga blog, let's take a look at this video from 1938, which shows him performing what looks suspiciously like the third series:


Pretty cool, don't you think? Well, I guess I'll leave you with this; got to attend to a bunch of things. More later. 

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