Calm, stillness, and peace

Yoga is good for a person in many ways. I did my Week 1 day 4 yoga practice today and we focused on Warrior 1 (Virabhadrasana 1) and Tree pose (Vrksasana). It was quite the physically demanding practice and it is ~85 degrees in our house. I worked up quite the sweat and worked my leg muscles till they were ready to collapse. What I found interesting though is how tired my feet were. For years I have wore arch supports in my shoes but for the last 2 years I have not had any, my dress shoes for work don’t have them. With all the walking I have been doing this last week my poor arches have gotten quite tired. I am going to have to upgrade my shoes to get some arch supports again. With all the work a half hour of yoga can be it is amazing how I manage to find that little nugget of stillness at the end. It is just me, my mat, and the sound of the fan in the window. I am able to filter out all the rest of humanity and just focus on my breath. Those moments are why I am constantly drawn back into a yoga practice. I will go for months without doing any at all then I will start up again and am always amazed at just how wonderful it can fee. For me it isn’t about the strength and flexibility but more about the fact that for the half hour I am practicing I am one hundred percent focused just on my body. When I am doing yoga I don’t care how I look, how much I weight, or how silly I look in workout clothes. Instead I am able to be amazed at how wonderful the human body can be.

I hope that you all can find that little bit of stillness in your lives.

My first canoe

So today the BF and I went and spent a boat load of money (hee hee). He got some money from his mother as a college graduation gift to be spent on a Canoe. So today I played hookey and called in to work and we went to the cities (MSP/St Paul) and bought our first canoe.

Now BF and I don’t do anything by halves so we bought a Kevlar canoe (here) and all the accessories to go with it. We had to get life vests, paddles and mounting brackets to get it on top of the pickup truck.

Canoeing is something that we have wanted to do for a while and we finally can do it right. After we got home we had about an hour before dark so we went down to the landing and put in the water. We stunk!! Practice makes perfect so we will be back out there tomorrow some time. Now the question will be a 4 mile hike or a canoe trip…. I want to wait and see how muscles feel in the morning.

I am skipping yoga today. My muscles are too tired and sore.

First impressions Gaiam Yoga

I am what my most recent yoga studio felt was an advanced beginner. I have been doing yoga off and on for the last 7 years and have never really gone very deeply into it. I do not do well when trying to put together my own home practice.

Last Friday I found this program and signed up for it. You start your week with a series of videos describing the poses that you will be practicing during the week. It took me 2 sessions to get through all the videos. For the last 2 days I have done the daily practice. I find it just challenging enough to keep me interested but not so difficult that I cannot get through the daily practice. It is quite the adventure but I am enjoying it.

On top of my new daily yoga session my BF is training to go on a canoe and backpacking trip so I have been joining him. This includes a daily 4 mile hike through some local woods (~1hr 15 min including a small 5-10 minute break) and starting tomorrow a bi-weekly canoe trip on a nearby river. My body is going to hate me for the next 2 weeks but if I can get through this training session I will be that much stronger and hopefully up for some camping trips of my own some time soon. I don’t want to overdo it but I have not pushed my body like this in to many years to count. As long as my blisters heal soon I think that I can do it.

Why I am doing this

For a while now I have been reading peoples blogs and have found some great ones. My sister started one before her trip to Peru and my mom even has one about her business. It is about time that I do the same.

The things that I will talk about is my journey to building me a more sound body, a more stable financial life, more interesting friendships, a healthier body, and anything else that may be of interest to me.

I have been doing yoga for years and have just signed up for a 12 week program at http://www.gaiamyogaclub.com. My goal with signing up for it is to help me build a sounder home yoga practice. Hopefully it will go well. Last night I started by watching half of the videos that they give you for the first week. All about standing poses.

Good luck me.