Sculpin

Today Josh and I tried Yoga I, moving up from Slow Beginner yoga. This was Josh’s first go at Yoga I, and attentive readers may recall that it’s the second time I’ve given it a go. My first attempt involved a bad time with a steel chair, plus a teacher who liked to push the classroom energy to eleven, which is a problem given that my energy goes to about six on a good day, plus a clumsily offensive assistant. Today was much better.

This teacher, Rebecca Brinkley, is gentle and mellow; I think we could be a good match. I’m not sure I’m up to it now, though. There weren’t any poses that, taken individually, I could not do. (Not even the inversions! My upper body strength is now that of ten noodles, rather than one noodle. I rule.) But the pacing was pretty hard for me — one standing pose after another — and within half an hour my vision had started to blur and go blue. That’s not a good sign. After about forty-five minutes– well, I don’t exactly lose consciousness, but it sort of softens, and I become easily confusable. More so than usual, I mean. I almost fell asleep in adho mukha virasana — oh, blessed blessed seated pose.

I can alter the pacing a little, but… well, I’ve got two more weeks of this and then I’ll decide. But I suspect I’m going to have to take a while, maybe a long while, and build stamina more gently. I have a lot of stamina to build before Beginner I doesn’t seem, well, kind of grim. I’ve done grim. Starting Slow Beginner was grim; I rested 3 days for one class. Now I’d like to be done with grim.

The thing is, I feel that I’ve pretty well mastered Slow Beginner yoga, and yet I’m not really ready for Beginner Yoga I. Most people would probably do fine transitioning from one class to the other, but my body challenges are not those of most people, and today’s sequencing went straight to my physical deficiencies. I’m not seeing how I get from Slow Beginner to Beginner I without taking some time, probably with occasional private lessons, to work out a serious home practice that can help me build stamina without kicking me in the head quite so hard. It may even be that my home practice is it, that I’m always going to have to sequence resting poses between standing poses and will always be kicked in the head by Beginner I. That’d be okay.

And I missed my Slow Beginner teacher, Laura, and all my yoga buddies.

The inversions were fun. I’d like to do more of those. (We did some shoulderstand and handstand preparations against the wall.) And who knows? Maybe next week we’ll have an easier class, with fewer standing poses and more of the kind I prefer: crumpling on the floor in a gracefully tangled heap. Maybe we’ll do backbends.

Josh also wasn’t ready for Beginner I. He sprained a hamstring, which has been a chronic problem for him; now he’s sitting on an icepack downing ibuprofen. No more of that for him. I’m pushing him to do PT with Dan Druckhammer, because that’s worked well for me. Dan knows his stuff, and I was surprised at how quickly I progressed.

And now, to the aspirin and the Epsom salt bath.

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