Friday, July 30, 2010

Lovely yoga in Hintonburg Ottawa

I finally have recovered from a wrist flare enough to try a yoga class, and this Sunday enjoyed a grueling Kundalini class with a friend which really tested my limits. It was a love/hate class. I felt good for being there, but did it ever challenge me while I was in it.  I felt great afterwards, until the next day when walking was a little hard. I'm fortunate to live down the street from Pranashanti Yoga Studio, which has a great range of classes. The setting is blissful as well.

Then (go me!) on Thursday, I enjoyed a 90 minutes Yin Yoga class. This style, called the quiet yoga, has you hold poses for five minutes each to get deep stretches into your connective tissues. It seems like it should be easy, but as you breath through the poses, the stretches get deeper, and your body begins to tell you exactly where you are holding problem spots. Again, challenging but great. At the end of the class, while I was lying in Savasana, my body was radiating contentment from all of the deep work it had just done. I felt like I had spent an hour with a massage therapist, when it was really all me.

I also had to laugh at the instructor's disclosure that she was type A during the day, and Yin Yoga helped her balance this. Type As, if you don't know, are people always on the go who feel a lot of time pressure. They are doers, and active, and can race by you like a whirlwind. That would be me. I jump out of bed, and the day starts in full speed. Yin really appeals to me as a way to counterbalance the full steam ahead pace of the rest of my life, which I'm trying to moderate.

Paying attention to balancing my life is working out really well.

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