I spent the day running around on medical errands that had a kind of deadline hanging over them: the impending snow storm that will lock us in our homes for another 24-36 hours. Take my wife for a chiropractic evaluation, pick up prescriptions from the drug store, take my dad for blood tests, pick up x-rays of my wife's back before the doctor's office closed at 4:30, fight the traffic out of DC even though there should not have been a rush hour because there was no Federal employees working today. There were a couple of other odds and ends thrown in the mix too.
And to top it off, there was no class at Thrive Yoga this evening. I know that snow flacks were falling by 5:30 and traffic was wicked so who could blame Susan Bowen for canceling classes for most of today and all tomorrow. After all, schools are closed for the rest of the week. Sure, I could have gone for a yoga class in the morning, but that would have made my day even more stressed out. I needed the yoga to unwind, not complicate my schedule on a day when I could not be sure how long it would take me to get from one end of town to the other.
Lucky for me, I took a yoga class at 6:00 pm last night. Susan combined the vinyasa and prenatal classes. You'd think that would be an odd mix, but it worked out just fine. As Susan said on my Facebook Wall: "Labor will be much more challenging than a yoga class -- so why not practice at a level that helps prepare the body, mind and breath for Labor." In other words, maybe the vinyasa class was stepping up to the ladies' level. In any case, I was rewarded with a nice practice. In Wide-Angle Seated Forward Bend (Upavistha Konasana), it occurred to me that the pose was about knowing which muscles to release instead of which muscles to contract. It also means releasing the muscles, and keeping them released over an extended period of time. Because I am so tight in the lower back and core (I basically can't fold over; I'm practically upright), the time available in class to release and re-release is not going to make much of a difference. I need to practice it at home and actually play with accessing muscles and letting go.
