40 Day Yoga Challenge: Day 4 & 5

Well days four and five couldn’t have been more different. Talk about yin and yang. Literally!

I arrived nice and early to Thursdays Yin class and which began with an almost silent room, allowing me to fall into twenty minutes of meditation before class began. I am constantly amazed at how the energy of the room changes each day. Wednesdays class was loud with lots of chatter and movement before we began and Thursday, almost completely silent. I absolutely love Yin Yoga. I am more flexible than I am strong so at this point it feels more natural to me. It’s feels almost comfortable to lay down in sleeping swan, one of my all time favourite Yin postures. I love how all the clutter in my mind just falls away and I can spend the time really getting to know the subtleties of each asana. If you are not familiar with Yin Yoga, it is a practice that focuses more on stretching out the connective tissue in the body like getting your hips joints to open up for instance. It’s mostly floor based postures that are held for much longer than in other types of yoga and with each moment the body opens up more and more. You can just close your eyes, focus in on the breath and everything else falls away. I hadn’t done a class with Claire for a while and I’d really missed it. She has a special way of  putting you in that mindful state of relaxation as you practice.

So then Fridays class, whoah! I’d never seen the studio so packed out. It is a very popular class, and with the two for the price of one deal I’m not surprised. It was a room full of people all happy for the week to be over that’s for sure. It’s the first time I’d come to the Hot Happy Hour and it really is just that! Sometimes we can be so serious in our yoga practice, our faces all tense with concentration, not giving in to that irritating bead of sweat on the tip of our nose. In this class though, we were encouraged to smile and laugh and just have fun with it. Lou loves to crack some jokes to get a smile on your face especially when you are on the third section of utkatasana and feel like your arms are about to fall off. I am beginning to notice more strength developing as I practice things like Virabhadrasana or Utthita Parsvakonasana which is great. I can focus more now that I am not spending the whole posture thinking when is he going to let us finish!

There are some great teacher profiles of Claire and Lou at PranaFlow if you’d like to read more about them.

Namaste.