Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Wedding, Yogis

The wedding was amazing. Cold, rainy, harsh winds and it was still beautiful…we still took photos outside too.

There were a handful of yogis at my wedding! I had the good fortune to spend a bit of time talking to an Iyengar yogi in her fifth year of certification process and she was somewhat disillusioned with the style…she has reached the point where they are doing backbends out of sirsasana and she is finding it painful and knows some other yogis who have hurt themselves. She has two young kids and wonders if it is worth it. She started in Bikram, then Ashtanga, then Iyengar. We were discussing the differences between Iyengar and Ashtanga and she said she would find it boring doing the same thing each day. If you’d asked me earlier this year I would have agreed with her. But now that I’m working on intermediate, I have plenty to keep me busy, between keeping my primary up to speed and creating some ease in intermediate (a long way to go there). I feel for her that she has come this far and is now having doubts. Any other style would take her, with her dedication!

I also caught up with a friend who brought me to my first yoga class. He is now teaching some Power Flow classes and practices Ashtanga on his own time. We had such a great time chatting and sharing our experiences. He is in a creative field of work so he craves the regularity that Ashtanga provides. He was the one who introduced me (and my friend H who is taking teacher training) to our beloved first teacher Alex. He’s based out of Orlando, hasn’t been down to Miami to see Kino MacGregor but I suggested that he go…

I also “played yoga” a bit with H, not a practice but we showed eachother what we’re working on. We spoke a lot about the divergence in our styles since the time we were roommates but I’ll go into more detail on that one later. It was so interesting, considering we came from an identical background! But something different attracted each of us to where we ended up. I thought I might be able to “sell” her on Ashtanga but she’s just as passionate about Power/Vinyasa/Flow, and she’s totally committed so I know she’ll stay there and carry on. Her updog/downdog transition is really something amazing to see…whatever she’s been doing for two years is working…she can actually slip a chaturanga/plank in there (yes, like a MAN) before sliding back to downdog. It’s unreal. Anyhow, have to save some details for my next posts 

Because of the busy-ness of the wedding and honeymoon I haven’t been blogging so I’ve been thinking up some posts that I want to write and one of them is about Goa and what it means to me and how I’ll be spending the next three months. It was interesting when I examined how I was thinking about it and what my motivations were. I probably won’t post again until the honeymoon is over so hopefully I’ll have that train of thought worked out by then.

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