Bikram Yoga, Class 12

Class 12, back to the usual.  Avoiding the disappointing teacher K, I made the spontaneous decision to take an evening class this evening.  One where timing just worked out right.  Plus I've given up Nextflix instant streamng for Lent (go ahead and laugh - just wait until you have no television or cabel access for years on end, only to get the cheapest all-you-can-watch movies and television series instantly accessible to your computer, Wii consol AND iPad whenever you want, and tell me it isn't addicting as ever).  Checking the schedule, saw it was an old school, seasoned teacher up, and was glad to go.  The constant slew of  youngins with their machine gun dialogue is getting tiresome.  So, off to class we go at 7:30 to make the 8:30pm class.  And it was a good class, the heat back to the proper temperature, me in the front, crowd heavier but not unbearable, and a teacher I could learn from and get a proper yoga session out of.  Glad to be back.

MY PRACTICE

Despite the added heat, I managed to not skip any poses, though a couple I did not hold the entire time.  In the beginning i did nothing but fall out of all the poses.  Even the stick pose I could not hold - what is up with that?  I wonder how annoying it is to have someone next to you fall out of the same pose a dozen times, and just keep getting back into it over and over again.  I feel sorry for the girls next to me.  

I am too at the stage where i am starting to have difficulty with poses that normally are quite easy for me.  I think its because I am not doing them properly, and with muscles building from other poses, I am not trying harder and the poses are no longer my nice easy landing pads.  

There has been a bit of an addition to my practice, in the form of irritations.  I see the practice as increasing patience, and tolerance, or as I have lately been reading, a deliberate ignoring of the little things.  Little things.  Like the student, always a woman to my left, creating her own class, as if the teacher is not there, as if she  can go into the poses whenever she feels like it, 5, sometimes 10 or more seconds after everyone else has gone.  Different people, but always on my left.  Bizarre.  Or another little thing like the personal space of yoga mats.  I tend to get there early, a new habit I mysteriously picked up recently, so I am one of the first people in the room, one of the first to put my mat down.  I place it somewhat strategically, with plenty of space for others.  But for some reason, perhaps because we are social humans not solitary tigers that we like to stick close together, and someone always seems to put their mat awfully close to mine, and the space between me and my new neighbor is magnitudes smaller than the space on the new neighbor's other side.  Uh... space?  Evenly spaced?  I like to think of myself as an atom, and we should all just space ourselves out accordingly, evenly, among the room.  But no.  Don't know why.  Of course, it could be me, since it's one of those things that EVERYONE is doing to me... yeah okay, it's probably me...