After a few days of being home, “reentry” as a fellow yoga student put it a few years ago, I have had some time to think about my experience at the workshop in New Hampshire with Patricia Walden and Edwin Bryant.
This is the third year I’ve gone, and I always look forward to the way my brain works when I get back. I look at things differently, more yogically.
This is the first year (obviously…) that I’ve been pregnant at a yoga workshop. It was, as yoga has been the past few months, humbling. There are many things I am not physically able to do right now, and I have to approach my whole practice in a different way. The assistant at the workshop helped me a lot, giving me alternate poses to do or alternate ways to do certain poses. I learned a few new modifications for myself (I have been modifying many/most poses already). Holly, my teacher, said I’ll be able to teach a prenatal class when this is over, and it’s true. I’m gaining a lot of knowledge and I hope I’ll be able to use it.
I got a few compliments on my practice, which is a nice ego boost as well as reassurance that I’m on the right path. Patricia said she could see that I am a conscientious student and that I had an excellent practice. I hope I am able to keep it up when the Raspberry is born!
We did Pranayama each afternoon; pranayama is yogic breathing, the practice of controlling one’s inhalations and exhalations. All yoga students should do Pranayama, but it is especially recommended for pregnant women. It helps prepare the body for labor and that breathing, it calms and steadies the nervous system (always good), and it gets the prana flowing in the body! AND the baby liked it, as was shown by his moving around then. And I liked it, as was show by my blissful feeling. So I have committed myself to an every-morning practice, which I should have done a long time ago. So far so good!
I felt the baby moving during these moments: supported backbends (which I’ve felt before), pranayama, Leslie Freyburg’s chanting, Edwin Bryant’s personal story of how he found he guru and his dharma.
Great workshop. Learned lots. Inspired to continue.
