It's day 4 of this yoga thing, and while I have a long road ahead of me in terms of sticking to it, it's been helpful to write about it every day.

NOTE: There's an update about today's practice, including the sequence, below. 

Last night my husband and I went to Roxanne's yoga class. It's a heady and challenging mix of Vinyasa Yoga, a form of Ashtanga Yoga where poses flow one into the other in a very active sequence, and what she calls Yin Yoga. I hadn't heard of Yin Yoga before, but it is apparently a kind of restorative yoga that focuses on opening the pelvis, spine, and shoulders, and deep relaxation.

I was really proud of my husband for coming - he had never been to a yoga class before in his life - and for sticking with the challenging class. He didn't give up, and no matter how frustrated he got with himself or with the poses, he just kept going. The teacher was very supportive of him just taking his time, and told him not to even try to keep up, but just to take it at his own pace (we'd told her it was his first-ever yoga class). Corpse Pose (savasana) was hands down his favorite, and I told him that's what he had to look forward to at the end of every single class. By the end of it we were both tired and relaxed, went home and made dinner and watched a movie. It was a good way to end the day. 

My body has been aching since Sunday's first yoga class, especially my hamstrings and lower back. Last night after class I was really hurting a lot. I took some anti-inflammatories to just take the edge off, and slept for a good eight hours. This morning I woke up and I was in significantly less pain. It's a sign my body is starting to get used to this already, though I still have to take it slow.

The thing about being a fat person doing yoga is that a lot of yoga depends on balancing your own weight and working with your own natural strengths and limitations. When you're thin you can just focus on creating and releasing tension in various poses. When you're fat, there's much more of your body to heft around. Your belly and boobs get in the way. You have more weight to support, and so it's often more of an aerobic workout than it would be for a naturally thin person. Some poses have to be modified, others have to be worked up to very slowly.

There are certain poses I can do easily, and others, not so much. I have naturally very open hips - unusual in our culture of stiff walking and sitting at computers all day - so malasana is really easy for me whereas other people in our class were struggling with it. Other poses are difficult or impossible for me, such as caturanga dandasana, for which I just don't have enough upper body strength. It pulls at my lower back, because my abdominal muscles aren't yet strong enough to hold me even in the modified pose (in fact, I think this is why my lower back is so sore from Sunday - I pushed through that pose and shouldn't have, even though Roxanne encouraged us to just go slowly and only do as much as we could). But eventually, as my body slims down and my muscles build up, I will be able to do that pose, and that will be a sign of real progress. 

The purpose of all physical yoga originally was to prepare the seat for long stretches of meditation, which involves sitting for several hours. Some rituals from the mystical tradition take over 24 hours to perform, during which the practitioner must continue sitting in the same position. Can you imagine the discipline and physical conditioning required for such a feat?

For my part, in addition to a daily meditation practice, I am a musician, and perform classical, semi-classical and folk Indian music (primarily North Indian, I belong to a particular gharana, or music lineage tradition). I sit on the floor for at least one to two hours every day (or at least, most days) to rehearse. It's demanding physically - on Monday, for instance, I sat for an hour and a half to practice in the morning, then sat for an hour for my lesson, then another hour through another student's lesson to observe, then sat for two hours learning to play rudimentary tabla with the tabla players who came to my music guru's house to practice (they brought me tablas, so I had to play!). In case you're not keeping track, that's five and a half hours of sitting on the floor in ardha padmasana, or the half lotus seat, the preferred posture. It's probably why my hips continue to be so open! So doing yoga will definitely help my "seat" for music, and for my meditation practice, which is a whole other thing.

Many of us sit every day for work - we sit in chairs at desks and push pixels or paperwork around. And I think this is one of the reasons yoga has really caught on here. Even though it's been totally secularized and removed from its deeply spiritual roots, the power of the postures comes through. People are able to find more peace within themselves through these challenging and relaxing sequences of postures. It reminds us that the physical, mental, and spiritual are all connected.

I have some wild stories about the physical, mental, and spiritual being connected. Some of you may be familiar with Herbert Benson's work studying Tibetan monks and the practice of tummo, or inner fire. He studied and filmed monks performing this formerly very secret practice in a mountainous monastery in 1981. They woke up in the morning, broke the ice that had formed in their buckets of washing water with their bare hands, washed their clothes and themselves, put their wet clothes back on, and then began their tummo meditation. In a short time, steam began rising from their clothes, and after some time, their clothes were dry because the monks were giving off so much physical heat from their bodies.

This kind of thing is really possible - for instance, one of my aunts has had severe epilepsy much of her life, and she was one of the experimental subjects for biofeedback research with the disease in the 1960s and 70s. Biofeedback involves monitoring brainwaves before, during, and after an episode of physical symptoms - whatever they may be, such as epilepsy, pain, or other symptoms - and then the patient is slowly guided toward a place where they can recognize the symptoms coming on, and change their physical response through concentration and learned response. My aunt was able to largely control her epilepsy herself, something medication hadn't been able to do.

Yoga brings the mind to a place of calm, and teaches you to respond to challenging poses with calmness and centeredness. I've practiced yoga off and on since I was fourteen, and poses like Warrior II (virabhadrasana) have taught me to balance action and fierce energy with calm and reflection. It makes life a lot simpler.

I'm still contemplating when and where to do my yoga practice today. I have three options: 1. I can do my practice at home with a video, 2. I can go to the yoga studio that is about 15 minutes away, where I have some pre-paid classes, or 3. I can go to my local gym. Whatever I decide, I can't let myself slack off and not do it. Right now the goal is regularity, and a daily practice is what I'm after, regardless of how easy or rigorous that practice is.

UPDATE: I went for doing yoga at home. It was actually really wonderful. I didn't use a DVD, I just let my body do its thing. They say that memory is locked into muscles and various parts of the body, and the aches and pains of my renewed practice seem to have  unlocked some muscle memories of sequences and poses.

I emailed my long-distance yoga buddy and told her my sequence (which was influenced by Roxanne as well as Shiva Rea's Yoga Shakti DVD, which I haven't practiced to in about 3 years but has stuck with me on account of its awesomeness), which I've posted here for reference:

• tadasana (mountain pose)
• surya namaskar (sun salutation; 2 full sets, so 4 namaskars alternating sides)
• virabhadrasana II (warrior II)
• virabhadrasana I (warrior I)
• prasarita padottanasana (wide leg forward bend)
• malasana (literally garland pose, but it's a deep squat)
• upavistha konasana (wide-angle seated forward bend, modified)
• dandasana (staff pose)
• janu sirasana (one leg seated forward bend)
• paschimottanasana (seated forward bend)
• variations on supta padangusthasana (reclining big toe pose)
• various reclining poses I don't know the sanskrit names for, like reclining pigeon
• ananda balasana (blissful baby pose - one of my favorites!)
• savasana (corpse pose)

Not bad for my first self-created sequence. It took about an hour and was really wonderful. I worked up a sweat and my heartbeat got going with the flowing poses, and then the reclining and restorative poses were great for helping to stretch out sore/tight muscles.

Remember, I'm returning to yoga after several years away, but before that I was a yogini (that's a female yoga practitioner) off and on for about 15 years. So I'm pretty comfortable with the poses, the transitions between them, and know how to self-correct. The sequence here doesn't detail all the transitional poses (it would be REALLY long!). Stick to the videos - or even better, a certified yoga teacher - if you're just starting out or if you're not super comfortable with the poses and body mechanics.

And with that: jai ho!