It's a yoga life

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It's Ashtanga, phew. As far as I can make out it's the form of yoga most closely related to 'sport'. My teacher, Rashpal, will instruct me into a pose, I'm trying to find a sense of balance and composure 'now hold for 2-3 mins' is he being funny? Nop. So I am exhausted, not really achy, more drained. My teacher also adds Hatha yoga which is about 'cleaning the inside' of your body. He talks about 7 shakras and 5 elements in the body...? A method they use is to feed a piece of string in through the nose and out through the mouth or the other nose, and then pull on both ends. I wasn't sure what to say as he was describing this. A dumb stare and a polite nod was about all I could manage. For my level of expertise I think he can only use Hatha to encourage better breathing in conjunction with funky body movements, such as raising my arms and as I breathe out bend over and push them through my parted legs, and repeat this enough times to encourage a serious head rush. We also do meditation. We started with the OM's and gotta say, I prefer the silent meditation. Perhaps cos there's a river which makes the most amazingly soothing sound. I'm not sure there's many noises I can listen to all day every day and either naturally blank it out or enjoy it. During meditation I'm supposed to be focused on my '3rd eye'. At first I thought this meant in between your eyes, all I could think about was cyclops. Actually the '3rd eye' is supposed to be in the middle of your brain. And I just can't locate it. I focus on my hips, which is my most inflexible area, and what they should be doing, and relax them into that position, as best as possible, and try to focus on that. It seems to work until the brass playing monkeys start marching through. Weirdly though I can sometimes use this same trick for Ashtanga poses. So think about which muscles should be doing what, focus, then the brain relaxes, till the muscle tremors start...

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