Day 59: Phase 2

I feel like today I sort of broke though a mini-plateau in my practice. I feel as though I've progressed now from beginner-beginner to intermediate-beginner. This week, I've felt a definite change in my muscles and I'm getting sore in different places, which I think means I must have improved my leg and arm strength enough to really begin engaging my core and my butt. My balance is improving and I generally feel very strong.

In reading Bikram's "Bikram Yoga" book (my second of Bikram's reads), he mentioned in camel to use your spine to push your hips forward. This has totally rocket launched my posture, at least to me. The idea of using my spine as a pushing force helped me to open up my chest and adjust my weight to get a really great compression in the spine. After camel today, I felt like I had enough energy to fly to the moon. I've felt incredibly energetic and focused ever since.

After class today, my skin was buzzing and I had a fantastic lightness and openness in my chest. The world looked very bright, which of course sounds ridiculous, but it's the truth. I don't know how else to explain it, but on occasion I get visual effects from the practice. After camel, my vision tends to become colored with an orange hue, which has to do somehow with the color of the room and blood flowing to my brain. I see spots a lot, and get crazy blood-rushing-to-or-from-my-brain feelings quite often. Put the mushrooms down! You can trip from yoga! Heh.

So tomorrow is the final day of my 60-day challenge. Joseph Encinia is teaching the noon class tomorrow, so I'm going to take that one. Nothing like a real challenge on a big day. He won the 2010 Texas Asana Championships (his, I believe, 3rd year in a row) on Sunday, so it'll be fun to see him fresh off his win.

After tomorrow's class, I'm going to go on a shopping spree to buy some new clothes! For crying out loud, everything I own currently is falling off me. I can't wait to get some new things to wear, and I think it's a nice reward for achieving a goal that would have seemed completely out of my reach a year ago. I'll also do an official weigh-in to see how much weight I've lost over the two months. It probably won't be as much as I was dreaming, but I can tell that I've got a lot more muscle on my body than ever before, so I'll be fine with whatever the number is. I don't care what the number on the scale says if I can fit into smaller sizes!