Thursday After Lunch

So, I am sitting outside after a lovely lunch and feeling just about every muscle in my body a bit sore. Patricia Walden taught a great back bend class today with lots of work in the chairs and lots of repetition in the poses . We did tons of chair back bends, lots of urdhva danurasana, a lot of dwi pada viparita dandasana, eka pada viparita dandasana, and finished the morning with a rousing foray into kapotasana. I got my heels several times with help which was great and she gave me some lovely tips on how to work on it so that was fun. And now, I am pretty darn tired.

I don't have much to write about. I am enjoying the time here on retreat to just be a little unplugged and little introspective. One thing I find so impressive and inspiring about both Patricia and John is the quality of presence they both bring to their teaching. I think they are both incredible examples of what a lifetime of dedicated practice yields in a person. They are compassionate, funny, disciplined, clear, generous and also very centered in themselves. I find it very inspiring and I feel very grateful to be on the receiving end of their very gracious teaching.

So, I keep wanting to write something about how that personal presence is the real reason to yoga, not the poses, but every time I start to type that, something stops me. Here is the the thing that keep occurring to me-- the path of the poses has been their path and still is. Every day, while one of them is teaching the large group, the other one is in the back doing their personal practice and, let's be clear-- they are very impressive practitioners. They are pursuing and practicing with great result, very difficult postures. So it seems to me somewhat impossible to separate out the poses from the effect of the poses, the approach from the outcome, the Light in their eyes from the clarity and excellence of their postures. Its merged. Its just so obvious that one feeds the other.

So, I find their commitment to practice so compelling and taking the time to receive their teaching and the accumulated wisdom of their journey is quite a treat.

more soon.