TRAINING SESSION 7

I'm not sure, but I think these yoga teacher training weekends are getting easier. It may just be because we really didn't do much yoga until Sunday afternoon and the rest of the time was sitting in lecture. This month we learned about the Kriya Shatkarmas and we were paired up to do a presentation on one of the kriyas. The kriyas are six purification processes often performed by yogis. Some of them, well actually all of them sound down right disgusting. The big thing was to show a YouTube video of someone actually performing the kriya you were assigned to present. Thankfully there were not videos available for all the kriyas, like the one that involves sucking water (through a tube) up into your lower intestines or swallowing 23 feet of cotton string and then pulling it back out through the mouth. Yeah, some of the kriyas just do not seem physically possible. But I did learn the correct way to use my neti pot. I've been using a neti pot since January and it's been really helpful in preventing sinus infections, but I was having problems with water draining into my ears and feeling panicky while using my neti pot. I don't have that problem any more.

We are constantly being told at the trainings that we are teaching people to breath calmly in stressful situations. If you are breathing erratically and shallow while holding a particular yoga pose, you are not getting the benefits of yoga. You are not learning to relax and be in the pose. I realized that my training has helped me when I take a yoga class taught by a teacher with a different yoga style/philosophy. I dragged my ass out of bed this morning and made it to the yoga class at the Y. The teacher has a tendency to make me cringe, but today I approached each pose with a calm and even breath while others around me panted and groaned and when I felt like it was just too much, I backed off from the pose and rested...with out guilt.