How time flies when you are having fun — and doing yoga — and writing about it. Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary for Hot Off The Mat. It has been an incredible year of sharing my experiences both on and off the mat with you. Thank you to all of my readers for your support, likes, comments and just for reading. It is a wonderful community for me, and I hope also for you.
This week, click through to enjoy some of the most popular posts on Hot Off The Mat this past year. Enjoy and Namaste!
I am new to meditation, but as my regular readers know, I am working to incorporate it into my daily life. So when I had the opportunity to meditate with Buddhist monks at a Zen Center in Colorado for a week this summer as part of a yoga retreat, I jumped at the chance. It took me 11 hours to get to the Zen Center from NYC, and the meditation practice began with a wake-up bell at 4:30 am, but the experience was amazing! And most importantly, since I returned, I have been meditating every morning. I hope that I can keep it up.
Teachers often talk about how one posture drives the next in the Bikram series, and even that some of the postures we do later in class set us up for the earlier parts of class the following day. I always understood that there was a flow within the class itself. For example, Camel comes alongside Rabbit so that the spine can work in both directions and Standing Head to Knee comes first after the warm-up so that the locked knee is firmly in place before other balancing postures are attempted. But I wasn’t always sure how the postures of one class set you up for the following day — until recently with Standing Head To Knee Pose.
I recently attended a fabulous yoga retreat at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center led by a wonderful yoga teacher named Charlie Samos. The retreat combined yoga, hiking and Zen meditation. I loved it! There were so many enriching experiences at the retreat, but one of the most memorable was the final yoga class. Charlie challenged each of us to find three things in every posture of the class: (1) the ease of Sukhasana or Seated Pose, (2) the stability of Tadasana or Mountain Pose, and (3) the compassion of Savasna.
It was an interesting exercise and made for a deep and enriching class. Each posture was an exploration of emotion and spirit in addition to the physical asana. It was a wonderful treat and a good lesson in how a physical yoga practice can be expanded and deepened through thoughtful meditation.
So far this summer, I have done a lot of traveling. This has been wonderfully fun and I wouldn’t change it, but it has been brutal for my Bikram yoga practice. While I typically practice 4-5 times per week during most of the year, so far this summer, I have practiced 4-5 times in total, and most of that was in the past week. It is bad. My body is not in top form, my muscles ache, and for better or for worse, the bad habits I have worked so hard to break this year have reared their ugly heads. Lucky for me, yoga is a practice, not a perfect, so I will have the opportunity to rebuild.
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