Back in August, I decided to start a morning practice of yoga, with the goal of doing at least a little yoga every day. My craft room has enough empty floor space to put out a yoga mat, and a door to keep the dogs from joining me. (Sometimes I let one in, but it’s very hard to do yoga around a dog.)
I’m not sure how I discovered Adriene, a Texas yoga instructor who has a million instructive yoga videos on Youtube, but I decided her 30 Days of Yoga would be a good start. She has several thirty-day programs, recorded in different Januarys, that are sequences that build on one another.
Her style(s) seemed quite similar to the instructor of the small yoga classes I attended in person a couple of years ago. My initial rule was to stick with the whole practice, even if I had to considerably modify things depending on how decrepit I was feeling on a particular day. I was quite pleased at the end of the month because I practiced every day but three. Two of those days involved our trip to Nebraska to see the eclipse.
In September, I changed the rules a bit: if I wasn’t getting into a particular practice, even with modifications, I could quit after fifteen minutes and still consider it a success. I enjoyed the 30 Days of Yoga program so much that I repeated it, and practiced every day in September.
In October, I changed the “rules” again while doing her Yoga Revolution thirty-day program. On days that I didn’t feel like doing the practice from Yoga Revolution, I would switch in one of her other practices. I practiced every day but one in October.
In November, I fell on ice early in the month and my upper back went into a spasm for over a week. I had to find some very easy practices that didn’t involve the neck and back much. I had planned to do the thirty day Yoga Camp program, but have only done a handful. I’ll probably pick those up again in February. So far I’ve practiced every day in November one way or another.
After years of wanting some sort of daily yoga practice, I am very pleased how I am doing now. With a few exceptions, I practice first thing in the morning, before I feed the dogs. I have a much better chance of getting it done before the day starts. I usually finish up with five minutes of chavasana after the practice ends.