Tonight I found my Standing Head To Knee again. And damn it felt good.

I came out of it smiling. My whole body was beaming; glowing. Inside. Outside it was just swollen and red with sweat and effort.

An hour later and that inner glowbeam is still with me and I’m remembering what it felt like when I was first falling in love with this wonderful yoga.

Over the past few months my practice has well and truly gone to shit. Work stress, (very) infrequent practice, and a sharp increase in the lower back/leg nerve pain that originally brought me to this room have all had a part to play. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Chicken. Egg.

It’s okay though. I know the yoga will always be there and that I’ll find my way back home again at some point so it hasn’t been getting me down. It is as it is.

One of the things I love about this yoga (and indeed life) is that things happen when you least expect them to. With my practice being what it has been recently I’ve just been choosing to see it as success enough when I’ve made it to class. It’s been refreshing too that I’ve found myself giggling at things that I’d normally be frustrated with myself for. I’ve used this opportunity to revisit the very early stages of each posture, focussing intently protecting my knees and very slowly opening my hips.

So it was a BIG surprise tonight when I managed to do Standing Head To Knee. The first set (like all the previous postures) was really wobbly and I fell out more than once, so I wasn’t expecting much from the second set. I surprised myself by holding on a bit longer, and going a bit deeper than I’d expected, so I dug my heels in (figuratively, of course, because I was actually on the ball of my foot) … and there it was. Like going on game drive after game drive after game drive looking for, but never finding, the ever-elusive leopard. And then all of a sudden, one day you drive into a clearing by some water and there it is. But it doesn’t run. It sees you, slowly gets up, stretches, yawns, looks at you calmly again and then turns and walks purposefully to the water to drink before disappearing unhurriedly into the bush.

I did it on both sides too!! And both times I did the full expression. Solid locked lamppost leg (no knee), kicking kicking kicking, head to knee, and after a few moments of head to knee, I slowly exited the posture, stage by stage, with complete control. No last minute collapsing onto my neighbour’s mat. My foot didn’t fall out of my grasp. And I didn’t rush out of the posture at the end. I was in joyful disbelief.

The joy from that posture coloured the rest of my class. Whilst the rest of my postures were back to being as unsteady as they have been in recent months, my focus was back. Love is on the rise. Today’s Standing Head To Knee has restored my faith in Me In The Hot Room. I’ll take that.

God bless the twenty-six and two. Or maybe for today it’s just God Bless Standing Head To Knee.