Just got back from Shala X, where I was happy to find that Sir was willing to bend the rules just a TAD bit so that he could give me the world's most intense adjustment in Mari D even though it was five minutes past the designated "Finishing Poses" starting gun. Speaking of intense adjustments, I got quite few today, in both Parsvakonas, in every Mari. It was awesome. Wish my body wasn't so resistant to the experience.

My mind was saying yes yes yes. But my body was saying, eh, not so much.

But like I've said before, stiffness is often in the mind. I don't think that my practice looks significantly different when I'm feeling stiff and crunchy. I still get into the poses. I just don't feel as good being in them.

It was a brief lesson in having and intention and letting go of results today. I wanted to recapture exactly whatever magic was going on yesterday. I tried to do everything I did yesterday at practice, the same way as yesterday. But despite long juicy holds in the Standing Series, it was simply a different day, a different practice. I guess there is not that much one can do to control how practice will feel on any given day. We try as we might - eating the right foods, eating less at night, not eating all morning, having a fulfilling bathroom experience, shall we say, before practice, hot showers, castor oil, epsom salts, uddiyana kriya prior to practice...it doesn't matter all that much. Some days simply are going to kick ass. And some days will simply suck ass. And most days will be somewhere in between.

And now, i must prepare for my visit to my Dr. B, my long-time dentist, who is married to Bettye M, shoe designer extraordinaire, which makes him a bit of a celebrity dentist, I think. Not that that matters to me. I just don't want it to hurt when he replaces that darn filling that keeps falling out, and I am hoping that this won't lead to my very first root canal. Lucky me, I happen to have been blessed with great teeth, so this would be quite the blow. Of course, any suffering would only be because I have chosen to identify with myself as a person with good teeth, because I have begun to believe in that impermanent state of being and have allowed myself to become attached to it. That's what I learned yesterday in Philosopy and Pranayama. In order to NOT suffer this tooth thing as a "blow", I need to detach from the notion that I am in control of my teeth, of aging and just observe it all as a thing that is happening to me, rather than the essence of me.

Later,

YC