Wow, it’s already the second Monday of this year..  we are just flowing along! It seemed like just yesterday the New Year had started and our vows (or intentions) to ourselves for the year had been made. One of my intentions for this year is to explore, not just the world around me, but explore myself (feelings, like/dislikes, and what ever other little changes that occur over time that we seem to hardly notice) and get to know my friends a little better as well! Part of exploring is getting to be comfortable with the UNcomfortable.. (i’m sure you can see what’s coming next.. oh, yes on the mat talk:)  ) of course yoga is a wonderful example of this, after all how many times have you looked at a pose and just “ah, not in this lifetime!” or “how do you even get into that?” It takes prep work, time, and the ability to just BE in an uncomfortable position until it becomes comfortable.

Yesterday, I was in a very lovely day workshop with the lovely Shiva Rea (with my very lovely and talented friend Melanie.. i have to take a quick time out and just say, damn i’m really blessed with truly the best friends! And not just friends but people in my life, good times or bad, every friend has brought joy to me.. but i digress..), Shiva is just as sparkly and shiny as you think she’s going to be.. all sun goddess and flow momma! I’m not going to dive into all the details of the workshop, but the theme was “tending the fires”.. our heart fire, creative fire, spirit fire, family fire and earth fire (i jumbled them all together so you get the idea, but we have 5 fire within us.. and 5 fires starting with us and moving outward.. if you want to talk about it, we can get a convo start on the good ol’ facebook). I found myself really uncomfortable hearing about these fires, more because it felt so personal, not because we were sharing what fires we wanted to stoke with the class, but because this was some deep work, for me these fires are the passion. The discomfort didn’t stop there, after 108 “yoga push ups” infused with some lovely back bending flow we moved into some asanas that involved arm balancing (I’ll try, but as some of you have seen, holding a person up on tooth picks isn’t easy  ), which lead to lizard pose (come into a lunge, bring your arms into the inside of the leg, and drop down to the forearms). From there we were encouraged to work our arm underneath our leg.. my body was not in pain, but to say I was having “fun” would be a stretch.

Instead of quitting, i breathed and tried sit with the uncomfortable until it became comfortable. New isn’t always nice, it can take time to make it nice, but as people we have a wonderful coping skill and that is our breath. For those of you trying yoga for the first time, give it time to be a comfort. For those that are trying new poses this year, start small and build, it will start to feel natural and it will just happen.  Start to make the uncomfortable wonderful!

Coming up this week on the Betty:Be on the look out for pictures from Shiva and some acro photos, a new video to tickle your fancy, and possible a new fun addition some yoga comic relief..

I hope you have a great monday and I hope to see you on the mat soon!

xx

Liz