Thursday, March 12, 2015

Restless in Savasana

I used to be really good at savasana. At the end of every intensive power yoga class, I would happily collapse into my corpse pose and sometimes even fall asleep. It was not a problem for me to stay still for 5-10minutes and observe the trickles of electric energy moving up and down my body.

Not so with Bikram yoga. I'm still not so sure about the savasanas in between each seated postures. I understand what they are meant for theoretically, but practically I don't know if it works as well as they claim (to release the blood flow in the body after each compression posture). In the beginning I really disliked them, since they felt disruptive to the flow of the sequence. Now I have gotten used to them, and welcome the break after each posture. It's not that the seated postures are particularly difficult, just that the heat of the room really gets to me.

It's the savasana at the end of the class that's been particularly challenging for me.  So far I have been feeling totally restless at the end of class 80% of the time, with the desire to get up and run around, do a headstand, wiggle like a worm, go into urdhva dhanurasana. The most I could do though was to wiggle around until the teacher leaves the room. It seems like the 26 posture-sequence, with kabbalah baati breathing exercise at the end, is not an energy grounding practice. I could feel the heat generated by my body from the practice clashing with the heat of the room.

On the other hand, I always sleep very well after a Bikrams class (I practice in the evenings). That's one of the reasons why I keep going back. We'll see if my wiggle problem goes away after a few more weeks of practice.

This energy/emotion business is so interesting. Yoga and the heat really stir up a lot of emotions and thoughts for me, but not in a bad way. I think I'm the type who needs frequent, strong doses of external stimulations in the body in order to drive away the negative, depressing energy within me. The scientist in me wishes I could study this subject scientifically somehow, but I have no idea how this "energy/mood" can be objectively measured and quantitated. Ah well, someone smarter than me will invent the method/instrument some day.


1 comment:

  1. In beginning, I also had same problems but then my friend suggested me a yoga video and that was really good video that helped me with learning exact yoga poses for beginners.

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