I began today with some Chi Kung, specifically Lifting The Sky and Carrying the Moon--two stretches that give the whole body and gentle wake-up. I paused for a drink of water and a chance to clear my nose (I often find myself quite stuffed up at first), and then found that I was in the mood for some spontaneous movement exercise.
The spontaneous movement started as a gentle shaking out of my limbs, then the start of a massage of my scalp, but I soon found myself stretching my legs in the splits (as far as my legs will go into one, that is) and transitioning to planks, including some side planks. I then stood up and continued the massage from head to feet.
I don't quite recall the order of the exercises after that, but I did some isometric poses from Kung Fu, more planks, horse stances, downward- and upward-facing dogs, bridges, and inversions (including plow). Speaking of dog, the house was empty except for me and Luna, so Luna heard the exercise and came over to sniff at my nose, do play-bows, and generally get riled up thinking I was going to play. It was actually really adorable, and I felt bad when I told her to sit on the side and then proceeded to ignore her. Alas.
I finished the workout with a variety of my favourite stretches from yoga, like half-pidgeon, butterfly, and some single leg folds.
One exercise that came up was a bit of jogging. Because of my lungs, I find I still can't jog very far outside when attempting to cover distance, but a little bit of jogging on the spot is a really good sensation I find. It exercises the springyness in my legs and feet, and lets the rest of my body relax and get gently shaken from the bounce. I find this really helps loosen muscles that are having trouble relaxing, as a sort of alternative approach to massage.
After the workout I tried to enter shavasana (corpse pose, where you lie on your back and relax) but Luna got far too worked up by it, so I instead sat in lotus on the couch (well, not quite lotus because lotus is actually quite hard on the knees, which are not good things to be hard on, so I was just in a comfortable cross-legged position). I found myself contemplating the bottlecap ninja, Love and Acceptance, and I found it really advantageous to relaxing. Because I was focusing on the acceptance of my feelings before anything else, I didn't have to struggle very much with feelings of judgement or perfectionism. This allowed me to simply relax and enjoy that relaxation, so the meditation was physically quite deep. Mentally, I did a fair bit of jumping from thought to thought--which I cheerfully accepted before relaxing my mind again. So the mental aspect of my meditation wasn't incredibly deep, but I found it pleasant and calm, if a bit distracted.
During this practice I decided that it would be good to start recording my yoga practices, as I originally intended when I set up the Yoga tag on the blog a year ago. I'm not sure if such logs will be of interest to anyone else, but they are cathartic for me, so I'm going to try them for a while to see how they go.
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