"These stones that break your bones will build the altar of your love"

That's from a Lynn Park poem that Anjali read at the close of both Wednesday and today's yoga class, the theme of which was "cultivating your garden". As such, we tilled the (proverbial) soil of our garden by focusing on the feet, legs and hips, which is just dandy for me! We did some "toe-ga" (yes, that's yoga for your toes) and Wednesday even rocked Hanuman pose (Hanuman's a monkey - no tail necessary to complete the pose), though nobody in the class could master it without some sort of prop under them - I managed with a mere 2 blocks and was quite proud of myself! Add to the growing list of things I can do that heretofore I feared might snap my leg off at the root.

With the theme of cultivating one's garden, we were asked to identify one trait we'd like to cultivate in ourselves and one "invasive" we'd like to weed from our (again, proverbial) garden. I had a little trouble focusing on something on Wednesday, but this morning settled quickly on breathing out doubt and breathing in ease. Ah... am I starting to sound like a lunatic here? ha! Well, no matter, doubt and ease it was, and continued to be throughout the session. Today was the first day a couple of the poses really clicked for me and, though I'm still dripping sweat throughout the middle portion of the 90 minutes, I'm definitely going deeper into my practice (as they say) with each class. When we were done Anjali put out some sort of yoga-based intention cards or somesuch and invited us to choose one. Much as I'm not any sort of fan of divination, I like exercises like this (thinking back specifically to an AmeriCorps end-of-year meeting where I was struggling with a lot of frustration and picked "Delight", which completely turned my attitude on its head). I picked a card with a nice spring green border and discovered that it said "Trust". How fitting!

Hmmm... and I have some ranting to do about insurance, but will save it for another day (when hopefully the issue has been resolved!) so as not to disrupt my Positive Mental Attitude! :)

(I tried unsuccessfully to find an image of the card I pulled, but did uncover this which should suffice for ending this post on a high note. hahaha!)