softening

 This morning I went to the 90 minute Hatha class with Diane.  She set an intention for the class of 'softening.'  I am someone who is always striving to do my best, and sometimes I feel that the harder I work, the more difficult things become.  When I focus on softening & relaxing, I'm able to accomplish more and with greater ease.

This is especially true with stretching - you can't muscle your way into being more flexible or try to force it to happen.  I stayed after class and spent some extra time on my stretching goal - seated straddle forward fold.  I tried focusing on releasing tension in my hips and letting go of anything I was holding onto.

I found that there was an ebb & flow to my challenges.  When I was holding in the stretch, after a few moments it would become very difficult and I would want to release out of the pose.  However, when I took deep breaths and focused on relaxing rather than tensing up, the difficultly would eventually pass and it was replaced with a sense of ease.

 

After several minutes, I was able to get my forehead to touch down to the ground!  I still have a long way to go before I will be able to get my whole upper body to lie flat on the ground, but I'm definitely taking baby steps to get there.

In the afternoon I went for a 6 mile run (around Green Lake twice).  As I mentioned before, I have a mental block at the 6 mile point, so I was worried about going for the run.  I decided to go to Green Lake because it's mostly flat and it's easy enough to walk if I had to.  I ran the first 5 miles with no problem, and then I could physically feel my body start to tense up.  I started feeling some pain in my knees, but I had a feeling that it was because of what was going on in my mind.  I was so worried that I was going to have pain, that my body was responding by tensing up, which then caused me to start having pain.  I noticed that the more I focused on the pain, the stronger it felt!

I stopped running and took a few deep breaths.  I thought about what we worked on in yoga this morning - softening!  I focused my thoughts on relaxing my muscles and releasing any tension I had going on in my body.  After a few moments I began running again and I was able to run the whole last mile without any more pain!  I'm so excited that I was able to work through it - I now have more confidence that I will be able to run farther.  I'm not fully convinced...there is still part of me that is hesitant, but at least I feel like I am moving in a positive direction.