Keep on keepin' on.

So.. I'm feeling a little bit cautious. Because... yesterday's ephiphany (epiphanies?) seems to be sticking. I had two magnificent, powerful yoga classes today, and I feel like I'm glowing. The classes weren't easy, by any stretch, but it seems like if you make the primary "thing that you're doing" in the posture breathing, you almost forget about all the other stuff, particularly if it hurts. Plus, we got to yell "YEE HAW" and "FUCK YOU" during our situps as loud as possible. If that's not cathartic, I don't know what is. Yoga teachers from texas are a TRIP. Craig was talking more about the "yoga truck" today and how we should be wary of it, that it might sneak up on us, and to be honest, I feel almost a bit nervous, like it must be sneaking up on me. I don't want to feel overconfident, but right now... things seem to be going fantastically.

I have a visualization about breathing that I want to describe. It seems to be working magnificently for me. I imagine a plastic piece of PVC tubing, about 1.5 inches in height and 2.5 inches in diameter. It has little wheels inset inside it, all along the middle circumference, little wheels which spin when air blows through the tube fast enough. I imagine this little device right in the center of my windpipe, just behind the sternum (a little lower) right near where the windpipe bifurcates out to the lungs. In each pose, as my body bends forward and backward and side to side, I can imagine where in my body the non-deformable little tube thing has been moved to - if I bend backwards, my spine pushes it up into my chest. If I bend forwards, the tube thingy moves into my back, feeling almost near my spine. In each pose, I spend almost 75% of my mental energy trying to spin the little wheels with my breath, imagining pulling the air through from below the device, hard. This has kept my heart rate down dramatically, and seems to have made the entire class not so panicky. Anyway, there it is.

Dr T's poop lecture was disappointing. In a nutshell: Don't grunt or push too hard, just... you know... poop. There's a much longer and more verbose version of it involving the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, blah blah blah... yeah. Just poop. I guess we'll have to wait on the revelations.