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The Cop did not get up for practice this morning. He wasn’t feeling well last night and needed some rest.

Which left me to my own devices. And thus did I:

Practice standing, the second half of primary, and intermediate to supta vajrasana. Why did I do this weird split? I have no idea.

It was really nice, though.

Actually, I think I might know how this happened. For the past 6 months, I have been working on my own. I had a grasp of primary and felt like I needed to work it through in a way that I could only accomplish by going at it day after day after day. Didn’t really need to trouble anyone else to watch over this process — and there was the added benefit of seeing for myself if I could sustain a practice on my own.

The challenge, in the working through, was to find a way to meditate through each moment of primary. To be present in it. I knew it well enough that I didn’t need to think about what I was doing, and it was pretty smooth sailing except for a few places. Namely, the kurmasana-through-baddha-konasana gauntlet. For a long time that was where I was most concentrated — where I felt anxiety, or wondered if I could do it, or felt my breathing tense up, or whatever. Those feelings seemed to linger, even after I could do the poses, so the solution seemed to be to do them day after day with the challenge of keeping my mind still, until they finally smoothed out.

The other issue was a tendency to roll mindlessly through the all the poses after baddha konasana. After “the gauntlet,” the rest of the poses seemed easy, and of course there were always other things to get on with in life, so that part of primary was usually pretty impatient. Oh, and don’t even ask about the closing poses! They were extremely thoughtless.

Truth be told, I’m still not really clear about the “purpose” of the end of primary, but at least I’ve slowed myself down and accepted it. And the closing poses are now a refuge.

They were very quiet and meditative and soothing, those months of mindful primary practices.

So why did I rip open the big Pandora’s box of intermediate this morning? Ack! All of the unsurety and clumsiness and lack of mastery! Messy, messy, messy!

And did I mention the fearful feelings at kapotasana? The heart-pounding apprehension? The frustration?!

Yeah. That’s what I did this morning.