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Wow, great practice today. One of those ones that feels good right from the first breath.

The heat was on, for some reason, and Muscle Man couldn’t get it to turn off. So we had both heat and air-conditioning running, in an attempt to even things out.

The room was HOT. It was great! Haha! Okay, the panting from the heat part during tough portions of the practice wasn’t so pleasant, but the bendiness was pretty sweet.

Kapotasana is coming along nicely. At this point, the weak link is the tightness in my shoulders. I’m good with that, because my lower back feels perfectly fine as MM keeps me in the pose for a bazillion breaths as he directs me to pull my shoulder blades down and stretch my triceps and all that sort of thing. It’s more an endurance exercise than anything else at this point.

Eka pada sirsasana! Woohoo! I had SUCH a sucky practice on Monday that I really felt some despair about eka pada. Liz mentioned (somewhere in the blogosphere) that she used to feel she’d never get her leg behind her head, that maybe it was a pose she just would NEVER get — and that’s how I felt on Monday. Reading about her experience, though (i.e., she got it & now really loves it), inspired me. Tuesday’s eka pada was pretty good (especially considering Tuesdays and Thursdays are home practices, so there’s no one to crank my leg), and today’s was REALLY good. Really good as in not hurting and also being able to sit more upright and not feel so CRUSHED by my leg. Which weighs a LOT, you guys.

Oh, did I mention I wore my short shorts? Seriously. The ones I wear at home that are super short. Handy, given our heated room in the desert summer. But I still felt like an ass. To my own credit, though, I thought about where I was going to throw down my mat, and I made sure that when I turned, my butt’d be facing the wall and not any people. Also set up at an oblique angle to the mirrors, so I wouldn’t be in danger of flashing anyone. I never have any flashing issues in the home yoga room, but I wanted to just be super sure in the shala. I mean, really — who needs to be flashed at 6 in the morning?

Why all this fuss about shorts? Well, ’cause practice is SO much easier with bare legs. And I also was happy because I had on my “home practice” clothes. Like a security blanket.

Dwi pada on my own is rather horrifying, and if Muscle Man isn’t available to wrestle me into it, I like to ignore it and just do some extra eka padas, but he told me today that I have to keep struggling to do it by myself. Sigh. Doesn’t he understand? I only like to look like an idiot at home. Still, I’ll do it because he said so.

Yoga nidrasana all by myself this morning! A first. I find yoga nidrasana really frightening for some reason, though I’m not sure why. I quite like supta kurmasana, so you’d think it’d feel the same way. Not so, though. It makes me feel very anxious. So usually I bail before I’m fully in. Not today. Woohoo!

Went through to pincha mayurasana, which makes me feel exactly the way I imagine I’d feel in a guns ‘n skis biathalon: too shaky for precision. I won’t say anything about the titthibasana sequence because I can’t try to do EVERYTHING well, especially something so ridiculous that burns my quads so much. If I keep at my lame attempts, I will get better at it. That’s my official strategy. ‘Nuff said.

But is that the end? Oh no. MM is into the backbending extravaganza: urdhva dhanurasanas, assisted backbends to the floor, backbends with arms folded, hop up into handstand, handstand into backbend (assisted, but still!). Quite a little circus workout. Definitely a challenge. I rather hate it, but I’m sure I’d miss it if I wasn’t given the opportunity forced to do it.

This is all so fun, though I have to laugh when I try to figure out why.