In My Mind’s Zen Garden

One more post before I go off to my gig with Donnie Finnell at the Bistro:

First off, I really had an incredibly successful yoga practice earlier today. Just one hour, but instead of doing vinyasa where I flow from one pose to the next, I went back to Iyengar style and held each pose for as long as I comfortably could.

Wow, what a difference and a feeling I had missed!

Back in September when I started doing yoga again regularly and pretty much daily, I had been reading BKS Iyengar’s book, “Light on Yoga”. In the book he states emphatically:

The right method of doing asanas brings lightness and an exhilarating feeling in the body as well as in the mind and a feeling of oneness of body, mind and soul.

So, today I went back to holding the yoga poses much longer, attempting to focus on breathing and stilling the mind, and concentrating more closely in settling into each pose.

The feeling was much more incredible. How could I have changed such a good thing?

Yoga Journal describes this of Iyengar Yoga:

…poses (especially standing postures) are typically held much longer than in other schools of yoga, so that practitioners can pay close attention to the precise muscular and skeletal alignment this system demands…

So, holding the poses for longer periods of time and focusing on the breath but not counting each breath really gave the yoga routine an incredible boost. At one point I had tears running down my eyes. I don’t really know what happened. The exhilarating feeling, perhaps? The emotion came out of the blue!

I think, that yoga can reach into the many layers of oneself and uncover some hidden emotions that could benefit from being released.

Anyways, great routine today. Good to document these good routines so that I will always remember what to focus on and not just go through the motions and not experience them firsthand like I should be doing.

Incidentally, I should get back to the meaning of the title of this entry.

Yes, it’s all about the song, “Starry Starry Night” by Don McLean:

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colours on the snowy linen land

I have iTunes set on random jukebox mode, so the songs have been popping up randomly while I surf the web and write down my thoughts. It’s wonderful when a song pops up and you haven’t heard it in a while, and it was the right timing and all.

It’s just… nice. What an awesome song!