Inside Studio 96*F
Feeling a bit like warm jelly, I have safely returned home from my 7th class at ZenSpot. Difficult and exhausting sixty minutes it was. Though I feel tired in this moment, my body and mind have been energized by the 8 AM class. It's like getting batteries re-charged. Another way a classmate described it was this, "It's a physical dusting." That makes sense to me when I consider that our bodies are under constant assault from the environment, germs, stress, and the like. When the scale tips too far in the wrong direction, the body's defenses have to fight off all the marauders or succumb to illness. When we sweat and breathe our toxins out on a regular basis, "dusting," the bad stuff doesn't have a chance to pile up so deeply that the fighting strength (immunity) is compromised.
During class I wondered more than one time if I should have stayed in bed and gone to the 1 PM class instead. I didn't miss any sleep (daylight savings was the night before) but I made a huge dinner to share with some friends and we had wine and cheese into the night. In class I felt like I hadn't been there in awhile which was exactly the case. I went on Friday afternoon and saw Kelli and Micheal approaching the studio from the lot. They had come to check on some maintenance or painting project, not for class. I was looking forward to this workout but once again, there was none. So it had been four days since my last class. Too long. I can really feel a difference in my body if I go every other day or a few days in a row. Wait longer than that and all the hard work has to be regained - not literally, but the lunges and stretches are so much easier for me if practiced more consistently. Go figure.
I must say that I was stunned as a newbie at ZenSpot when people just jumped up after a moment of lying down and hurried out of the heated room. After sixty minute of high heat, heavy sweating and valiant efforts to contort the body in many directions, the reward comes...savasana. A chance to let it all go. As stated by psychotherapist and yoga teacher, Michael Stone, "Corpse pose exists in the middle space between sleep and effort...The architecture of savasana requires us to continually let the ground we are lying down on, literally the ground of our thoughts and our bodies, to fall away, until the constructs that frame our experience pass on. This is an act of both dying and being born. Our imagination makes us very busy exploring the world of choices. In the end, there will be no choice, just death. So in the center of your bumbling human life, where you are always looking around for something better, notice how the present moment is just a small death away." And I thought I was just laying there! Savasana can be so difficult because it asks us to do absolutely nothing. I feel nostalgic for the days at Tamarack when savasana seemed to go on for a solid 12 minutes. I could really relax then. Here everyone's quickly getting up, the doors are opening and closing six times per practitioner, and clearing the mind of its crazy ways is far from what's happening. I stay until my heart rate feels normal again and even then I would rather just bliss out in Nowhere Land/Savasana.
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