Day 2 & 3 of Bikram 30 day challenge

After my warm up yesterday, I decided to do my first double/back to back class today. When I came in the studio at 5:30am, I saw Omar and we talked a bit and he told me that he's making his first class easy but since I was doing a double he also said that the 8:30am class was going to be hard. He said that he wanted to get back at Ginger because she'd been giving him a hard time in her classes.

I set up my mat and had my first class. Omar was right and it was very manageable and I was so proud of myself because I didn't even drink water in class. I was able to nail standing bow(meaning: not falling at all). I came out of the class feeling pretty good.

I had some other people doing back to back classes with me and we even ate a bit of food before the next class(this is not for everyone--some people might vomit if they do this). The 8:30 class was full so I knew that it was going to be pretty humid. I set all negative thoughts aside and just went in the room to "BE" present in every moment and in every posture. 

When we were in the half moon pose, I knew that we were in for a looonnnngggg and hard class. Omar was true to his word and he really did keep us in the postures for quite a while. My spine hurts when I do the half moon to my left and since I have to stop myself from going down, I actually have a harder time in postures now because of my modifications. It's so hard to stop early when gravity is pulling your body down and the longer we stay in it the more difficult it becomes. 

I kept on reminding myself to just breathe--"long and slow", "long and slow" is what I kept repeating to myself the whole time. Because we had to stay in the postures for a longer period of time and since Omar only opened the door and window twice the whole standing series, everyone was struggling. People were sitting down left and right, they were breathing with their mouths open--all these really made practicing much more difficult. I could feel the energy of people going hay wire and I did everything that I could to keep my stillness. I did pretty well until the last two postures. I suddenly had the "creepy crawlers" feeling in my hands, arms and legs. I had to keep on shaking my hands to make the blood run through them to bring back some feeling into them. Why did this happen? I have no idea, maybe it was fatigue and thirst kicking in overdrive. 

I struggled with kapalabhati. I could hardly exhale with force and when the class ended, I drank my water as fast as I could before even hitting savasana. After resting for about 5 minutes, I attempted to stand up and dress up BUT I couldn't. I made it outside then my insides starting quivering that I had to sit down and make the feeling pass because I sure as hell couldn't drive in that state.

There were about 5-6 of us resting and venting out how hard the class was. In hindsight, do I regret doing my first double today? Not really. I know that I got tired and struggled but I know that this day will help me in moving forward and make other days seem easier. Sometimes, we really just need to get our butts kicked to get reminded of how far we can go if we wanted to. Today will be unforgettable for me and I know this experience will help shape my future practices.

Day 4 of the challenge tom!!!!