Into the Start New Year.

Ferveur avec mesure,

de la passion avec exactitude,

ce n'est sûrement l'idéal

Arguh.

Monday this week I made my triuphant return to AYC.

Primary felt great - deep twists, forward folds, and smooth back bends.

The plan, move all asana back to Ashtanga. How I've missed it. Approach the practice with honesty and humility, only practicing primary until I could hold urdhva dandasana with some fidelity.

Monday night continued waking to take asthma meds and I haven't gotten a full nights sleep since. At work until 9pm last night, still waking a couple times for meds, breathing still sounds like an accordion and my cough and congestion is getting deeper, but still really not productive. 

Why am I thwarted at every attempted return?

General Frustrations.

I'm still having difficulty with my asthma/breathing at night.

Practicing I'm fine.
Consciously controlling breath.
Moving. Gently opening and controlling the body.

It' been well over two weeks of general asthma difficulty and a week, of being unable to wake for morning practice. 5:30 am start time is not so reasonable when you've been waking every two to three hours for a nebulizer treatment and then to roll into work for a 8.5 hour work day.

Granted. It's been a gorgeous spring here in DC. Which means there's proportionally that much more pollen.

I'm really starting to wonder if this asthma difficulty is more muscular than formal asthma attacks. An epsom salt bath at 3:35 this morning relieved most of my symptoms. But I don't know if that is just from the normal effects of magnesium sulfate - which I've had in the ER multiple times as a treatment for an asthma attack and was part of the hospital trials when I was a kid. Looking back over the days I've practiced and when I've been getting up for meds/having breathing difficulty has coincided conscious work at attempting to engage jalandhara bandha though to moola bandha.

Integrating both halves of the body.

Do I need to teach the body that muscle tightness in the chest cavity, isn't necessarily an asthma attack?



Something to ponder at least.

495/261: Smooth Sunday.

One of those Sundays where I was very tempted to linger in bed, take another day of bed rest from the Friday and Saturday's asthma difficulties - treated with multiple tisanes, water, soup, rest and more episodes of Lost than should probably be watched in one sitting.

SilentSpeaker easily convinced me over GChat to practice - basically reminding me that I could stop at any point I wanted to - my original plan was to go simply do Primary. Breath came so rhythmically almost like a metronome, each pose floated into another. I ended up easily smoothly practicing through laghu vajrasana and as I move to backbends D comes over and adds kapotasna a and kapotasna b. Very surprised and excited by this - still trying to work on the illusive "stall" thing when transitioning between ustrasana, laghu and kapotasana.

Thinking maybe break dancing lessons next..
or maybe give capioera another shot...

After three long holds in urdhva dhanurasana, three quick standing to dropbacks and immediately into assisted, and down half way on the last drop, D grabs my wrists and firmly plants my hands right to the lower calves. Of course, my hands slipped down a bit, and heels came up a teeny tiny bit - but oh, that hold was glorious.

There's been a bit of a return to backbending work in the cybershala - and after this morning's fairly successful exploration of tiriang mukhottanasana (LOY 418-9) decided to see where things are in the backbending department.

Started with a little chair work from Iyengar class, really working to try to get the pelvis tucked, extension through the front body, spine deep into the backbody, and lots of rotation through the shoulders.



And then of course, a little play with urdhva dhanurasana and dropbacks.

Day 17 & 9 To Go.

For the half-life of that med.
Then in another 26 days, half of that amount will be gone from my system and so on and so forth. By April it should be completely out of my system. Nothing I can do to speed it up.

Things at my doctor's went well - again the best pulmonary function test I've ever had! Of course, he was disappointed that I've been pulled from the treatment because, save for breaking out in hives, I was responding well to it until recently. Details. So I'm just on my standard maintenance medications. There's really not much that can be done save for waiting and watching to see how things progress.

As the Artist and the Mathematician pointed out to me, I'm taking the best care I have of myself, from diet to regular asana practice and to sleep - maybe any "problems" will ultimately be negligible.

So, I'll be logging pretty much my entire life, from practice to what/when I eat/drink, when take my meds and my peakflow and when I sleep. Somehow, I'm sure there's an art project lurking in this self study...


Still every thing remains to be about patience and persistence - funny how all this seem to work.


(Of course that does nothing to mitigate general aggravation and frustration, but at least it makes it a little more palatable.)