Anyway, where was I? Yeah, you all need to know I'm guilty of false advertising, I AM NOW A NON-SMOKER!!!!! :-) Well in the making, still fighting a daily urge to have a puff with the help of patches and nicotine gum. I started off fighting the urge every 10 minutes, after a week it was an hourly urge but now, at the end of my 8th week, I'm only getting the urge to smoke once a day at most. An ashtanga practice and nicotine replacement patches don't really work well together, saying that they work together better than yoga and cigs lol, all the sweat and movement give my patches a certain mobile note. For instance one day in particular I lost my patch altogether, it was on the back of my right shoulder, I later found it on the back of the right thigh! lol Kurmasana has a lot to answer for!
Mentioning Kurmasana leads me to a practice update, this has good and bad points, or should that be positive areas and areas needing development, splitting hairs in my mind. When I last updated I was under AM practice full steam, let me just say the winter we experienced here in Scotland made that *feel* impossible for me. So I've not been up and on my mat for a while, just over a month to be honest. As one old habit slipped back in so did the consequences; back to sporadic mat time, after giving myself a week off over Christmas and New Year (which admittedly led to nearly a fortnight of no yoga), I've found it very difficult to get back to a daily practice. I'm currently at the 3 - 4 times a week stage and, to put it mildly, I'm not happy about it! So, again, I'm in a funny limbo with my practice, I'm still working on Marichyasan D, feeling it in my thighs in Navasana, quite happy with my Bhujapidasana progress and I seem to be flourishing in Kurmasana and Supta Kurmasana (were they part of my practice the last time I blogged??). But, obviously, my practice is different due to it's infrequency, firstly I've lost a lot of strength, you can see it in my weedy arms and shoulders lol Secondly I'm not feeling the "after effects", the yoga glow isn't the same, this may be due to the infrequency or due to the change in time, from AM as soon I get up to, usually, around 2-3PM, who knows. Either way I want to get back to my AM practice, if not I'm sure I could be working on these asanas for years. This is my year to get back to full primary for sure! I can hear you all, "isn't that just an attachment?" and the simple answer's YES lol an unashamed YES!
Regarding this being my "back to full primary" year I'm very excited to say I've booked myself on an 8 week beginners ashtanga course at Yoga Union Edinburgh, which I'll discuss next time ;-)
P.S. Happy New Year lol
