More pre­cisely, the sec­ond week is draw­ing to a close.

I missed yoga classes on Tues­day and today because of other com­mit­ments. But I did fit in a restora­tive prac­tice on those evenings. The biggest rev­e­la­tion for me was see­ing the accu­mu­la­tive pay­off of reg­u­lar prac­tice. On Sat­ur­day, in Susan Bowen’s 2/​3 vinyasa flow class, she had us do wheel pose five times. I was able to get up for each one. Even more sur­pris­ing, I did not do a pre­lim­i­nary step of going from bridge pose (Setu Bandha Sar­van­gasana)  to wheel sup­port­ing some weight on my head and then in full wheel (Urd­hva Dha­nurasana). I did a bridge in which I made sure that my legs were doing all the work of sus­tain­ing the pose, my back was arched and then I placed my hands on the mat by my ears and pushed straight up. It was a smooth move­ment. In the past, the half-​​way head on the mat mod­i­fi­ca­tion seemed to jam my neck into my shoul­der gir­dle, mak­ing it much harder to push up into full wheel. I could feel the pres­sure on my spine.

I had seen this trick done by Sadie Nar­dini prob­a­bly in a YouTube video. I had been able to do it a cou­ple of times, but then my prac­tice got com­pletely dis­rupted and I lost the strength to push up. Doing it on Sat­ur­day just showed me that I had recov­ered enough to strength and improve my spinal flex­i­bil­ity to han­dle this power move into wheel.