I did Bliss Rider tonight and it truly was Blissful. Since this was my second time doing this particular routine I put in the effort to really give every move my all. I held those boat poses with every strength I could muster up, I scrunched my abdominals as hard as they would allow me to, and I kept my head up high, trying to do every posture as gracefully as I could. Man alive, am I going to feel this tomorrow! Bliss Rider includes the Aloha Abs portion of the really large routine and at the very end of this part you do an upward dog and hold that stretch. I've never felt so much stretching in my core before. It was heavenly.
I think Bliss Rider might be one of my favourite routines in this dvd set. It's only 42 minutes long and Eoin is all business at the beginning, jumping right into sun salutations. The pace is quick because he ensures that every move is inline with your inhales and your exhales. In other words, you're doing a posture during each natural inhale, and a totally different posture during the exhale that follows. So you're not exactly sitting around chanting om for too long, and you really get your heart rate going right off the bat.
I also like Bliss Rider because it's really well rounded in that it contains a really big variety of postures, targeting all the major muscle groups in a very short period of time.
The best part of tonight's practice though would be savasana. Eoin stresses at the end of each video that this is the most important part of your yoga practice. A lot of people (myself included) are tempted to cut this part short. I mean all you're doing is lying there... in silence. How boring. No? If you're really just into doing yoga for the workout, then you probably would be tempted to skip this as you'd see it as a total waste of time.
However, Savasana (also known as "Corpse Pose") is a posture intended to rejuvenate the body, mind, and spirit. Organ and muscle repair and development take place during this posture. So really Savasana is like sealing the deal on your practice. It's like playing the slots at the Casino. Why would you play for hours at the slots, investing your time and energy collecting those little voucher cards with your winnings on there, and then leave the building without cashing in your vouchers? It's just a horrible waste of time and money. Imagine if your voucher was worth a few thousand dollars? What a waste! It's the same deal with Savasana. If you skip out on it, you could be skipping out on cashing a 50, 000 dollar voucher! You could be skipping out on healed muscle tissue, on a rejuvenated immune system... the possibilities are endless.
I'm not going to lie, I myself wanted to skip out on Savasana tonight. It was getting late, and I could really use some extra sleep. But then Eoin said his little bit about how important it is. So I decided to keep with the theme of my practice tonight and give it my all. I sank deeply into corpse pose and did some progressive muscle relaxation to go with it. Before I knew it my mind had wandered off into lalaland. I was picturing what my muscles looked like inside my own body, and envisioned sucking all the bad stuff out of them with every inhale and then completely expelling it out with every exhale. I continued to do this until I was shaken out of a total state of relaxation when the closing credits of the dvd started playing. Eoin tends to have a little goodbye message at the end of the Savasana session, but I didn't even hear any of it this time around. I'm going to take that as a good thing and will just reap the benefits of having an excellent practice tonight.
Unfortunately I had some more technical difficulties tonight with my sister's camera in that her battery is dead as well, so I don't have any pictures for today. Hopefully tomorrow will mark the end of the universe's complete rejection of my access to technology!
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