Subtle Changes

Day SEVENTEEN

I did not expect 15 people to be in Alicia's 7am class today.  Usually we have no more than 10 so 15 people is 50% more than what we usually have.  I love morning classes but one thing that I do miss from evening classes is the energy of a room full of people...and the heat.  It doesn't get that hot at 7am class, I guess because it's the first class of the day with less people.  There you go.

Today, it poured and it was 60 degrees.  The Husband worried that he would have a miserable class due to the warm weather.  Apparently, he had a great class.  I reminded him not to have any attachments to past classes.  Yes, easier said than done.

I decided it was time to say good-bye to The Husband and I set myself up in the second row off to his left side.  It was a solid class:  I was strong and I worked hard to push myself a little more.  I am finding my forehead to the floor in separate leg stretching these days for these last 11 days.  It's really amazing.  For months, I couldn't get my forehead to the floor.  The stretching sensation behind the backs of my knees was too painful to bear.  And then boom.  One day.  There's my forehead.  On the floor.  How did that happen?  Now that I can do it, my selective memory kicks in and my brain has forgotten how I couldn't do this for months.  Why do our brains work like that?

Before class, I told Alicia about my commitment to integrity in forehead to knee poses.  She said it was totally normal to have an imbalance on one side, for whatever reason.  Just accept it and work through it.  Maybe one day my forehead to knee will touch and then my selective memory will kick in and I'll wonder how I could never do it before.

What I love about bikram is that the shifts and changes happen so incremental that often you don't notice them.  It's only when you look back that you realize you've progressed from point A to point B and didn't even realize it was happening as it was happening.  This happens in our lives too:  when we work on our relationships, our professional development, our personal growth -- we don't realize we make daily choices that lend to subtle changes until we look back and realize how much we've grown.