yoga # 8 / bridesmaid dress nightmare / tap class # 3

[supercheesegirl]

Yoga # 8 for 2010
Friday January 29, early morning
25 minutes
210 minutes total

Friday is usually my jammie yoga day, but today I thought I would try to incorporate some more restorative poses (I was going to say, "actively try to incorporate", but the whole point of the restorative thing is not being active?). So I did some of my usual floor work, and then spent the last 15 minutes or so in just four poses: legs-up-the-wall, reclining twist (to the right then the left), and sivasana. Unfortunately, I don't think restorative yoga in the morning is a good thing for me--usually I come out of yoga all pumped up and ready to face the day, but today I was groggy afterwards and in a negative mood. The grogginess was definitely from the static nature of the poses--in the morning I don't need to relax, I need to get moving. I think the negative mood came from today's poor music choice. I've been playing with different music for Fridays, just looking for something laidback and mellow, and today I put on Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call. It was just fine doing some light stretching when he was singing about the lime tree arbour, but when I was in sivasana he was singing about his child's bones crumbling to chalk and his wife baking him a cake full of glass and bleach and razor blades. That was NOT a good way to start my day and was in fact even worse than the time when Iron & Wine's "Teeth in the Grass" creeped me out. I think I'm just going to have to spend some time making a mellow yoga mix for my iPod, because even if one artist has some good yoga songs, nobody's entire album is going to be right, and I always land on the not-right songs during sivasana, which ends up being the feeling I take away from the practice no matter what the rest of the practice was like.

Anyway, I treated myself to Starbucks this morning to try to make up for it, but it turns out that I am not that big a fan of the new Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte even though it sounded really good. Back to out-of-season peppermint mochas, I suppose.

I also had another bridesmaid dress dream. This one fell into the category of actual nightmare: I have an appointment tomorrow at a bridal shop to show Lauren the one dress I really liked from last week's shopping trip, and I dreamed that the bridal shop owner had given away her sample of the dress I like and was trying to talk us into buying other things. I said, Why would you give it away? I specifically told you that I wanted to see that exact dress and even told you the style number! It turned out that some other bride came in wanting 18 dresses and that was worth more to her than the seven dresses I need. Instead of being helpful and honest, she kept trying to deflect the questions and distract us with other dresses and I felt helpless and angry, and Lauren was more interested in the other dresses the woman was showing us, and I felt like we were going to have to start completely over. I actually woke up with a start. It was very upsetting. I hope my actual visit to the bridal shop tomorrow goes more smoothly and we get these damn bridesmaid dresses done with.

In other news, I had my third tap class last night. I love my tap shoes and I really wish I had more occasions to wear them. I also wish I were better at tap dancing so that I could employ my wonderful tap shoes more usefully. When I'm working really hard to learn a step, I tighten up my ankles, and that's the exact opposite of what I should be doing. I think tap also has an element of just trusting that your feet are moving faster than your brain and that's okay, they know what they're doing down there. There was a sequence that I just wasn't getting, because I couldn't think it through fast enough to do it in time with the music, but when I just did it on my own without the music, my feet made it happen--they might even have been doing it all along but I hadn't been able to hear it over the music. Tap is a challenge, but tap class is really fun (unlike flamenco, which was a challenge and not really fun). Our class next week got canceled, and we have one more class after that and then hopefully a make up class on President's Day. Then it's on to african dance! No loud shoes for that one.

Comments

[myras-girls.livejournal.com]

One trick I learned is to practice your tap routine sitting down in a chair. It is easier to just let your feet move but not really get the individual steps when you're shifting your weight from foot to foot. However, when you practice the correct steps while sitting down, you learn better what the individual movements feel like and later this helps you learn a few routine quicker. It worked for me, anyway!