Bodhi Tree Yoga has re-invited their spring yoga challenge, moving from a thirty day to a “forty day revolution”! Check out the brochure: Bodhi Tree – 40 Day Revolution.

Earlier this year, my girlfriend at the time and I undertook a 30 day yoga challenge at the Bodhi Tree Yoga studio here in Calgary. It was an intense thirty days, during which I, well, did a lot of yoga, didn’t get much sleep yet felt physically and mentally vitalized. After successfully completing the challenge my practice ceased to a halt, as the howling demands of graduate school became harder and harder to ignore, and the acknowledgment that the yogic intensity of the last month wasn’t sustainable at this time in my life. Spring and early summer buzzed by and I hadn’t made it back to a steady yoga practice. By mid-summer though I had begun to pick things up again and by mid-September yoga was a regular part of my life once again. To maintain this positive flow of energy, I decided to essay upon another 30 day challenge beginning on October 15th at the same studio. Today is the ninth day into the challenge and I’m experiencing the same vitalization and acuity, however without the dearth of sleep (that’s what living downtown versus south Calgary gets you). Needless to say, the challenge is going wonderfully. There is an aura of sustainability that wasn’t present back in February during the previous challenge, which is beautiful. My only lament is that I won’t be able to complete this challenge, since I’ll be heading down to the States next week to attend a conference. Looking at the schedule for next week, I think I might be able to get in the old yoga class here and there, but practicing everyday cannot be done. Alas. On the bright side, the classes that I will be attending while away will hopefully be through a Bikram yoga studio. I’m really interested to see if there is any differences in a explicitly “Bikram” studio which practices Bikram‘s copyrighted sequence of asanas. Calgary doesn’t have a Bikram studio anymore, although Calgary Hot Yoga use to be one (notice that Calgary Hot Yoga’s URL is bikramcalgary.com, a relic from the Bikram days). Once I’m back in Calgary, I’ll continue with the remainder of the challenge and with luck the momentum will continue past the thirty days.

30 Day Challenge: Day Four

Sunday. Rachal and I attended a Yin class today at noon taught by John. Yin yoga is… about surrender. The postures are held for minutes rather then a few breaths, and we focused on opening the hips and hamstrings. Since the postures are held for so long, I fond myself becoming restless and frustrated with my inability to hold the poses. Things picked up towards the end of the class, but it sure was a completely different type of yoga compared to what I’m use to.

30 Day Challenge: Day Three

Rachal and I attended the Moksha II class this morning at 8:00 am. The class was taught by Celeste (who owns the studio) and it was an advanced class; it felt it too. My trapezius was fine this morning, but the postures were pretty difficult and I found myself getting frustrated for the first time during a yoga practice. I’ve gotten use to being able to do the standard Moksha I postures and this morning’s class was throwing me off my game. I pulled things back together by the end, and I found myself humbled at the end of the ninty minutes. It was a good class and I’ll definitely schedule in a weekly Moksha II class from now on.

30 Day Challenge: Day Two

Day Two got off to a shaky start and I am not sure that it ever redeemed itself…Rachal here, with my experiences with the 30 Day Challenge. Goal:6:30 am yoga class, Plan: M take the bus from the deep south to get to Sunnyside in time for me to pick him up, Result: getting turned away from the 6:30 am class because the door was locked….Further Result: Rachal is annoyed.

Decided to try the 8 pm partner yoga class. Matthew here, I’m going to finish up this post. So after being locked out in the morning (mental note: waking up at 5:10 am is insufficient; 4:50 would be a better bet), I went to the 9:30 am Moksha class instead.

My trapezious was bothering me this morning, so I took special care with any postures which involved movement in that region. The class was taught by Lisa W and at final savasana she put some Japanese Mint Oil (now, Lisa called it Japanese Mint Oil, but it was infact China Gel… I don’t know why she mixed those two up) on my trapezious which felt wonderful. Mmmm, burning heat. With my body feeling the way it was I decided to get some body work done, aka. get a massage. A few doors down from the Bodhi Tree is the “Professional Institute of Massage & Fitness” (ph. (403) 247-4319) which offers student massages at the door crashing price of $16 per one hour session. I figure you can’t really go wrong with that (so long as the person giving the massage doesn’t press krazy hard or something) so I booked an appointment for 5 pm that same day. After the morning yoga class, I went to school and didn’t do much. The five o’clock massage was great, I’ll definitely go again.

After my lateness causing Rachal to miss the morning class, I decided to join her for “Partner Yoga” at 8:00 pm. It was taught by Amy T and it was a completely different then the classes I usually attend. In short, the class was fun and I’ll go again (and write more about it at that time).

In summary, Rachal said it right: Day Two was indeed off to a shaky start. The lateness, compounded by the issue of having to make up the missed class later in the day, cutting into Clarice’s birthday sushi dinner, , was annoying to say the least. The whole day was kind of a big funk which never really redeemed itself. I’m still going strong for the challenge, but [the moral of today's story] I’m going to make extra super sure that I make it, one time and early (cause the classes do fill up, and it’s first-come-first-serve), to ever class. No more of this being locked out crap. It sucks.

30 Day Challenge: Day One

I went to yoga twice today: at 6:30 am for John’s Hot I and at 6:00 pm for (again) John’s Moksha class. The morning classes are always very nice, generally more relaxing then strenuous. There were fourteen of us practicing , which is the most I’ve ever seen at a 6:30 am class and these are the classes that Rachal (B.F.F.!) and I usually attend. It’s the first class of the day at the studio, so even though it’s a hot class, you couldn’t really call the room hot but rather warm. This was my first yoga class in over a week–I was slacking off before the challenge–nevertheless it was a gentle movement back into things. I had tried to attend the 6:30 am class the day before, but I failed to wake up at 5 am to catch the train from south Calgary up to the studio. It takes about an hour via the train, although driving is generally much quicker. Cough. It didn’t help matters much that I tried to go to sleep at 10 pm the night before, but ended up not being able to fall asleep and so I stayed up to 3 am blogging. Right. Anyway, that made Thursday’s class great was that I went to bed early and sprung out of bed in the morning ready to do some yoga. Walking up in a good mood pretty much means your morning (and if your lucky, the whole day) is going to be awesome. And that’s what happened on Thursday. The morning was so awesome and I decided not to pollute things with school, so I took the day off. Rachal too. We didn’t really do much that day, and when Rachal went to work, I went to yoga again. It was a full class and I took it easy, but I was able to go really deep and comfortably into my postures. It was a good class.

It’s only day one, but things are smooth so far. I’m confident the next twenty nine days won’t be so bad…

Starting Feburary 1st, I began a 30 Day Challenge put on by Bodhi Tree yoga studio. The “challenge” is to practice yoga everyday for thirty days. Simple.

It was suggested that challenge participants should try to keep a daily journal, documenting one’s disposition and diet during the next thirty days. I’m going follow this advice and blog about my daily practice, how I’m feeling, my general mood, what hurts, and what I’m eating. I’ll be putting these posts under the Yoga category.

So without further ado, let’s blog.