The day ended on an up note:

Vishvamitrasana

This was the pose I got to attempt to get myself into near the end of this evening’s class at Yoga Belly Studio. It was a nice moment when I realized that I was actually anywhere near achieving it.

Got to class just in the nick of time, after racing through the last of my work and leaving my office just in the nick of time. Yoga Belly has a changing area, which is nice, because I was in such a hurry to get on the road that I didn’t change into my workout clothes before leaving the office.

I walked into the studio and was met by a blast of warm air and immediately thought, “What am I doing here? I’m going to die.”

But the room cooled off, eventually.

I walked into the studio and a girl I don’t think I’ve seen before said [to the woman at the computer], “Oh, this is Eme.” Then [to me]: “You’re all signed up so you can go right in.”

I found a spot off to the side and suffered through I don’t know how many minutes of adjusting to movement in the hot room. I wobbled through the standing poses, the flow portion of events, sweating immoderately and carefully keeping my eyes off the image in the mirror I’d parked myself next to. And then we got to arm balances and suddenly things were much easier.

The class had the same format as bikram, not in terms of poses, but in the sense that you start off just gritting your teeth and going through it and then suddenly finding some relief, realizing that the session was front-loaded with challenging ‘warming’ poses and now that you’re warm enough the heater’s been turned off and you get to do the slightly more restful ‘deep stretching’ poses. (In bikram, of course, they didn’t turn the heater off; the instructor would just open the door occasionally and, if you were well positioned, with a spot near the door, you felt a cool breeze across your sweaty heap of a body before it closed again.)

Our instructor, Edna, then took us through a series of poses: starting with head-to-knee forward bend, moving on to revolved head-to-knee pose, then the same pose in a different position (standing and with one leg up on the wall), then extended hand-to-big toe pose.

Then it was back down to the ground for eight angle pose (which I came very close to achieving, only I didn’t manage to bring my knees together), and then it was time to try out vishvamitrasana, which I could only manage with one knee on the ground.

So.

I can’t say that my poses looked anything like the linked pictures. But I can say that I tried my best. And by the end of class, after all the bending and twisting, I was completely wrung out and it felt awesome. My clothes are still sweaty and I am strangely proud of that.