On Starting Yoga again

Over the years, I've been practicing yoga on and off.  I've tried Ashtanga, Hatha, Restorative, Iyengar and the "whatever the community centre teacher is teaching today".  For the past 2 years though, I've been actually practicing yoga pretty much on a weekly basis.

However, due to the need for some abdominal surgery in January, I haven't been doing any Yoga at all since mid November.  I've really missed it.  There is a sense of well being that I often get from the practice. For the most part since about April of 2009 I've been working on the restorative with a few classes of Iyengar thrown in.

This past Thursday I was able to start yoga again.  There is a group of us that decided to go to the Yoga Centre Toronto to take the fundamentals of Iyengar classes (6 week course).

I was a little nervous about the class as I often still have pain in my incision and since yoga does involved a lot of muscles stretching, I  thought it might hurt.  Thankfully I was wrong.  I was able to do all the poses we did that night.  The only pain I experienced was my muscles elsewhere that I haven't been using.  And that was a good pain.

The instructors in our class were quite well informed and made sure that everyone understood what they needed to for the poses and helped with alternative poses if needed.  I also found that there wasn't that sense of "you have to keep up with the rest of the class" that you often get in group fitness classes.  There was a lot of emphasis on going at your own pace and that everyone is at a different stage in their practice.

I'm already looking forward to next week's class.

As an aside, I've previously been having a lot of problems with working on the bridge pose.  we did the beginnings of the bridge in the class and I found I had no problems with it.  This made me quite happy as it had been bothering me to no end that I wasn't able to do it before.