My Yoga Practice Lately: Poses I’ve Been Working On

Greetings from the northeast!

My red eye arrived bright and early this morning. Between seeing my family, my hubby’s family, my girlfriends, and my friend’s wedding that I’m in next weekend, there is a lot of fun to be had on this trip. Today is also my hubby’s birthday! I’m sure I’ll be filling you guys in on all of the excitement going on here, but today I want to talk about my life lately when it comes to yoga.

My yoga practice is always an interesting journey. Some months I slack off a bit on practicing as much, and then some months I really get into frequent and heart opening yoga sessions.

July was a case of the latter. I went to a few yoga classes on the beach and at my favorite studio in my town, but mostly I practiced at home. Sometimes I get into following a lot of videos, but for the past month, I mostly put on my latest yoga playlist, started moving, and let my practice take me wherever it wanted to go.

Sometimes I get more into the spiritual aspects of yoga, and other times what brings me to my mat is just some achy muscles that want to be stretched out, the hope of increasing my flexibility, and the desire to get a gentle workout in. But I always leave the mat feeling more centered and calm.

Some days I would do a more gentle flow, other days I would incorporate light hand weights into my yoga. Some days I would practice headstands and balancing poses, other days I stayed away from any inversions. Thanks to an Instagram yoga challenge that I took part in, many of my poses this month focused on heart opening postures….   

…and of course, the month entailed some dog photobomb yoga pictures: 

When you have a crazy dingo who hates actually looking at the camera but loves just getting in the way during photos, it’s inevitable!

The Instagram challenge I took part in was called Back to Backbends, and was designed to incorporate a lot of poses that strengthened your backbend practice.

While sometimes during a yoga challenge, it’s a pain to get a photo each and every day posted on social media, I thoroughly enjoy them as a way to try new poses. The challenges also bring about a fun sense of community with yogis on Instagram.

Here are some yoga poses that I’ve been working on:

Compass pose. Stretching my arm over my head and grabbing my foot is not an easy task! This is a pose I definitely practice only once I’m warmed up. Otherwise my body does not want to bend this way!

Dropback into Wheel pose. This movement brings me back to my competitive cheerleading days, during which time I still was not a natural gymnast. Getting into Wheel from a standing is very mental, and I find it to be a scary feeling letting myself go.

Bow pose. Ahhh, I love the feeling doing Bow! It’s such a great stretch. Whenever I practice it, I aim to get my legs higher and my torso up more than ever before. Handstand splits. As I mentioned before, doing these yoga challenges forces me to try poses that I normally wouldn’t do. This is certainly the case with handstand splits. I hadn’t tried a handstand at all in awhile, mostly because I have funky wrists from my many years lifting people up as a cheerleader and it tends to aggravate them, but this being the pose of the day forced me to try it…. and it was kind of fun! I used my fence to balance my foot, and was able to work my way off of it to do the handstand split all on my own. Woohoo!

King Cobra pose. The ultimate goal here is to have your feet touch your head, which at this point, seems like a next to impossible goal, but I’ve started integrating this pose into my practice often in hopes of improving my flexibility for it.

Wheel pose. While I’ve got a solid foundation of Wheel, I’m working more on improving variations like the above one-legged pose and getting my hands closer to my feet while in backbends.

Pyramid pose. I had never tried this before this month, and while I’m happy I could successfully do it, I want to work on not rounding my back in the pose. 

Reclining Hero pose. This posture looks relaxing, but it’s harder than it looks to keep your legs on the earth when you lay your head down!

Tiger pose. This is a great stretch, and the focus is on moving deeper into the pose by bringing my leg up as high as I comfortably can.

Straddle splits. I actually love practicing side splits, but I hardly ever do straddle splits, so this pose is a newly incorporated one that I’m going to try to practice more often.

“Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.”

And there you have it: my yoga practice lately!

Tell me.. Have you been practicing yoga at all? Do you stretch on a daily basis?