Yummy Yoga

Y is for yummy yoga time that makes me happy.

I couldn’t really do anything else for this letter as I have become a total Yoga convert.

I used to do it now and then but this year I decided to do Adriene’s 30 Day Yoga challenge for January. At the end I wanted to carry on and have taken on the personal challenge of 365 days of yoga. So far so good. In fact I am a day ahead which is cool because if something crops up and I need to take a day off I have one in the yoga bank so to speak.

It is not a lot of time out of my day. Some of the videos are as short as 10 minutes, most are between 20 and 30 minutes, the odd one is 40 – 50 minutes but because you have a months worth of videos on the playlist you can always swap them round to another day when you have a bit more time.

I have been stunned by how much a little bit of yummy yoga a day has changed my body particularly my upper body and core strength. At the beginning I firmly believed that Crow Pose was just impossible but now, well I still can’t do it but I am starting to believe that maybe one day I might be able to just lift one foot. I can feel the muscles in my arms in a way I couldn’t before and much to my amazement in a recent online bra fitting I had with Curvy Kate (I highly recommend doing this if you are not sure of your bra size. I was super skeptical but oh boy did she nail it) turns out I have gone down a whole back size and actually nearly 2 but the 32 was just the little too tight, for now.

I am fairly sure Yoga is the reason for that change. I have not lost weight but my body shape has definitely changed and there are lots of things I couldn’t do when I started back in January that I find fairly easy now but maybe most importantly of all Yoga has become a sanctuary in my day. Those moments are just about me and my body and my breath. I relish them. They help me to clear my head and calm my brain and all the breathing techniques that I have learned I have found super helpful for when it comes to drifting off to sleep. I used to have terrible trouble getting to sleep. It would often take me hours to drop off but mostly since starting yoga regularly that is a thing of the past. I switch off the light, lay on my back and sink into my breath and concentrate on the rise and fall of my chest and tummy and nothing else and after a few moments when I feel my body growing super soft I turn over onto my size, snuggle up with teddy and am usually asleep within moments.