Well, I skipped two days because of Christmas, but I'm back on schedule now.

I talked with Jon Hinds the other day and he reminded me to keep my head long and extend while doing poses where I curve my back so there there's isn't any compression. If you keep your back long, then there's really no compression of your back, causing no pain during the pose or later.

That also reminded me of how my posture is. I've been trying to sit up straighter in chairs rather than slouch.

I gave my dad the Eischens Yoga DVD for Christmas and he's going to do yoga for 30 days to see if it helps his Parkinson's. My mom will do it with him when she can, too. I videotaped the first one that my mom and I both did with him so that we can track his progress. He had trouble with a few poses but did really well, I thought. I can't even do them all yet, but I'm getting better. After we were done, I asked him how he felt and he said he felt better. I don't think he wanted to admit it at first but later he did. :-)

I'll be really happy if I can get rid of this chronic back pain. So many people I talk to are in pain or attribute pain to "getting older" and I don't think it has to be like that. They just don't know that they can feel better. I'll wait to proclaim that more until I get through my 30 days.

-T

Ok, I never thought I'd be doing Yoga. All I've heard is that it's this strange thing that isn't biblical and it's like you enter into a cult or something. After talking with Jon Hinds of the Monkey Bar Gym, I see it differenty. What he explained made sense... feeling pain is good. Pain is your body telling you where it hurts - like if you touch a hot stove, you feel pain and know what to do to fix that pain. Your body can heal itself. Yoga helps you do that.

What? That sounds goofy. Well, I'm a Christian (or I like to say "follower of Jesus" since I don't subscribe to everything with the "Christianity" label on it) and I believe that God is a pretty smart guy... ok, the ultimate smarty. People throughout history didn't have all these wonder drugs, doctors and surgery, right? So how did they stay healthy? Well, they had better diets, first of all but it seems to me like they got better themselves. It just seems logical to me that God would give our bodies a way to heal all of our pain. We already heal up when we get cut or something, so why not more than that?

Honestly, I don't know everything about Yoga and how it works or what the church thinks about it (I was given a book by a pastor I know about how evil it is, but my spirit didn't feel right about that and I never really read the book) but I'm trying it out. That's what this section on my blog is about. I'd rather find out first hand rather than read books or take other people's opinions. The kind of Yoga I'm doing is called Eischens Yoga and it's really just the exercise part and not any of the goofy stuff. Monkey Bar Gym has put out a DVD (linked below) and it has the beginning workout on it. I may move up to the advanced one later.

Jon challenged me to do the beginning Eischens Yoga for 30 days and see how I feel, so that's what I'm going to do. I've got some lower back pain / problems, which really affect my sleeping, sitting, standing and even skiing. I want to get rid of that. We'll see how this works. I may not blog every day but I'll write posts as I come up with something good to report or at least every few days.

Eischens Yoga DVD

So I just did day 1. I feel good - kind of stretched out looser. I couldn't do all of the moves that they wanted me to do but I think I'll be able to do them within the 30 days. I'll need to get some Yoga blocks or something similar as a substitute.

-Tony