Saturday, March 23, 2013

To pee or not to pee

What's up with morning pee?

I've been confronted with the claimed benefits of morning urine a number of times in the past weeks, so I start to wonder how morning pee got promoted from bodily waste to "fluid with benefits"....

I've been reading a book - yoga bitch by Suzanne Morrison . It's a book about her yoga experiences in Bali, and one of the topics she frequently addresses is the fact that yogi drink their morning urine as some sort of ritual. Although she's convinced that she will never do that, severe diarrhea changes everything and out of desparation, she joins the - what she calls - pee-drinkers by taking a sip of her morning urine. Apparently her sickness improved after that.... (coincidence?.... I certainly hope so).

Recently, I've had a discussion on colds and runny noses with some yogis, and the use of a neti to rinse your nose with 10% salty water came up in the discussion. That was topped with a statement that rinsing your nose with morning pee is even better than rinsing with salty water..... please let this one sink in for a while, I needed to do that as well.

And then, even non yogis confronted me with benefits of morning urine. I've got told that people that used to work in the coal mine washed their hands with morning pee as a cure for skin fissures.

Now I am wondering what the mechanism behind all these "strange" usages of urine is. I was hoping to get some insights today in yoga class, but have a shoulder injury so have to skip the teacher training today. Not fun, but the question stays on my list of things to ask next time (end of April).

So if anybody has any good explanation, feel free to comment. I will get back with the explanation I get as soon as I get it....

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Next challenge please...

So I'm just starting to feel better after 5 days of fighting a viral bronchitis.... it was the second time since I started writing this yoga blog that I've been down for a few days because of some little creatures messing up my system. I thought yoga was supposed to make me more resistent to all these thing - playing the devil's advocate here - guess an attempt on being a Western yogi is not enought to be granted immunity ;-)

Anyway - I'm still preparing myself for the next class, in a few weeks, where the complete flow will be taught by the students for the first time. So I have to focus on teaching my 2 asana's, but also have to prepare the asana's of the person before and after me, in case they get sick.....

I've decided to let the sanskrit name of the asana for what it is now - I will be teaching the 'extended hand-to-big-toe pose' and the 'tree pose' instead of the 'Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana' and 'Vrikshasana' -- I probably would be okay with the vrikhasana, but I think they should be named in the same language, and I'm not there yet for my first pose....

I'm using the Audio CD to get the instructions memorized properly -- we have an audio CD where our teacher goes through the entire flow with his instructions - so it helps me in doing a weekly entire flow practice (since I can not attend live lessons during the week) and it also helps me to focus specifically on my poses. I don't want to repeat exactly what is on the CD, but it guides me through the different points to focus on when teaching a pose.

For me, the teaching bit is already a challenge - especially as a yoga rookie with no ambition to become a yoga teacher. Nevertheless, I am looking for another challenge for myself.
I've completed my 40-day-challenge successfully and for some reason, setting myself a challenge gives me more of a drive.

I'm now thinking about 'trying to complete 108 sun salutations' or 'a vegetarian week'. And for me, a vegetarian week is also a massive challenge.

Once I have made a final call.... I'll be sure to post it here.

Meanwhile, I will work on getting my poses better - I'm already improving on arm balance poses but still have a long way to go (the journey is very exciting).