Jessica just came by the apartment to give me my weekly yoga lesson. I feel a little weird calling it yoga, because the movements I make and positions I hold bear virtually no resemblance to any yoga I've encountered. This was my second lesson, and this time it didn't hurt as much! Yay!
I don't know much about yoga actually. The reason I'm getting these lessons is because I was recently in physical therapy for my knees, and it really helped. I can now run and play without always feeling like my knees are going to explode into tiny fragments. But at a certain point, you know, the insurance company gets angry if one stays in PT for too long, whether or not there's progress.
One option is to have a friendly doctor keep rediagnosing me with something new. Another option is to pay out-of-pocket. And yet a third option is to stop doing physical therapy, and just try to do the exercises on my own and make do as best as I can. I chose option 3.
But while I was in the midst of choosing option 3, the PT people had been considering adding some yoga to the therapy. So I got to talking with the yoga person, and when I decided to quit PT before the evil insurance monster came to eat everyone's children, I kept talking to the yoga person, whose name is Jessica, and we decided to do private lessons at my apartment.
It's a really great deal! $45/hour, and if more people decide to show up, it gets less and less expensive for everyone, down to $13/hour for a small group. This doesn't really help me though, because she comes to the apartment at 8:00 AM, and I don't really know anyone who'd be interested in showing up at my place at 8:00 AM for a yoga lesson. But that's OK because the single-person price is really not so bad.
But so, I sort of fell into the yoga thing, and haven't really read up on it. I have more experience with qigong and tai chi. I studied a very simple form of qigong (called zhong gong) when I lived in San Francisco, and I still do the exercises from time to time. And I studied Tai Chi last year for awhile, before my knees got so bad I had to stop.
I've also read a bit of Chinese medicine writing - not your standard popular writing that leaves out tons of details, but the big industrial strength textbook format that tries to be comprehensive. But yoga isn't really related to qigong, tai chi, or Chinese medicine, as far as I know. It emanates from a different philosophy that I haven't looked into yet.
But I've known a lot of people who do yoga. My parents have done it from time to time; and a lot of extremely fit people I know are big into yoga. I've tried it a couple of times in the past, but I always made the mistake of trying to do too much too soon, and injuring myself.
So now, with Jessica, we do our almost-yoga, nice'n'easy, and she's like, "that's right - twist a little more, let your shoulders flow down your back... does that feel good?" And I'm like "argh! ::grunt:: Mmf!! Um...I don't know!"
Yeah. Me and yoga. Or at least, almost-yoga.
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