Pain. Serious pain. Pain so bad that I couldn’t turn my neck. I couldn’t bend over. And when I woke up in the morning, I cried because I thought I’d never be out of pain again.
I tried everything. I drank relaxing tea. I rubbed on homeopathic anti-inflammatories (Topricin usually does the trick). I took hot baths with salts. Then I moved into stage two of damage control: over-the-counter anti-inflammatories and pain medicine. Finally, I turned to prescription muscle relaxers.
Still, the pain.
The one thing I didn’t do—and hadn’t been doing—was yoga. In the past, a bare minimum of twice-weekly yoga sessions kept my chronically tense back muscles from seizing up. When I do yoga, I can move my neck. I can stretch my shoulders without wincing. I stand straighter, breathe deeper. Any level of stress is manageable.
But because my husband has been out of town, my kids are at camp for three hours less than they’re usually at school, and the Barnacle (read: baby) is on preschool strike, I haven’t been able to get to the gym to do yoga on my own—let alone to a studio to take a yoga class. And although I’ve been practicing for more than 20 years (my dad took me to my first yoga class when I was 11), the idea of doing yoga at home—with the dogs sniffing around me and the kids yelling for attention—just seemed like a chore.
Enter YogaDownloads.com. I stumbled upon this site one night when I realized that 1. the only thing that was going to make me feel better was yoga and 2. there was no way I was getting out of my house to do it so I’d better find a way to do it at home. I searched “download yoga” and grabbed my mat, and the rest is pain-free history.
Although there are other sites where you can download yoga classes, YogaDownloads allows you to grab 20-minute yoga classes for free so you can test them out and see which instructors (they’re all awesome, but Dawnelle is my favorite) you like best. And where some peeps are promoting yoga videos, YogaDownloads are mostly audio which, especially if you’ve been doing yoga for a while, is so much better because you can close your eyes without distraction. I created my perfect class by lining up my favorite four sessions on my computer, using the one-minute shavasana at the end of each session to add extra poses that I love, like headstand.
Not that I could do a headstand when I first started YogaDownloading. I could barely touch my toes. But for a few days, I would do a relaxing 20-minute yoga session before I went to bed. Then I’d leave the mat and laptop computer—wireless internet access disabled, so I wouldn’t be distracted by emails—next to the bed, so I could do another few sessions first thing in the morning.
I wouldn’t say I’m completely stress-free, but today, my shoulders aren’t hunched and I’m standing tall. And I lost the six pounds I gained in my brief stint with vegetarianism. Bonus!
