Day 21: Another week done, new lessons learned

First I must get this out of the way...I had my worst class ever. No reflection on Jessica who's voice helped me through the 90 minutes, but it was my personal worst.

I learned two very important lessons today.

1. Do not expect to have a pleasant Bickram practice five hours after having
tests/blood work done.
2. Do not psych yourself out.

This was actually a great day for me. I was pretty much cleared by my liver doctor who said I have made remarkable progress since my kidney/liver failure in May. This is news that I have been hoping for. He did however want to have one last set of labs drawn, just to be safe. I am already naturally wussy when it comes to that and did not feel good going in to class. I thought I could just let go and have a nice practice. My body was not in total agreement with that idea. I had to sit several times for fear of vomiting on my neighbor and had a huge problem with dizziness.

That brings me to the 2ND lesson of psyching myself out. As I felt worse I got irritated with myself for not being able to push through it. This led to feeling sad that it wasn't happening. Which led to being mad for being sad, and so on, you get the idea. I need to focus on not letting (in Jessica's words) the monkey chatter in my brain get the best of me in my practice.

I was able to offer up some encouragement to a fellow newbie Yogi which gave me positive energy. I left the studio not feeling defeated but with a positive attitude knowing that tomorrow is a new day. Instead of dwelling on it I am going to embrace those feelings as part of this process and hopefully handle it better if and when it happens again.

Thanks to everyone for your support!