A bad day at yoga beats a good day without it.

Surprisingly, a lot of traffic is driven to my blog from people searching things having to do with hot yoga. Guess that means I'm allowed to blog more about it :)

Like I've said before, I love Bikram. I love it so much that I sometimes wake up at 5:30 just so I can make class and so much that it makes me sad when I have to go a day without going. And honestly, in the last month-ish, I've really had very few "bad" moments in class.

Today was a really tough day in Bikram.

I knew it was going to be hard during the first breathing exercise when I was dripping sweat halfway through the first set. My concentration was somewhat shot, and I started getting frustrated during the balancing series (the second series of the class). And then, somewhere towards the end of the standing series, I started feeling like I was going to die.

The problem really amplified because instead of concentrating on my breathing, I psyched myself out. By the time we made it to spine-strengthening series, I knew I needed to leave the room.

In 28 days, this is the first time I've had to leave, and I was really embarrassed. I felt like a failure as I regrouped myself in the bathroom, and I was still embarrassed when I got back into the room. There I was, four weeks into my practice, and I had to leave the room. I was THAT girl.

But then I realized something - and I'm gonna get psuedo deep here - yoga's a lot like life. It's really good 90% of the time, 9% of the time it's hard, and then there's that 1% of the time when you feel like you're not going to make it out in one piece. But even during that 1% - whether it was yoga class today or a rough patch in your personal life- your body and your mind get you through it, and you come out on the other side a stronger person, having learned something important about yourself.

Today was hard. It certainly wasn't the best day in my practice, but I learned something about my physical limits and something about accepting every part of my practice. There isn't really a bad day at yoga because the bottom line is, I made it to class, and I devoted 90 minutes to challenging myself.