Please Pass (On) The Salt

This section of the reading opens with Arjuna asking about Sattva, Rajas and Tamas and how to determine if a person is exhibiting one of these qualities. The food section was intriguing and I wonder about its historical context. It seems like anything salty/spicy is considered ‘bad’ or at least worse than ‘normal food’ that Sattvic people eat. Could this be because salt and spices were a fairly expensive commodity? It would be bad for people to spend significant portions of their income on these items, especially if it means having to go without necessities in order to have tasty food. It would make a lot of sense to attribute the qualities of ‘pain, grief and disease’ to this because spending all of one’s money on salt/spices to flavor one’s food could definitely lead to negative consequences when one needs money for clothing or shelter. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it would make a lot of practical sense to tell people that ‘normal food’ is the best and discourage what could be considered frivolous spending on making intricately flavored dishes.

Class on Thursday was very different than typical classes. Since there were so few people, we did a lot of work in the chairs, particularly with twists. Some of the more difficult poses strained my shoulder/back, but I was able to do all of the poses, even the crazy inversion/shoulder-stand thing at the end of class. I felt great the rest of the day and slept decently, but when I woke up the next morning, I felt terrible. My entire back was sore and extremely tight; I think I might have seriously overdone the twists. I wouldn’t call it pain – there were no sharp/stabbing feelings of pain – but I was horribly sore Friday and Saturday. Technically, I guess I could have just slept in a weird position and it just coincidentally lined up with the day we did the twists, but that seems unlikely. I think I just need to go a little easier on the twists to avoid this in the future.

Outside practice has been fine. Grad school applications and GRE studying are eating up all of my free time, but I’m still managing to find time for yoga. I like going through the Warrior sequence of poses, particularly (What I think is) Warrior 3, where one foot is planted on the ground and everything else is parallel to the ground. My Downward Dog has gotten much better throughout the semester, but I still cannot bend at the waist far enough to keep my heels planted on the floor. I’m worried I might have hit a plateau on that pose until I can figure out how to hinge at the waist. I saw a strange pose on Facebook the other day. I have a friend that teaches Yoga at some retreat center in Houston and she regularly posts about yoga. This one was a picture labelled ‘Firefly’ and just looked weird. It’s like Crow pose, but instead of resting knees/shins on triceps; you just sort of swing all the way up and put your feet in the air by your head.