My yogini friend Jane once told me that in yoga, we will get to meet poses that will be our friends and those that will start out as enemies, but eventually, may become frenemies. I liked how she put it that way, because it did make good sense to me.

From the very beginning of my practice, there were a few poses I LOVED to bits and we became good friends instantly…

the butterfly in yin yoga (I love the bound angle pose in my yang practice just as much )

the down dog

my all time favorite...the waterfall i thank my ashtanga teacher Karen for introducingt this to me!!!

I also loved the triangle and the square. Other, poses, however…errr….were less than friendly.

However, in the past month and a half, I have come to love several new yoga poses (errr…just don’t tell my yoga teachers this, haha )

There’s the saddle…

this was my nemisis pose in the beginning. simply falling backward into it was complete torture. admittedly it is not a favorite of mine, but I have come to love it

and the wheel and the tree…

and yeah, though it’s a major, major challenge and I still can’t get it right half the time, I have come to love Half Moon Two and the Plow (or snail in yin)

images from here

Lately I have come to love the dragonfly or straddle as well

My new challenge pose for now is the crow and the dancer….let’s see how soon we become friends teeheeheee…

I love how these challenges have taught me so much about life in general. I wrote before about how the saddle was such a difficult pose for me because it entailed trusting a freefall and so that was really a challenge for me. I have learned to take risks, should I say, in my life and it all started with that yoga pose. It’s really amazing how much you learn on the mat and take with you in real life, I tell ya.

The most important lesson I have come to love, however, I think is that of being content with baby steps I used to be the type to go all or nothing…to want to do only the things I do well and if I can’t, I won’t even bother. This was true about so many aspects in my life. Like I said in my previous post, What I’ve come to learn about trying to get into these asanas is to really find a good balance between just taking the plunge and taking it slowly. Okay, I know that kinda sounds like complete opposites but what I mean is, without the courage to try and the humility to take a step back, you’ll never really get there. But because of what I’ve learned, I am more content with the little things that I can do, even if they don’t seem to equate to much right away…and more than anything, it really doesn’t hurt to try. Maybe it stings when you fall…but you pick yourself up and try again and if it still doesn’t work right then, maybe in another day it will.

Baby steps, Ria…one day at a time.