21.5.800 - Corpes and journals and stretching - oh my!

I don't know exactly when or how these things became so appealing, but it seems every time you turn around there is another opportunity to write or go to the gym or complete items on your bucket list over some fixed period of time.  I tried my hand with National Novel Writing Month (fifty thousand words over thirty days) last year and it didn't quite take.  My first week of November was hellish with meetings and work and by the second week I had lost my job.  You would think that unemployment would be the perfect opportunity to catch up with that first week and bang out the required 50,000 words for a month, but between getting unemployment compensation settled, interviewing for an internship and unwinding from a three-plus year stint an a job that I grew to detest, it didn't happen.  However, the writing bug has been biting me hard lately and I've returned to that project, albeit without a time frame.

This morning my friend Nina, fab food blogger over at Cooktivism, sent me info about doing savasna pose every day for twenty to forty minutes.  Also known to practitioners of yoga as "corpse pose"it is basically just lying down on your back, palms turned upward, and allowing mind and body to be restored.  Typically, every yoga class ends with this pose.  After an intense practice, it is not uncommon for me to sort of "trance out" and experience extraordinary mental and spiritual restoration and rejuvenation in a relatively short period of time.  Curiously, this was being touted as part of something called 21.5.800 so of course I had to find out more.

Basically, it is twenty one days of writing eight hundred words per day, and doing yoga five days per week.  the twenty to forty minutes of savasna was suggested as one way to achieve this if it isn't possible to do five yoga classes per week.  With a summer intensive college course three days per week, rehearsal several days per week, plus my own research for the show, five yoga classes per week, while I would adore such a schedule, are simply not doable.  However, I have recently returned to the practice from The Artist's Way of writing three "morning pages" every day, and I have just started working on releasing the psoas muscle based on Liz Koch's The Psoas Book.  Interestingly, the basic maneuver is very similar to savasna and doing it yesterday at the gym I coincidentally did one after the other, plus some hip release work afterwards.

To me, this is just perfect.  I have already committed myself to working my morning pages and psoas release and yoga into my day.  Now I have just a little extra motivation, plus perhaps I will be inspired to blog or write just a little bit more when I can squeeze it in.  It doesn't feel like an extra burden to take on; more like an affirmation that I'm already doing exactly what I need to with the added bonus that others will be doing it along with me.