I have changed my routine slightly. Instead of doing Power Yoga every morning, I'm now doing Power Yoga on weekend mornings and cycling through the lessons in Chapter 8 of "Moving Toward Balance, 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee" on weekday evenings. Doing evening workouts fits in better with my schedule. I am weaning myself off of sleeping pills, and I can only do that by planning my schedule to accommodate just that one goal. That means allowing myself to go to bed when I'm sleepy (instead of trying to force myself to bed when I think I should), and allowing myself to waking up late, which means skipping my morning workouts.
So my daily schedule is more like, (1) wake up and do some sitting meditation if I have time (2) do morning pre-work preparations (3) go to work (4) come home and cook and eat, (5) let my food digest for an hour or so, (6) do my evening yoga. Most of the time it means starting my evening yoga at 9:30 or later and ending at 11:30 or later, and then going to bed and reading and falling asleep naturally when I'm exhausted. I'm also drinking a glass of green drink after my yoga workouts to flush toxins. I'm trying an experiment and committing myself to doing that no matter what time of day my yoga workouts occur at. That means getting up frequently during the night... which also pushes my getting out of bed time to later. It's a bit of a strange sleep schedule, but so far it seem to work better, because it removes imposing rules, which in itself I think causes me stress which makes the sleep issues worse.
One of the things that I'm liking about doing Chapter 8 routines instead of Power Yoga every day is that my body gets a lot more variation in the different workouts. For instance, last night was twisting (my arch nemesis workout). The Power Yoga with Rodney Yee DvD only has one true twisting pose, which is very short in duration. True, the triangle, side angle, pyramid, warrior I and such are forms of twisting, but for the forms that really focus on the twist, the DvD only does the cross-legged twist. Chapter 8's twist routine does about 5 or 6 different twists, which end in Lord of the Fishes, which really gets deep into my body.
Now that I'm getting more time with my arch nemesis, twisting, I'm concentrating on really understanding them. Lately I've been just starting with barely any twisting at all. Just starting with my back straight and shoulders back, and then VERY VERY slowly, with each breath, easing into the twist and feeling the space around my spine releasing at I very gradually twist more. I'm finding that this is allowing my body to have a much better understanding of what it is supposed to do. Up until now I think I've been trying too hard to get into the twist, and finding it frustrating, because then I feel my torso slumping more, which I know is not the correct posture for the twist.
As an aside... another interesting thing about my new routine of no Power Yoga every morning --- my daily back ache seems better -- as though I'm giving it time to recover. Possibly the variation in the workouts is healthier for my body.
