365 Days of Yoga - Day 14

Last day at Kripalu. Sigh. Stayed up a little late (10:30pm!) the night before, chatting with a few of the ladies from the photoshoot about, oh you know, the things you talk about on retreat--love, marriage, babies (two of them were in the early part of their first pregnancies), yoga, pooping. Yeah, pooping. We talked a lot about pooping over the last few daya. AND, Taryn (one of my new friends--another model from the shoot) showed me this amazing thing where you roll up a blanket like a melon and roll around on it to loosen up your...you know. To, um...speed up...evacuation. Get me? It's a pretty good trick.

Anyhoooo...enough about that. Morning yoga again was lovely. We were in the "Forest Room" which, true to its name, had an amazing view of the snow-covered woods behind Kripalu, and once again, I felt like I was breathing the morning into existence. There is something so incredible about sitting down in a room when it is dark outside, and to fold down into some pose and come back to sitting and have it be light outside. It's kind of like magic.

And then Taryn and I rolled around on some balls shaped like melons.

I was leaving pretty early--my bus was at 10:40am, so after my (DELICIOUS!) breakfast, I only had a couple hours to take advantage of the rest of the facilities before leaving. First order of business: go outside. I had not been out of doors since my arrival and I knew that I would feel that I had wasted some opportunity if I didn't at least TRY to wander around the grounds. I had noticed the day before that there was actually a cement path that circled the building that I had seen a few other guests working on and I figured that my tennis shoes would be capable on the pavement, in a way that they would not be in the foot of snow all over the rest of the grounds. So, I bundled up and headed out, thrilled to get a taste of the great outdoors for the first time in days. I did not, however, realize that it was 9 DEGREES OUTSIDE! 9 degrees!! Seriously, people. And that was the actual temperature. I found out later that that 9 degrees FELT like zero. Zeeeeero.

I made it, no joke, halfway around the building. And then promptly scurried back inside, for fear my face was about to fall off.

So much for that. Okay. Next item on the agenda: Sauna. Oh yes. I could not leave that place only having gone in the sauna one time. That would have been a travesty. So I hurried myself downstairs, into the bowels of the building, and spent my remaining 40 minutes going from sauna to cold shower to hot giant spaceship-y whirlpool, back to sauna again, and so on.

Sigh.

It was a beautiful morning, and I was sad to go, but also looking forward to getting back to the dirty crazy hecticness of New York and my love, renewed and ready for action. Thank you, Kripalu.