Here are my week 2 pictures for the June Summer Splits Challenge. I must say, I’m really enjoying this challenge.  It’s an awesome feeling knowing that I’ve done yoga every single day for the past 55 days. It’s simple enough that if you want to do the bare minimum, you just have to hold a pose for a minute or two and be on your way, but it never ends up like that. Even if I don’t feel like stretching or bending, just starting with one pose always leads to more.

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.”

― Mark Twain

I’m toying with the idea of doing a whole year of yoga poses, although I’m not worried about repeating poses. I’ll see how it goes the next couple of weeks/months, and hopefully I’ll make it to 365. I don’t want to set too large of a goal, because then I’ll sabotage myself.

Next month, there is a July ARMy challenge, and I’m not sure about it. During this month, there have been a great mixture of challenging and easier poses, but looking ahead at the arms one, most of them are challenging for me. Obviously, I should go for it because they are poses I don’t practice very often, but I’m worried I might lose steam after a while. I’m sure there are other challenges out there, or maybe I’ll go back and try the summer of balance challenge.

During this week of poses, I was trying to figure out how to get into King Pigeon. More times than I’d like to confess, I try to get into a pose on how I *think* it should be done, instead of how it actually should be done. This is true of King Pigeon (although I can’t get fully into it even doing it the right way). I was looking up videos on YouTube and the best tutorial was posted by Kino MacGregor, one of the ladies hosting the yoga challenges. I had never heard of her before so I thought it was really neat to find her in multiple places, like the universe was directing me to her.

Then on Twitter, there was an article posted on YogaDork I think, about Kino MacGregor’s shorts and rape culture. Upon reading the headline, I honestly had no clue where the article was going. I mean, she wears shorts, and usually a sports top, but I’ve never found her outfits to be sexy or risque in anyway. Maybe I’m just so used to BodyRock/DailyHIIT over sexualizing everything they do that I’m just desensitized to it? I had only recently started following Kino on Instagram, and hadn’t even noticed people’s comments. I guess YouTube is worse with trolls, but I hadn’t bothered to read any of the comments on her videos because I was there just to watch her explain yoga to me!

It’s really sad that you can be so amazing at something, share your gift with the world, and get such nasty comments. I do not know her in anyway, nor do I know anything about her personal life, but I can only imagine how I would feel if I was trying to put myself out there to help people and read such nasty comments. I’m not just talking about negative criticism, but gross, totally inappropriate stuff.

I received a comment the other day that said “Not to be rude but in your splits you are not all the down”. First of all, whenever someone starts a sentence with “not to be rude” or something similar, you just know they are about to be rude, lol. But more importantly I was slightly irked because I’m extremely far from perfect, never claim to be, and all I can do is try my best. It didn’t really bother me, it just seemed kind of weird. Like, I try to leave comments of encouragement to lift people up, make them want to keep trying and get better rather than point out their weaknesses. 

When I first discovered Kino, my first thought was “wow, she’s who I want to strive to be, yoga-wise.” Now, I question, if I ever were to get to Kino’s level of skill, would I be strong enough to be in the spotlight and share my gift, or would I be afraid of negativity and harassment, and stick to myself?