Welcome to the first installment of Oolong Owl’s “Sunday Tea Hoots”. Sunday Tea Hoots is about Oolong Owl life randomness related to tea!
Tea Drunk Yoga
I’ve been dabbling in Yoga on and off for years. This year I’ve been really pushing to re-composition my body as married life has led me to enjoy baking and eating a little too much. I am doing a bunch of stuff with success, but that could be another Sunday Tea Hoot.
To do a bit more, I decided to do Yoga more regularly. I’m on a 30 day yoga challenge, which I’ve almost completed (eehhh I missed a few days, doubled up on a few days, but hey, I’ll do them all). There is probably some yoga-broscience (sis science? yoga is full of women, isn’t it?) on when I’m supposed to practice, and on an empty stomach, I don’t know. I seem to just do yoga when I get past my procrastination, whether that is after lunch or right before I go to bed.
Three times now, one for an upcoming review, I had my afternoon tea session right being doing yoga. All smashing tea drunk as I had many many rounds of pu’er and feeling pretty weird.
You have probably heard me mention being tea drunk on a number occasions in my tea reviews, often for drinking pu’er or oolongs. Being tea drunk is the mix of a whole bunch of caffeine hitting you plus the calmingness of L-theanine. Some get pretty meditative while tea drunk however I tend to get manic weird since I’m sensitive to caffeine, with the odd creatively insightful moods.
Before I go into the experience of tea drunk yoga, I have done Brazillian Jiujitsu tea drunk and it certainly effected my performance. If you don’t know much about Brazillian Jiujitsu (BJJ) it’s a ground grappling martial art that uses chokes and joint locks. I felt really relaxed, which was great for keeping my cool and staying loose so I could escape out of offensive attacks. However, I was also very strangley energetic and hyper. I was windmilling my arms a lot and humming this, driving my partners insane.
Mahna Mahna! Oddly it has always been my go to Tea Drunk humming tune.
Anyways, I had the biggest urge to do yoga in some sort of tea drunk manic phase. I know enough about my own exercise procrastination, if I feel like working out I should immediately do it. Some concerns crossed my mind as yoga is more relaxation and stillness than smashy arm breaking BJJ. Often I’m doing yoga thinking I wish I was bench pressing or arm locking people instead so maybe a ton of tea in me would be fun.
Turns out, Tea Drunk Yoga for me is a whole lot of downward facing dog butt dancing at first. It was also difficult to turn off tea manic mode, as my brain was busy thinking about crocheting yoga bags, how a t rex would look doing yoga, and how I had to pee again from drinking too much tea. After that (and hitting pause for pee break) I was able to finally chill out and relax into the pose. TEA MELLOW ACTIVATE! I did find switching on calm was easier than having no tea.
There was a problem though. My last session I messed up my lower back with an enthusiastic cobra. Alas, no more yoga for awhile. The Tea Owls still do it though as it helps with deeper hooting.
