I’m thinking about buying the above led primary CD to help keep myself “on track” when I’m practicing at home. I’m not sure whether this will be useful for my practice or if it will just be another “thing,” another object of attachment. I don’t know. I’ve never practiced with a CD or DVD- – once, I bought Shiva Rea’s Yoga Matrix, but I just ended up sitting there and watching it. . .
Mysore practice a few days a week combined with home practice a few days a week is one thing. All home practice all the time is going to be quite another. I’m going to have to muster up an uncharacteristic amount of will power or figure out a good system or something. Because the yoga’s not just going to do itself (except for on those rare days of amazing, magical flow. . . aaah). I need a plan.
AYS being closed and gone forever, I’ve weighed my options and decided to go the all self practice route, at least for the time being. On the mysore ashtanga front here in Seattle, the other option is to practice with Mr. Troy at Velocity dance studio, which sounds like a fabulous option indeed, but- – it’s weird- – I feel like I’m not ready for a new teacher. I guess I’m kind of greiving the loss of the teachers I’ve depended on for just over a year now- – in fact, it feels kind of like getting out of a strange breakup. I need to break free and go it alone for a while. (I had no idea I was so emotionally involved.) The idea of having some space to turn inward and really observe myself and my practice sounds very attractive right now. In fact, I’m craving it.
But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. However, I am lucky enough to have a fantastically supportive partner who cares about my yoga practice because I care about it so much, and he’s volunteered to be my project supervisor of sorts. I’m supposed to do my full practice with the twosies three times a week and at least an honest effort at something the other three days and report back to him. Presumably he will give me a scolding if I don’t meet my goal or something. At any rate, it’s helpful for me to be even slightly accountable to someone besides myself.
This might also be a good time to re-integrate pranayama into my daily practice. The lead teacher of my yoga teacher training, Paul Dallaghan (look at him–isn’t he cute?), is a longtime student of O.P. Tiwari, and as such prescribes individualized pranayama practices for each of his students at the end of training.
Which of course means I never took it very seriously. I was travelling in SE Asia for four and a half months after training! By bicycle! I didn’t have time for extra practices (I told myself). But now feels like a good time to pick it up. Really and truly, I have this feeling in my bones that the next few months are going to be a great time of discovery. . .
The things that were going through my head during practice this morning would make my grandmother faint. My mind was being so grumpy! My inner being became a pouting, sneering five-year-old with a overly-colorful vocabulary. It was rather humorous to observe, really, but I couldn’t stop it. Well, I guess it would be more accurate to say I didn’t try to stop it. I’d be doing, say Setu Bandhasana, thinking, “Goddamn f@#king Setu Bandhasana,” all the way though, yet it would be a lovely posture. I was enjoying myself during practice despite the pouty-grumpy mind.
So strange. Strange things are happening with my practice in general. Since my little pit-orchestra day, it’s like I’ve pulled out some kind of stopper, ripped off the duct tape, opened the floodgates of effing strange. I’ve been having really long, vivid dreams. I blame second series. All this backbending craziness. I’m trying to take it really easy in my progress through the series to keep the mental weirdness at a level I can manage. Goddamn yoga.
In yoga: Somehow, I’m up to Kapotasana in intermediate and doing fine. For a while, I was under the impression that D was waiting for something to happen in my primary practice–some kind of benchmark or gateway accomplishment–before he would start moving me through secondary, but I’m pretty sure nothing of the sort happened at all, yet here I am at Kapo. I still can’t wrist-bind in the twisty Marichys, I can’t bind at all in Supta K, I struggle through Navasana like a novice, and I drag my feet in jump-backs. I also stay in bed as long as I possibly can, timing the start of my practice so that I am the second-to-last person out of the shala every day. I can’t be the last person. That would just be sloppy.
In work: Work went from hard to harder. I just recruited, interviewed and hired two new student employees which is great, because now we have more coverage in the office with a total of six staff, but it means I have to train these people without the aid of the usual orientations, training workshops, etc. at a time when I can barely keep up with deleting garbage emails. I’m coordinating a community health and wellness fair that comes up in less than a month, I’m going back and forth with workshop instructors to try to put on a workshop in two weeks, I have an advisory board to answer to, volunteers to coordinate, a budget to balance, ridiculous bureaucratic paperwork to complete, and a general student survey to distribute, track, and bring on home, hopefully sometime before our annual budget begins in, um, March. And that’s the easy part. The hard part is this: part of my job is to confidentially provide a listening ear and helpful resource referrals to students who are in tough situations, and we’ve had a lot of tears and anxiety in the office lately. I want to HELP, but I know that all I can do is listen, offer a tissue, and give out a few phone numbers and say come back to talk anytime. I can’t fix America’s health insurance disaster, I can’t make abusers stop raping and beating their girlfriends, I can’t stop INS (or “Citizenship Services” or whatever the fuck euphemism they’re using) from terrorizing immigrants, I can’t stop employers (hospitals and schools come to mind) from being racist, self-interested monsters, and I can’t force privileged co-workers to open up their eyes and see how good they have it, much less to use that privilege for social change. And apparently I can’t qualify for health insurance or retirement either, and there’s little prospect here for career laddering. Which brings us to. . .
In education: Looking at master’s and doctorate entry programs in nursing. GRE’s, prerequisites, recommendation letters, scholarly writing samples, personal statements, interviews (if I’m lucky), loans. . . oh my. Or maybe I should just skip all that, go to Seattle Central, and become an RN. Same job, after all. Oh, but the lure of higher education and a self-directed career.
In life: Z started a blog about what else but FOOD–read it! The days are becoming just perceptibly longer and I’m becoming just perceptibly less S.A.D.-ish, hence my renewed motivation to write. A person was shot to death at a corner I pass most every day on my walk between home and the shala. There’s flowers and candles there now. I’ve been fantastically forgetful this week: it started out with losing my keys, progressed to misplacing my glasses, and culminated yesterday with me forgetting my car at work and taking the bus home. Seriously, something is very wrong here. I need my mind back. I need my car back too. Oh, and I forgot to do Navasana today, but that doesn’t really count, because I dislike that pose immensely, and probably subconsciously edited it out on purpose. And we’re hosting a big game night at our apartment this weekend, which means I need to start cleaning. . . right now. Before I forget.
Last Tuesday, I was having a really hard time practicing during mysore class, probably due to low blood sugar and/or pms. It was getting toward the end of my practice and I felt like I wouldn’t have any energy left to walk out the door when I was done, so I skipped the last few postures of primary series. Skipped postures! This is something I have NEVER done during mysore, so I was feeling a wee bit criminal as I scurried away into the back corner of the room to start on my backbends. And then Surfer Dude calls out my name from half way across the room. Oh shit, I think, I’m going to have to explain myself and it’s going to sound really pathetic. He walks over and as I’m thinking of a way to explain that I’m really not a big old cheater, he asks if I want to start second series. Ha! My guilty conscious was all wrong, as usual. Now I get to cook up some second series magic at the studio, instead of just doing my renegade postures at home- – yeah, I’m ready. I was to start next Monday, after the moon day.
But the auspicious part (to me) is this: This Monday, after tacking on my four new second series postures to my usual primary, I stood up from my backbends without the use of a pad! Wa-haa! I just sprung right up, nice and clean, and it felt as if I had been doing it all my life. I think it was a combination of factors- – including having had a break for ladies’ holiday, drinking some coffee and juice before practice, and most importantly, having been practicing this damn trick for months- – but I think the little confidence-booster of moving on to second series helped me do it. Silly but true.
So now I’m on the path of longer practices, getting up earlier, and having new kinds of soreness in my body. I love it! After having been in yoga-is-such-a-chore mode for a while, I’m definitely back in yoga-is-so-fun mode. How refreshing.
I found it difficult to breathe in yoga this morning.
It wasn’t asthma or congestion or anything like that, but rather a feeling of tightness in my ribs and abdominal muscles. I’ve never really felt that way before- – it was rather uncomfortable.
So I decided to just simply observe the sensation as I went through my practice, and I realized that I a lot of people may actually feel this particular kind of tightness much of the time. Of course I can’t be sure, because I don’t know how other people feel, but I suspect it may be true based on observations I’ve made of others’ practices when I’ve been teaching. My difficulty breathing came along with difficulty doing certain postures- – parivritta parsvaknoasana, Marichyasana D, urdhva dhanurasana, and others- – and it led to a certain heavy, restricted way of carrying myself in general. The change wasn’t necessarily obvious to an outside observer, but it was profound. I’ve noticed the same set of characteristics in other people’s practices, and I wonder how much of it is related to restricted breathing. Hmm.
At any rate, I have a renewed appreciation for breathing.
Two-inch thick ugly, plasticky 1×1 1/2 foot foam pads. I have no idea what they’re normally supposed to be used for, but they’re amazing. Take a stack of them (I like to start with 4) and stack them on the floor up next to a wall. Stand facing away from the wall at a distance that will allow you to drop your hands back squarely onto the stack of plasticky foamy things without either hitting the wall or missing your target and landing onto the floor whilst smashing your face on the scratchy foam pads (as I gracefully demonstrated the other day). Bend back, place hands on pads. Stand up. Ta-daa! Magic! When you can do this with relative ease, take one mat away and repeat.
For some reason, I need to start with 3 or 4 pads, but then I can easily go down to 1 after I’ve warmed up a bit. Yet, mysteriously, when I have no pad at all, I tend to crash-land. In fact, I pretty much only crash-land. Those 2 inches are critical for me- – physically or psychologically, I do not know. At any rate, I love the pads, because I can practice dropbacks without assistance, which makes me feel accomplished. And then I practice dropbacks with assistance, because hey, it’s fun, and then I carry on with closing and feel GREAT. Because at this point I’ve done about a million and a half backbends and my nervous system is all jazzed up and and happy. Woo!
I’ll be bouncing off the walls when (if) I get to second series.
This video is rad–it’s from way back in 1993 (I was 10–yup) and has Maty Ezraty, Richard Freeman, Karen Haberman, Chuck Miller, Tim Miller, and Eddie Stearn all practicing Primary with Guruji. Apparently they filmed the Primary Series video and the Secondary Series video all in one go, but of course they all look amazing throughout both. It’s actually terribly boring to watch one of these videos in its entirety, but they’re a good reference for the correct technique, if you’re into that kind of thing.
I wanted to put up this clip to provide an example of graceful, effortless vinyasas. Aaah. That’s what I’m working towards.
I LOVE my home practice. I practice at home about one to two times a week, and it is such a nice change of pace from my yoga shala practice, which I do about four to five times a week. Sometimes in my home practice I just do plain old full Primary like I do at the shala, yet the feeling of it is different because I’m better able to tune into the sensations in my body and breath. Sometimes I do fun little sequences that I have made up for myself. If I’ve been feeling a little tight or closed off in the chest, I’ll do a series to open up my chest and shoulders and to invite deep breathing and relaxation. If I’ve been overworking my legs and hips in Primary Series, I’ll do a practice full of hip openers and hamstring stretches. And sometimes, even if I’ve practiced all week, I’ll do a little restorative session on Sunday just because it feels so good!
I really love that I’ve gotten to a place where I have both the confidence and the discipline to create a practice for myself and follow through with it. I like the balance I find in practicing 70-80% traditional Ashtanga and 20-30% self-styled flow yoga. I still feel connected to a rigorous yoga tradition, yet I have the freedom to listen to my body, to listen to my heart, and give myself what I need. “Listening to my body” can be used as a cop-out, as one of my teachers has explained, and I agree that it can indeed. But I would continue on to say that if one sincerely practices the discipline of listening to one’s body, in the context of a firm grounding in yoga practices and philosophy, one can truly take their yoga to a deeper level. Instead of relying on someone else to tell me, to give me, what is good for me, I myself must do the honest work of finding out what is truly good for me and I myself must create a way of bringing that into my life.
I decided last night that I was totally beat and would stay home this morning to do a gentler practice and work our some of the knots and tight spots that have been building up over the past few days. I ended up barely doing anything at all, or so it felt. I guess I’m feeling pretty wiped out. I practiced on Sunday this week, skipping my day of rest, and I’ve been very busy in general, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my body is on strike.
Also on the subject of yoga truancy, yesterday in class, I was all the way to the finishing sequence when I suddenly realized that I had entirely skipped Garbha Pindasana, Kukkutasana, and Baddha Konasana. They had just vanished from my mind without a trace. It felt perfectly normal for me to go straight from Supta Kurmasana to Upavishta Konasana, as if that’s what I do all the time. Bizzare mental lapse. I even felt kind of guilty, as if I had skipped them on purpose. Felt like this. But the thing is, I like those postures! Why couldn’t I have forgotten something like navasana? When I expressed this idea to Z, he aptly remarked, “You can never forget navasana.” How true. Sigh.
Tomorrow will be a better day. I’ll change my ways, you’ll see.
Yoga Vita 