Astanga

I’m so tired right now, my bones are actually aching. My day started at the Shala with my practice, continued with a long walk and some work on my ‘secret project’, then I taught a couple of classes. Afterward, I biked to the store to shop for provisions and I spent the next 5 hours baking.

I love baking. But I don’t have air conditioning and my apartment is approximately the size of a shoebox. My kitchen basically *is* my apartment and right now, it’s about a kazillion degrees in here. The oven has been running all day! By mid-afternoon, it was so hot, I half-expected Bikram Chodhury to step out of the oven, wink at me, and steal a muffin! The temperature *outside* was 43C with the humidex (that’s about 110F). I’m sure it was far hotter than that in my kitchen.

But I whipped up the following:

-2 batches of vegan muffins

-1 batch of vegan double chocolate brownies

-1 batch of gluten-free vegan double chocolate brownies

-1 batch of blueberry crumble squares

And tonight I put together a vegan stew, which will bubble away in the crock pot into the wee hours.

My fun and very social weekend starts tomorrow evening with Shala North’s vegan potluck.

Just consider the last two words of that sentence and you’ll understand why I’m *so* excited: VEGAN! POTLUCK! An entire table full of food that I can actually EAT! Without worrying about the ingredients! (okay, let’s just ignore my gluten and bean semi-allergy for a moment)

Heaven!!!

And that’s not all! Once I’ve filled my plate, I get to sit around and chat about Astanga yoga with a bunch of cool and interesting people. I’m embarrassed to admit how incredibly excited I’ve been about this. I’ve been anticipating it for weeks!

Then on Saturday, Shala South is celebrating their anniversary with a yoga class, dinner and musical performance by my chanting/philosophy teacher’s kirtan band. Since Sunday is a Moon Day, I can enjoy it all guilt free - no worries about ‘turning into a pumpkin’ at 9 p.m.

I might just need a weekend to recover from my weekend! ;-)

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Practice report:

When I arrived at the Shala, it was COLD because the air conditioning had been running all night. A few cracked windows solved that problem, though. It was hot out, even at 6:30 a.m.!

Good news: I didn’t get attacked by any flies today.

More good news: Backbending was pretty good!

This is the first day in about a week I haven’t been suffering from ‘secret project’ induced leg aches. My legs felt fine, so I was stronger. P watched me do the first two backbends, then pulled my hips forward for the last one.

Something shifted in my brain during this adjustment and I suddenly got it! I understood it better (it’s never made any sense to me before). I pushed down into my heels, lifted my hips up and forward against his hands. All of the experimentation I’ve been doing with shifting the weight around in my feet led me to this point. It was kind of an ‘a ha!’ moment. P gave me positive feedback.

I worked really hard in the last three backbends. I walked my hands in (Pingu arms!) each time I pressed up - P kept encouraging me. The third backbend, I walked them in A LOT and P said: ‘Good!!! You’re walking them in far!’ It felt like it! I kept breathing, maintained my Driste, came down after 5 breaths. My legs were shaky and tired, but I felt okay.

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I had another breakthrough moment with my ‘secret project’ today.

This one took me entirely by surprise and I think it was an important step forward for what I’m trying to accomplish. Not that I was very successful or anything. ;-) I was so gobsmacked that I fell over, then ended up flat on my back, laughing at myself. Then I tried again! No dice. I guess it was a fluke, but a good one!

It’s hard to be fearful or angsty when there’s a blue sky stretching overhead and the entire world is green and sparkling. Even if nothing substantial comes of this, I have these memories of soft grass under my feet and a sense of transcending my own perceived limitations. Yoga is awesome that way!

Astanga

Gah. My practice is very boring these days. There’s nothing to say. What passes for excitement in these lazy summer days of broken hamstrings and sloppy backbends?

Well, how about sneak attacks from creepy crawly creatures?

This morning, as P was assisting me in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, I glanced down at my mat and noticed something small, dark and ominous advancing stealthily towards my foot. Keep in mind, I don’t wear my glasses at the Shala so everything passes by in a blur. I couldn’t see *what* it was, but I knew it was getting closer. And closer.

As I brought my lifted leg out to the side (and dutifully settled my Driste over my opposite shoulder), I could almost feel it approach. The hair stood up on the back of my neck when I realised that IT, whatever it was, had crawled onto my foot. It started moving slowly up my leg.

I kept breathing and thinking: How important is Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana to me today? What if that thing is actually a poisonous spider? What if it bites me and I fall over dead in Utkatasana?

I couldn’t take it anymore. I glanced over at P and said: “There’s something crawling up my leg.” Then I reached down to take a swipe at it.

It was an ordinary housefly!!! P was *extremely* amused. I was a bit embarrassed. So much for creatures going bump on the Manduka mat!

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The heat wave continues. I have two fans running to keep the air circulating in my tiny apartment.

I’m all punch drunk on sunshine, heat and abundant free time. I only taught one class today! I have three books on the go, a couple of them on my Kindle. I’m thinking of pre-ordering the new book about Guruji for my Kindle (it would be ‘autodelivered’ on the 20th, the day the book is released). But I might want a print copy anyway. There’s also a new book coming out on Krishnamacharya. Lots of good summer reading for Ashtangis!

Work on the ‘secret project’ continues, secretly, outside the Shala. Susan offered some good advice which I put into practice today. I ‘lowered the bar’ a few notches and went back to the basics. I don’t want to fall into bad habits and develop incorrect muscle memory!

In the end, it all comes back to...Pingu!

Yay! PINGU!!!

I should try this. But when I land, I’ll do it with STRAIGHT ARMS! *grin*

Astanga

Once again, I’ve spent the day avoiding eye contact with my computer. This time, my procrastination is due to an internal debate over my own comments section.

This blogging thing has gotten a lot more complicated since I broke out of my home-practice-comfort-zone and found myself in a sticky world of people and relationships and loyalties and conflicts. I hate conflict! I try like mad to avoid it.

Sometimes I miss the days of my solitary practice and the five readers who stumbled upon my blog by happy accident. People actually read this thing now!

I appreciate every single comment (and email) I received yesterday - I read every last one. You were all indignant and rallied to my defence and I just love you for that! You offered some good advice about how to move forward as well as some really profound thinking about the practice and how we struggle through it. You offered gentle encouragement, which was something I needed this morning in order to get my tail to the Shala (in the cold, torrential rain; funny how metaphor likes to spring to life).

But a few of the comments were a shade critical of my teachers. I’m feeling so heartbroken and conflicted over this entire thing, I don’t want that responsibility thrown on my shoulders along with everything else that’s hovering here.

When I took my show on the road, I vowed to only blog about my own experience within the confines of my Manduka mat. That seemed like a fail-safe policy at the time. But it’s more complicated than that. I’m sharing the space with two people who I’ve come to care about, no matter what they say to me or think about me (and sometimes I’m pretty sure they rue the day I ever walked into their Shala). I don’t want anything said on this blog to hurt them.

I should have closed comments on that entry. My bad. For now, I’ve closed comments and hidden the existing ones. This is not to say that I don’t agree with some of you 100%, but I need to sort this one out on my own.

What I really feel like doing right now is crawling into a deep, deep hole and ordering a pizza. But I still have five hundred words to go and if you’ve learned anything about me from reading this blog, then you know how stubborn I am when I commit to something!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the past few years of my Astanga practice and how this all began. I’m the ‘reluctant ashtangi’ for a reason! My background was in Iyengar and I teach mostly generic Hatha. I didn’t even like Astanga! That was the whole point.

I started practising the Primary Series, on my own, for 365 days as a sort of masochistic experiment. I had 13 years of yoga practice under my belt. I thought I hated Astanga and I was intent on documenting exactly why before I pitched the practice unceremoniously to the curb. The first few months passed in a spirit of cynical (but curious) experimentation.

I was a woman on a mission! And Astanga yoga was happy to help me out:

This hurts.

This is impossible!

Sirsasana away from the wall? Fat chance!

My body doesn’t DO that.

I’m tired today.

This pose sucks. I’m gonna skip it!

Do Bandhas really exist?

Ujjayi breathing makes my throat dry!

How am I supposed to find these invisible leg-holes, stick my arms through, then touch my ears!!!?

SERIOUSLY?!!

Okay, THAT’S just nuts.

I’m supposed to do WHAT with my arms?

Why on earth am I doing ANY of this?

Ow-my-(neck/heels/back/wrists/shoulders/knees/face)

How do I wash this blood out of my yoga rug?

What kept me going were the small things. A bind. A deepening of my forward bends. Discovering that I can actually DO Urdhva Dhanurasana (true confession: up until a few years ago, I didn’t really do Urdhva Dhanurasana).

I moved my headstand away from the wall and taught myself to lift into the pose rather than kick. I learned to fall. I learned to lower to a half-bend. Shoulderstand became possible! I finally found the those invisible leg-holes and started to roll around, even though I felt incredibly silly doing it.

I got the blood stain out of my rug and kept doing Bhujapidasana, albeit with more care.

The one element of the practice that I never experienced was a room with a teacher in it. In my first two years of practice, I didn’t receive a single adjustment or any kind of feedback. It was funny, because I was making all of these Amazing Discoveries on my own, which were not really amazing at all.

It kind of reminds me of the time a young student showed me some Valentines Day heart candies she had ‘discovered’: “You’ll never believe this! They’re hearts! And you can eat them! And the best part is, THEY HAVE LITTLE MESSAGES ON THEM!”

OMG, you’ll never believe this, but if engage my Bandhas? I can hold my legs up in the air in FULL LOTUS! It’s AMAZING!

But to be completely honest, the idea of going into a Shala and trusting a teacher with my practice scared the daylights out of me. I had heard dire, dire things about adjustments, peppered with words like ‘crank’. It scared me.

To be continued, tomorrow...

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I was determined to get through this post without a practice report of any kind, but I did want to offer an update on my backbends: I did seven today. Three in a row, two in a row, two in a row.

Today, I made an important observation about Urdhva Dhanurasana: I think my shoulders must be opening up more, because it’s easier to keep my arms very straight. And when my arms are very straight and I walk my hands in, I kind of waddle more than walk.

And this totally reminds me of Pingu!

And I think Pingu likes epsom salt baths too!