Backbending

I didn’t need to get up for the Shala this morning, but I was awake nonetheless. My body has a built-in alarm clock and I can’t seem to turn it off!

I took Princess Fur for a walk in the muddy park, then gave her a quick bath before hitting the mat for a casual backbending practice.

I started with some leisurely sun salutations and moved on to quadricep and hip openers. I find that I ‘m craving these ‘research poses’ - I’m hungry for ‘length’ and stretch in that part of my body and I’m starting to feel big changes! There’s a huge amount of movement and opening going on in my hips. My psoas has been talking to me (mostly complaining, usually in the mornings). My gremlin recently moved out from under my left shoulderblade and she’s been hanging out around the left side of my pelvis.

As I moved on to backbending, I noticed that my back was not very open today, compared to previous days. This may be the first time I’ve ever really noticed a day-to-day change in my spinal flexibility. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t practice Primary, or maybe doing daily dropbacks has just made me more aware, but I think fluctuation is a good sign!

Because my back was less open, dropbacks were more difficult than usual. I had trouble getting a decently deep hangback. The floor felt miles away. I didn’t even try to rock to standing because dropping back felt difficult enough!

The ‘Dropback School of Hard Knocks’ continues to deliver regular life lessons. Today’s lesson: DON’T THINK! During my second dropback, my silly brain decided, mid-drop, that this was a ‘bad dropback’. Instead of keeping my arms straight, my brain ‘abandoned hope’ midway down and I bent my arms on landing. *headbonk*

Ouch.

I could feel the pity party percolating in my brain, so I got right back up and dropped back again. This time, I silently chanted ‘straightarms...straightarms...straightarms’ to myself as I hung back, hung back and finally dropped. This was probably a ‘bad dropback’ too, but if my arms are straight, it doesn’t matter - straight arms give me enough ‘height’ to avoid head-bonks. Good to know!

I did 5 dropbacks in total - three of them were decent, but none of them felt good. I filmed one and noticed that I wasn’t getting a decent bend in my upper back at all. It makes me wonder if I should integrate some supine/restorative backbending into my daily routine. Maybe re-institute the hangbacks off of my blanket box? I feel like my back is very tense. I laid over my Manduka for five minutes this afternoon and I could feel the muscles along my spine begin to soften and my chest open.

I also filmed one round of rocking. Viewing the clip later, I noticed that my head was slightly lifted on the first few rocks, but during the last two, I pulled my head back toward my legs. I seemed to rock forward more easily then and get more lift (I’m pretty sure R has cued this head position before). I felt it at the time, but it was good to have this confirmed visually. I’ll work on head position next week.

I’ve decided to truly honour the Moon Day tomorrow and take a day off from any active yoga - no vinyasa, no dropbacks. I’m absolutely exhausted and I need to rest. I’ll do a restorative or Yin practice in the morning then relax for the balance of the day.

I need to replenish my energy reserves. It’s going to be an interesting, and potentially emotional week.

Hatha

Interesting day. This weekend, my city is hosting a meeting of International Big Wigs and the security here is unreal. A huge area of the city centre is enclosed within a 10-foot high fence, heavily guarded by police officers. I watched the barrier go up earlier in the week and it’s creepy looking. It reminds me of a war zone.

The soup kitchen I volunteer at is just outside of this ‘security area’ but we were forced to shut down for the entire week. We normally serve 6,000 meals to the hungry. Some of our guests rely on these meals and I wonder where they ate instead. All week, roving bands of riot-police-in-training wandered the streets, familiarizing themselves with our city. They conducted training manoeuvres and randomly shut down intersections to ‘practise’ for the Big Wig motorcades. I’ve never seen so many police officers in my life! They were everywhere.

Many people escaped the city for the weekend in order to avoid this. I didn’t have the option, but I figured that it wouldn’t be a big deal. This morning, I travelled via public transit into the downtown core to teach my Saturday morning class. It was a very fast commute because *nobody* was down there. The streets were literally deserted, clear of parked cars, and many of the shops had boarded up their windows. It reminded me hurricane preparations when I lived in Hawaii as a kid. It seemed a bit like overkill.

I had a bet going with a fellow teacher that I would have a full class this morning, and I won my bet. My students are troopers! I had a full room and one person travelled all the way from the west end of the city to attend. After class, I made it home in record time. The streetcar was filled with protestors. I rode along the northern boundary of ‘the fence’ and it was surreal. The war-zone atmosphere intensified at the subway station. There were 15 officers in partial riot gear crowded near the wickets going in and I counted 20 on the platforms.

I was relieved to get home! I ate lunch and read a book and didn’t pay much attention to what was going on outside my building, though I did notice the unusual number of helicopters.

In the late afternoon, I walked to the health food store to pick up some brown rice protein powder and noticed riot police guarding the intersection to my neighbourhood! That’s when I found out that a band of violent demonstrators were moving through the downtown area, smashing windows and setting cars on fire. “They smashed all the windows of the Starbucks”, the shop clerk told me.

They were headed north. At the peak of the violence, these protests were a mere 1.5km away from my building (southeast). It’s rumoured that the police were using tear gas to disperse them.

I beat a hasty retreat home and stayed put, with the radio on.

Just to give you an idea, here’s the street I walked through on my way to class this morning. At 10:30 a.m., it was quiet and still. By 4:30, it looked like this:

I guess the boarded up windows were not ‘overkill’ after all. The downtown core apparently looks like a war zone, with smashed windows, burning vehicles and vandalism.

My teachers just canceled tomorrow’s Mysore. The Shala is located well outside of the current ‘red zone’ so it’s just a precaution. But it means that I’ll be going to Shala North for my practice again tomorrow morning. Goodness, I’m spending a lot of time up there! I’ll head up as soon as the subway opens. Hopefully, this will give me enough time to do my practice. The adjustments workshop starts a couple of hours after that, so I guess I’ll hang out in that neighbourhood and get some lunch.

It will be a relief to get out of downtown, to be honest. I just took Princess Fur for a walk around our block and even though it feels like a ‘normal’ Saturday, with children playing in the park and people enjoying their barbecues, the city is still filled with the sound of sirens and helicopters are buzzing overhead. There’s a pall of smoke over the downtown core. It’s a weird scene.

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I more-or-less honoured the rest day/Moon Day and just did a little bit of Hatha to stretch a few things out.

My upper ribs and my hip flexors are aching today. On Thursday, I launched my new ‘secret project’. It will span a month and I’m hoping it will lead to great things, but for now, it’s just making me very, very sore. Ug. I thought I was using most of the muscles in my body, but apparently there are a number of them that have been sitting on the shelf until now.

Vinyasa

Theoretically, today should have been easy peasy. No classes to teach, no place I needed to be. Theoretically.

But, in fact, I had to finish some work in the morning, then errands: Stop by the post office, drop off rent cheques at my landlord's office and battle public transit to get home in time to stop by my neighbour's place to meet the her cats (as one of the few people in this city who doesn't travel someplace exciting for the holiday, I'm the Cat Sitter of Choice in the neighbourhood).

And then Princess Fur needed her holiday fur-cut (I'm now getting the 'silent treatment' from the Princess, who doesn't appreciate the clippers).

I needed to eat lunch. *burp*

And then I remembered that I still hadn't ordered my mom's Christmas present. I wanted to check that one off my list because I double over with guilt-pangs each time I see someone pass me on the sidewalk with gifts and wrapping paper.

I promised to work a shift at the soup kitchen tonight.

And yoga? Oh yes, yoga! THAT yoga! Of *course* I'm going to do yoga. Ummm...just as soon as I can find space to unroll my mat in the chaos of my apartment and locate a spare 10 minutes.

Today, it's a short, simple practice: 5 Surya Namaskara A, 3 Surya Namaskara B.

Sometimes, that's the best I can do (Seriously, I cannot WAIT until things slow down a bit).

Hatha

How is it that I'm technically working less, but I'm MORE busy?! Today had no wiggle room, none at all.

I slept in late this morning because I was out late on Friday night partying with Dutch people. I now know more than I ever imagined I wanted to about St. Nicholas Day. It's about more than gifts in wooden clogs!

Here's a brief synopsis: St. Nicholas, who is Turkish and works in the government, comes to Holland on a boat from Spain. He is met by a white horse and 6-8 black men (apparently, the number is changeable, sort of like the Surya Namaskara B's in Astanga). They are all named Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). In olden times, these guys may have been slaves (and St. Nicholas wears a pointy hat, but hey, let's not go there...) but now they're all 'just friends' and they hang out together.

If Dutch children are bad, then they are beaten with sticks by the 6-8 black men, then St. Nicholas kidnaps them and takes them to Spain. There are no documented cases, though my Dutch friend told me very solemnly that her parents never mentioned the beating, only the kidnapping (that was apparently enough to scare her into obedience).

On the plus side, Dutch children put out their shoes and sing a little song and voila! In the morning, St. Nicholas has stopped by on his white horse and filled the shoes with small gifts.

For our part, we ate cookies and chocolate and exchanged small 'secret santa' type gifts with badly composed poetry. It was a hoot!

I had so much fun, I forgot to meditate in the evening and I slept in so late that my yoga practice got bumped to suppertime. I did my typical last-minute-must-do-yoga thing: Sun salutations and some Hatha poses.

Vinyasa

I had a funny little practice today. I was feeling really indecisive. We're having a warming spell, but I wasn't sure I wanted to take my practice outdoors because the park was crowded. I didn't feel like doing a full Primary but I felt like doing a bit. I didn't feel like doing a lot of yoga, to be honest. Also, the batteries on my iPod shuffle were dead.

The solution: Very slowly and mindfully, I did 5 Surya Namaskara A's and 5 B's. The shuffle charged up while I saluted. Then I went out to the balcony and did the really short version of that vinyasa core class, Core Yoga #1, I've been loving lately (aka: 'Hello, Bandhas!').

All together, with the 9 rounds of Nadi Shodanam pranayama, I spent 45 minutes on the mat. Perfect! This is such a great time of year to use the balcony. The balcony faces south, with lots of sunlight in the afternoon and it's sheltered from the wind, fairly warm even on a cool day.

Today was every bit as lazy as I hoped it would be. I did a lot of reading, listened to music, swung in my hammock in the park (later moved to the sunlight; it was a tad chilly for hammock-swinging), made significant progress on my knitting project.

The GF and I finished watching Grey's Anatomy Season 2. I've seen it before, but she hasn't, which is a lot of fun for me and it's difficult to keep my mouth shut about future plot elements.