Andrea Franchini was my first yoga teacher at Tranquilspace and then she moved to Flow Yoga Center and I soon joined her. I introduced my daughter to Andrea and we took classes with her together. Stephanie and Andy struck some common vibes and kept in contack over time. I was really fortunately to find a teacher like Andy. She has a nurturing, therapeutic approach to yoga, typically of the Anusara tradition, so she helped put to rest a lot of my early nerves about doing yoga in a classroom setting. She's always been a kind of marker in my practice
Two years ago, Andy decided she wanted a change of scene and moved to San Francisco, but once or twice a year she comes back to Washington to give a workshop or a master class. Stephanie, Teresa and I joined her this time around at Flow Yoga. Of course, I was going in part because of the ego trip — I wanted to hear her tell my how far my practice has come in two years. For instance, I realized that I had to use a bolster under my hips and back to get into reclining hero's supta virasana pose when Andy was teaching me, and now I can get by with just a folded blanket. But that was only a sidebar in the rush of mat-focused learning that took place in those five hours. Workshops allow me to push through a lot of artificial barriers that I erect in my mind.
This Saturday-Sunday workshop was back in January and I'm just now getting around to writing about it so I am playing catch up. My yoga practice and its internal processes has pretty much overwhelmed my capacity to digest it through writing, either in a journal or a blog. Blasting off a quick entry about a news item on yoga, a website or my trip to St. Thomas is just a gesture to pacify my angst.
This evening, I was suddenly inspired to stand in tree pose (Vrksasna) as a preparation for heading to bed, a different meditative pose than I usually take. I concentrated on how my feet were supporting me, serving as the foundation for my limbs and torso. It made me sense viscerally what "four corners of the foot" really means. I could feel all four points on the sole of my right feet and the tension of strength that held them together. As I moved into the pose on the left side, I became aware that I was really not standing on the ball of my foot; it was more accurately a midline of the foot, thus turning the base into a narrower and, therefore, more unstable platform. I pressed more firmly into the ball of my foot and immediately felt the shift towards a broader base. As I've been running regularly over the past month, I've become more conscious of my overpronation and literally walking and running on the outside edge of my feet. Now I walk around purposefully pressing in the balls of my feet. That refreshed awareness paid off tonight in understand a structural weakness in my tree pose.
If you are scheduling your calendar around the growing number of yoga-focused events, you can block off the whole month of September, which a coalition of yoga personalities, media outlets and service companies has declared "Yoga Month." It is "a year-round awareness campaign and will peak September 2008 with millions of health and socially conscious individuals practicing yoga at thousands of yoga studios, businesses, parks and homes around the globe." The campaign will highlight the health value of yoga in dealing with obesity, hypertension, heart disease, breast cancer, menopause, chronic back pain, asthma, arthritis and depression, among other illnesses and conditions. So far, there is no event or affiliate from the Washington, DC area.
Labels: dc_yoga, health, yoga, yoga_resource
This morning I had my third yoga class in three days so I've been able to get my body back to homeostasis after a week without a class. Susan Bowen at Thrive Yoga led a hot yoga class, which was packed with people because it was Presidents' Day and more students than normal for a Monday morning put their mats close together to work up a nice sweat. It was a purifying experience because I had already had Saturday and Sunday classes to get my body back into the swing; I was able to get into my poses deeply and with ease so I could concentrate on making micro-adjustments to my posture. I came out of class feeling that I rid myself of a lot of debris and could receive the day to the fullest.
Labels: class
I have not been posting much recently because I had so much to say backlogged in my head that I did not know where to start — so I did not. There's a personal contradiction for you.
My skin is as white as the sands on Salomon Bay beach, St. John, US Virgin Islands.
My wife and I also took a quick trip to St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, for four days so I was out of circulation for a week. A couple of days getting ready, and then a couple of days to recover. There's another layer of overwhelm that can get in the way of writing. And I get all tied up in knots when I travel so there's another issue to deal with. But sandwiched between the prep and the flying were two days spent chilling on the beaches, Magens Bay on St. Thomas and Salomon Bay on St. John. When we lived in Peru, the Pacific Ocean beaches were something that we took for granted and enjoyed every summer; now residing in the States, beaches are out of easy reach. The Caribbean is just a world apart. There is nothing as mellow as the sound of the surf against the shore. Lots of sun screen to keep from being burned to a crisp, and keeping covered up when not on the beach. During the day, St. Thomas tends to be overrun by day visits from the cruise ships that dock every day in Charlotte Amalie, but the rest of the time, a visitor has plenty of room to enjoy the place. We took a 45-minute ferry to St. John on the second day and came back in the evening. It was worth the trip because more than half of St. John is a US National Park and contains one pristine beach after the other. According to National Geographic magazine, we were told, Magens Bay beach is the number 3 beach in the world. If that's the case, then, there are a dozen other VI beaches that deserve a similar ranking.
This past weekend, I surprised myself by kicking into my first unassisted handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana) against the wall. It is probably harder, I believe, to get into handstand (with or without a support) than to actually balance in the pose. Susan Bowen had been leading a class to reach into unexplored poses that we assumed were too difficult for us so it was appropriate that I reached this milestone in the class. We had spent a large segment of the class practicing keeping the core firm and kicking up to the pose, leading with one leg and pushing off with the other. The first couple of rounds I held back; I refrained from attempting the full pose with someone to spot me up for the final push into the pose. But as we were going into the last round of repetitions, I got down into the starter pose and something clicked. I just did the lead leg lift-up and it just kept going. I was in the handstand. My form was lousy: my back over-arched, my shoulders too tight, my legs too loose, but I just held the pose absorbing the sensation of being suspended upside-down on my hands.
I think a key trick was something that Jill Abelson had taught us a week before a Flow Yoga: when using the lead-leg kick-up, make sure that the toes on the lead leg comes all the way down to the ground before kicking it up because it is the full swing that give you momentum to get all the way up to the wall. The tendency after doing a couple of attempts is to bring the kick-up leg midway down, kind of waving it in the air, instead of lowering it completely. I also found that the less I thought about it, the easier it was to get up.
Labels: core, inversions, milestone
Since becoming aware that I have (nearly) flat feet, I've switched my running shoes to Brooks Beasts, started doing some simple exercises to strengthen my arches and generally paid more attention to how I walk and run, feeling how my feet strike the ground and trying to correct my stride. It had gotten so bad that I gave up wearing about three pairs of shoes (Rockports so they were not cheap shoes) and switched to shoes that were roomier (wider and more toe room). The old pairs felt as if they were squeezing my feet and I frequently removed them at work because of the discomfort.
One of the exercises I've been doing over the past three weeks is what I call "tiger claws." In my bare feet, I curl my toes and then release them under for sets of 20 repetitions. Several sets of instructions called for me to stand on top of a towel and try to pull it up under my feet, but I found that I did not have the strength or flexibility to pull a towel so I just claw the ground my my toes.
Well, today I tried on one of those shoes that did not seem to fit me anymore and, low and behold, the shoe felt fine. I wore it for a day and did not have any more discomfort than you'd ordinarily have from a days of walking. The next day I tried out another of those discarded shoes and they also fit fine. I don't know whether it's my exercise that have reverse the deterioration of my arches or whether it's the supportive running shoes.
Labels: running
