This weekend I am participating in the Desirée Rumbaugh's "Heart Stimulus Plan" workshop at Thrive Yoga as resident photographer and yogi pretender. Four two and a half hour sessions. Thankfully, we had MLK's birthday holiday on Monday so I will have a day to recover from this excess. Tonight, it was a sizeable class, but there was still room to spare. I've heard that there are still spaces available for the other sessions.
Tonight we worked on hip-openers and inversions: inversions were stuffed into the last 20 minutes (not a complaint), and Desiree really led us through a series of demos and highly focused postures that gradually led us deeper and deeper into the contradictions of how to spread your sit bones. This was not a vinyasa flow class with sequencing to work up a sweat and work the whole body (as with the Brian Kest workshop in October.) No, Desirée had us apply "shins forward and hugging to the midline, thighs back and spiraling inward, hips scooped to support the core and spine." Anyone who has taken an Anusara class knows the alignment principles that are repeated over and over again. If you confront this vocabulary for the first time, you're baffled, but Desirée does a good job of wittily describing and joyously demoing how the principles are applied in poses.
- July 2008 workshop at Thrive and more comments
- Tale of my knee injury coming out of the workshop
At the end of the class, I sat crosslegged in Easy Pose (Sukhasana) on my mat. In the past, my right hip was always so tight that my knee would jut up at a 45 degree angle. More recently, my left hip had actually opened up substantially and came close to resting on the ground ("cheating" with a blanket under my hips). Tonight both hips were open and I could rest both legs on the ground. Even though I was protecting of my right knee like crazy, not pushing it too far, pulling back from the edge, that's progress. Maybe I should not give up all hope of one day doing Lotus (Padmasana)
The danger with Desirée is that she is so inspired and energetic that you want to follow her off the deep end, take a pose to the next level and compete with your neighbor as to who can get deeper in a split (not me). Desiree warned us that we need to protect ourselves with the right tools and techniques.
Well, I have two sessions tomorrow so I should to bed. I need sleep.
Labels: hips, inversions, Rumbaugh, workshop
This weekend, I got in my two sessions of yoga at Thrive Yoga, with Dana Cohen, who has been subbing a lot recently. I also took a class from her last Thursday so I've been getting a steady diet of her brand of intense, burning vinyasa. Actually, my class today was hatha yoga and there was not a sequence of asanas in sight. Instead, we held poses for what seemed like an eternity and then came back to revisit the poses or variations repeatedly during the session.
I am trying to follow through on my intention of "not working too hard at my yoga." I am consciously pulling back from poses that test my limits, taking a modification. Even still, today, I was in Intense Side Stretch Pose (Parsvottanasana) and found myself tensing up my shoulders, unnecessarily. I know that I instinctively tighten my shoulders in many situations, from typing at the computer to driving, to pranayama. For the time being, I am taking my shoulders out of the shape in some poses, like Extended Triangle (Utthita Trikonasana) whenever I feel them tightening up.
Where I am concentrating my efforts are in my hips, especially my psoas. I am not really engaging them in many poses, and compensate by overusing other muscle groups. For now, I try to make sure that I am pulling my pubic bone up towards my stomach, the oft-repeated pelvic tilt formula that requires you to "pull down on your tailbone and up on your pubic bone." Because I could never seem to access the specific muscles to accomplish this rotation, it was all very abstract. Now, in practically every pose, I try to identify the expression of the pose and establish it in the hips first. What has really surprised me is that correcting my hip tilt also eventually results in a correction of my shoulders and thoracic spine.
I did not go into the workshop with Desiree Rumbaugh with any special expectations, aside from that of knowing that an excellent instructor would be guiding the process and a group of yogis would energize the environment. I saw the occasion as a mid-term evaluation about how my practice has been maturing since my last workshop. I wanted to see how the work invested on the mat has paid off. So I pick up where I left off yesterday.
Thrive Yoga's Dave Bowen gets a taste of Desiree's adjustment of wheel pose.
Fourth Finding: The day after the workshop was over, I felt really fatigued, my whole body burnt out. I pampered myself and did not try to do any yoga or exercise except for my walks to and from the Metro, a couple of miles. I felt sore as if I'd really gone through an extreme physical ordeal. I was especially sore and stiff in my hips and shoulders, thighs and arms. Curiously, my knees hurts when I walked, as if I might be a risk of tweaking a tendon. Throughout the weekend, I had been probing my edges and it was natural that my body should feel the strain. At my age (two months short of 59), the energy reserves are shallower, the recovery capacity is slower and the need for healing is more pronounced. But it took me a while to realize that this sensation is really a kind of muscle memory of all the poses that I did and the new edges established. I stop, focus in on my aches and pains, and sense what muscles involved, and then I feel myself drawn into alignment and something lights up inside me.
Desiree stands back in awe, watching Christine Peterson
(you can tell she's a Forest Yoga buff because she uses gloves)
settle into Diving Osprey pose.
Fifth Finding: yoga is an experimental, experiential science. It is a sophisticated universe of knowledge about the body, mind, spirit, energy and their complex interrelation, which has been accumulated, filtered, refined, and aged over millenia. But the application of this knowledge system on the body and mind is left to the individual practitioner. Desiree said that you can tell when a yogi is advanced because they take their time getting into poses. It almost looks as if they were practicing in slow motion. That's because they are observing and parsing all the information coming back from the far reaches of their limbs with scientific rigor: how do the muscles feel, have they reached their edge, is there a risk in pushing beyond the edge, do I feel at ease, can I dwell in stillness in the pose, how can I get out of this knot, what emotions and energies are released by this pose, what am I revealing about my mind or spirit in this vulnerable pose and so on. A beginner will zip through the vinyasa, and in and out of poses, as if he/she is sprinting to a finish line. The intermediate yogis are the ones who get themselves injured, Desiree pointed out, because they are pushing recklessly beyond what is physically safe and worth the risk for the practice. She admitted that she was guilty of this excess in her early years, and her current skills at practicing advanced poses and assisting others to learn yoga were acquired through painful mistakes and the need to heal and avert them in the future. She got really amped up when people started asking questions or giving insights that showed that they were paying attention to the details. The workshop drew a pretty experienced crowd of yogis, but we went over the details of the poses as if we were all beginners.
Thrive Yoga's Lisa Johnson turns inward in Eight-Angle pose (Astavakrasana).
Sixth Finding: Anusara yoga practitioners have their opening invocation "Om namah shivaya gurave..." that starts each session, and then there's the mantra that they repeat for every pose: "Shins press towards the mid-line, thighs spiral in and back, the sit bones widen, the tail bone tucks into the space made by the blossoming of the hips..." The Universal Principles of Alignment are the guidelines that John Friend laid down to unify all the yoga practices and poses across multiple lineages and traditions. Desiree repeated the instructions over and over again, and then came back to them, again and again. But I never found this repetitious or boring. Even though the instructions are similar, each pose opens a different gateway into the body. And since your body is changing in the process, each time you approach a pose, the experience is going to be unique. You can be practicing mountain pose or a complicated arm balance, and the same attitude and approach apply.
The reward of sweat
Seventh Finding: at any time during the workshop, I'd look up and see yogis and yoginis, teachers and students doing their stuff, and all of them were bumping into what seemed to be their own bodies'limits. Desiree would come up and apply pressure with a hand or knee on a specific area and show that it was merely a false floor, that there was space beyond that faux boundary. Desiree was asked about the ideas of some yoga teachers, like Paul Grilley, who make a point of highlighting the anatomical limits that exist in all people, and may be quite different, the conclusion being that you should not ask students to go beyond their physical limits. Desiree said, however, that Anusara celebrates freedom of yoga (as opposed to anatomical limits) and that each individual should assume ownership of his or her own body and take it as far as they can.
Labels: blessing, core, hips, milestone, shoulders, workshop
Back at Thrive Yoga for a vinyasa flow 2 class with Christine Peterson. She has been assisting Ana Forrest, the widely respected West Coast yoga teacher, which says a lot about Christine's capabilities. (If you've never seen Ana Forest's peformance at Yoga Journal Conference in Boston in 2006, you owe it to yourself to see how far yoga can take you). As far as I know, this was her first class at Thrive, and there were more than a dozen students so the word had definitely gotten out.
In a few words, Christine gives a mean class (and this was a vinyasa class, not Forest Yoga): I took a small hand towel to mop up my sweat; I should have taken a beach towel. Aside from some work on inversions, which was really more prep work, there was nothing really beyond a 2-level class. But she hit a couple of areas in which I am really weak and tight, and then doubled back and hit them again. Shoulders, especially in Dolphin pose and other preps for getting into Feathered Peacock Pose (Pincha Mayurasana). Core, core, core. This blog entry isn't long enough to mention all the poses and sequences that hit my core muscles.
Christine will be giving a 1.5/2 hour class on Friday, July 4 and then have several classes on a regular basis (when she's not assisting Ana Forest on tour). I will make a point of picking them up as often as I can.Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. My experience Monday with more open hips did not turn out to be a fluke. Today, I came very close to getting into Double Pigeon pose (Agnistambhasana). I didn't want to push it too hard because of the stress the pose puts on the knees, but I was closer than I ever dreamed I would be mid-way through my fourth year of yoga. I also went more deeply into One-Legged King Pigeon pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana). It's as if I stopped clenching my muscles and that loosening of tension allowed my hips to open up.
On Monday evening, I went to a vinyasa 2 class at Thrive Yoga to make up for missing my normal Sunday class. I was met with a teacher substitution: Mary Lou McNamara was replacing Lisa Johnson because of vacation travel. Both followed the Anusara style so there was an underlying continuity between the two. I was breezing through the class without really being tested to my edge when we moved into the seated practice and I was hit by an unexpected breakthrough: Mary Lou asked us to get into Lord of the Fishes pose (Ardha Matsyendrasana). Almost without thinking, I slipped into the pose, which requires me to fold one leg under as a kind of base and the other leg is placed over it, with the foot on the ground -- it requires that both sit bones be on the ground. In the recent past, this kind of contortion was beyond my reach: one hip would be torqued up in the air and I would be completely out of balance. I'd have to extend the bottom leg out before me or put a lot of blankets under one hip. Well, this time, both my sit bones were firmly planted on the mat and my spin could sit squarely over my hips, allowing a smooth even twist when completing the pose. We quickly moved on to other poses, and I could not fully appreciate what had happened.
Let me say that I have not made Lord of the Fishes pose as one of my goals, like full or half Lotus pose. I only practiced it whenever it rarely came up in class, unlike say half pigeon pose that almost always gets thrown into the mix. I recognized Lord of the Fishes as another manifestation of my tight hips, and some day I would move beyond this corporal legacy of sitting in chairs and slumping over keyboards.
Ironically, since coming back from vacation, I have been grousing about how hard it has been to regain my stamina in jogging. My legs seemed dead weight and fatigued. Well, part of this muscular fatigue is probably because the connective tissues between my legs and hips are having to move in new and different ways, while tolerating a lot more range of motion in my hips. As I've said here before, I often feel as if I am teaching myself to run all over again.
I am back from our Spanish vacation, even though American Airlines did everything possible to keep me in Madrid, including unilaterally suspending our return flight reservations without notifying us. I did not get many chances to practice yoga, though I did fit in mini-sessions of mindfulness. I did learn a lot about my body from the harried pace of trans-Atlantic flights, long drives and sight seeing. After spending four hours walking through the corridors of El Prado Museum taking in the masters of Velasquez, El Greco and Goya, I could really feel the fatigue in the small of my back and my lower abdomen. But I discovered that by leveling my hips I could feel immediate relief. I focused on keeping my spine balanced on top of my hips. Another confirmation that I have hyperlordosis from years slumped over a keyboard.
Today, I did not do my usual Sunday routine of meditation and vinyasa at Thrive Yoga in the morning. I took a special master Ashtanga class that Devon Roe offers, usually on a monthly basis at Thrive (next time is in August or September). Devon studied with Beryl Bender Birch and teaches in several yoga shops in the DC area, mainly in Virginia. It's two hours and focuses on the primary series. There were only four students in the class so it was a chance to focus on the asanas and get hands on corrections.
I have taken a few Ashtanga classes or workshops in the past so it was not completely foreign to me. For that matter, the whole vinyasa trend is strongly influenced by Ashtanga. I was surprised that I could handle the class physically, that I did not have to fall down in child's pose in order to recover my breath, recoup my strength and steel my will (except for one brief time in downdog, but that does not count). After the whole thing was over, I did not spent two hours collapsed on my couch at home because I have developed stamina, thanks to my running and practice. In other words, I did not feel intimidated by the difficulty of poses, I just knew that some of them were beyond my reach.
If it were a strict Ashtanga class, I would never have gotten beyond the first pose that requires anything approaching half-lotus: hips and hamstrings are still too tight to allow me to fold. Then, there are still issues with behind the back binds because of stiff shoulders and my inability to rotate my should joints more than a few degrees. The other major flaw is core strength, especially in the lower abs: I still don't have enough strength to lift my legs off the ground when seated in staff pose, for instance, or when sitting cross legged.
My biggest surprise was that when I was in shoulder stand and plow poses, I was able to breathe smoothly. In the past, my stomach (and probably other organs, like liver, kidneys and intestines) pressed down on my diaphragm and made me feel as if I was suffocating. I suspect that I've gotten rid of some belly (omentum) fat. That changes lifts a burden off me in the inversion phase of my yoga practice because I don't have to fight off the panic feeling of suffocation and can concentrate on balance and breath.
Labels: class, conditioning, core, hips, practice, shoulders
I went into my class tonight really eager and energized to get back on the mat. I've become aware of increased control over my lower core (thighs and hips) because of my new jogging regime. That strength gets reflected in my balancing poses because there is a firmer foundation to build on. I can hold something like Lord of the Dance (Natarajasana) pose (with a strap to pull my raise leg higher) for more than 30 seconds without wobbling, and I can transition in and out of the pose more smoothly.
This sense of enhanced power and skill is something new for me & and a bit bewildering. On one hand, I feel as if I'm falling into a trap of vanity and pride, that I am betraying the very mindset necessary for practicing yoga. On the other hand, this confidence and enthusiasm are what propel me to get back on my mat, make me aware that there are really changes taking place in my body and my mind. This contradiction is paralleled in my practice by the conundrum of strength and flexibility, rigidity and suppleness.
I don't have an answer for this dilemma right now. But I do get another chance to respond the next time I get on the mat.
During my yoga class tonight, we were going through a series of twists. I was again contemplating the lack of range that my body has, especially when dealing with my core. After three years plus of yoga (of which a good 18 months could be considered consistent and persistent), I am still very far from half lotus, from eagle arms, etc. I've worked at tackling specific issues, like my hips or my shoulders, but that does not seem to make a difference, except when measured against months of time.
While I was trying to relaxing into the poses, I thought about doing something drastic, like taking a day or week off and work on nothing but my hips, or using sandbags (weights, my wife's body) to push me past my limits, or hiring a personal trainer to whip me into form or a private yoga instructor to show me whatever I am missing to get through these obstacles.
In yoga, kundalini is the female energy that lies coiled at the base of the yogic body, a sacred power that rises out of the loins, coils around the spin and rises upwards towards the crown; the goal is to enable the free flow of kundalini, Well, my kundalini seems to be firmly knotted around my hips and wound tightly around my spin.
Then, I thought that perhaps it's not the physical side that is holding me back. There must be something non-physical inside me that is tightly bound and thoroughly even entangled. I like to pretend that yoga and meditation has made me mellow and grounded, but I am just deluding myself: hidden underneath the surface is a small boy who's afraid of moving or even fidgeting and freezes his muscles to the bone. When the musculature has been locked in position for nearly 50 years, it's excruciatingly difficult to ply it loose.
I went to a hip-opener workshop today at Thrive Yoga with Susan Bowen. The two and a half hour session is the third one that I've taken from her, a sign of her commitment to addressing this need and my own recognition that my hips are tight. I've been "working on my hips" for the past two years, and I can see only marginal improvements. I still cannot get into easy pose Sukasana without a support under my hips; otherwise, my knees are above my waist. Like most Westerners, I've spent all my life seated in a chair, as opposed to on the ground; I am a man so my anatomy is less flexible than a woman; finally, my professional bondage to a computer means that I spend too much time seated in front of a keyboard and monitor.
I think that my lack of progress is due to the fact that it's not just a hip problem. It's a kind of muscular knot that tangles together my whole core, legs, hips, abs, spine, and even my shoulders, ensnaring both strength and flexibility. Focusing exclusively on the hips is not going to fix it. It's not going to get better until the whole problem is corrected.
So until then, I just accept it as the state in which my body is, and get back on the mat. At least now I enjoy half pigeon (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana).
