I took at morning vinyasa flow class with Susan Bowen at Thrive Yoga. It was my first physically demanding class in a week (if not more), and I really felt the lack of conditioning and ease. It seemed that I was fighting against myself the whole session, and I had to remind myself constantly to let the yoga do the work. I could tell that I was physically fatigued having done a lot of aerobic exercises the day before: 30 minutes of stationary bike and then another 30 minutes of jogging/walking, on top of Saturday's workout. After class, I could tell that I need recovery time so I did not go on to the gym for more aerobic work.
Yesterday, I took in Marylou McNamara's Hatha yoga class, which is strong on alignment, but does not make me break into a sweat, also at Thrive Yoga. That's not to say that the class did not have its challenges. I winced while holding Warrior II for what seemed like an eternity. Marylou focused a lot on opening up the shoulders, and I ended up doing a couple of strong wheel (upward facing bow or Urdhva Dhanurasana ) pose, which she complimented.
After class, I chatted with Marylou because she likes to put funny names to yoga poses adapted to other environments ("church yoga, bed yoga") and I had a pseudo-posture that helped me locate the muscles between my shoulder blades. I call it "Proud Indian Chieftain." I have this image in my head, probably from some drawing I saw in my childhood because I can't find anything like it on the Web, of an Indian warrior standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his head raised high. What's striking is how high the arms are positioned over his chest, almost as if he's posing by puffing up his rib cage. But really, his arms are pulled back fully into the shoulder joints, and the the rhomboids fully engaged so that the shoulders are broad and pulled back. What would be the Western antithesis in this pose? the folded arms would be resting on the lower rib cage because the shoulders are slumping forward. This is a posture acquired from slumping over keyboards.
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 had a vinyasa flow 1 session at Thrive Yoga early this morning, this time with Lisa Johnson. I almost talked myself out of going because I finished the week exhausted and was sore in my shoulders and upper arms. But my wife wanted to go to yoga and threatened to go alone so I could not let her show more discipline than me so I threw on my clothes, threw together my kit, brewed a quick pot of coffee and jumped in the car.
The class was less physically demanding than my previous two sessions; at least it felt that way and did not have to take any breaks. I know that I have to keep the mindset of a beginner, to approach my practice without any preconceived ideas about what I should be doing. In a way, it's an opportunity to relearn my yoga poses and vinyasas, and perhaps even overcoming some of the tightness in key areas of my body (shoulders, spin, hips).
I found that my right (injured and surgically repaired) knee seemed to track better than my left one. When doing a balancing pose, I felt more stable, with less propensity to shift out of equilibrium. The tendency may be due to overcompensation for the past three months in which I've nursed my right knee while relied on my left knee for support.
I also noticed that my shoulders seemed to have loosened up since my injury. When I'm laying in savasana at the end of class, my palms turn upwards more naturally. In the past, my arms tended to turn palms down when lying on my back. This pattern was probably created by years of pounding a keyboard, with my shoulders rotated forward. I actually worked on loosening up my shoulders during the break by combining a few simple stretches with my pranayama routine.
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
I took my first Forrest Yoga class at Thrive Yoga with Christine Peterson this morning. I could tell that the routine has different priorities than your run-of-the-mill vinyasa class. We started out with core work, then moved on to inversions with emphasis on shoulders -- the rest of the class was gravy. Since this was the first Forrest Yoga class for most people, Christine had to do a lot of explaining and demoing so that we were all on the same page. Christine used a term that I had never heard before: "gravity surfing." This refers to transitions from one pose to another, say, Downward Facing Dog pose to Crow pose. It requires muscle strength, but you're using gravity to pull you into a pose. I don't believe that I did any surfing this morning.
This was the only class offered at Thrive on July 4 so it drew all the people who could not miss yoga, even on a holiday. We opened up both classrooms (sliding doors) to make room for everyone. A few new faces were there, as well.
While I've sensed that my hips have loosened up, I now realize that this more relaxed hold may apply more broadly because I could feel that my shoulders were opening up -- and also feeling more fatigued from the exertion. Christine had us soften our necks in a lot of poses, for instance, Triangle pose. Instead of looking up towards the raised arm, you allow your neck to relax and hang. As an over-striver, I instinctively lead with my head in a lot of poses. This Forrest Yoga technique will help me break that habit.
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.
Teresa and I outside the El Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain on our vacation earlier this month. I took in a Vinyasa Flow 2 class at Thrive Yoga with Lisa Johnson teaching this evening. Although it was a demanding class, I felt really comfortable within my body and the parameters of the class. Lisa is a really thorough Anusara teacher who goes out of her way to explain and demo what she's asking of us. Sometimes, she showed us herself; other times, she had one of the students follow her instructions and she adjusted. We did a lot of prep work for handstands and other inversions, especially getting the arms, shoulders and torso correctly aligned. Lots of work against the wall. Because I have tight shoulders with extremely limited range of movement in some directions, I appreciated the opportunity to explore my edge. Even though I worked up a sweat, the class did not push me aerobically, which was fine with me after yesterday.
So I walked out my the class without any of yesterday's complaints. I'm glad that I did not skip my yoga class because I was afraid of repeating the experience. And now, I'm pushing my bedtime back so that I can jot down these ideas before the trail goes stale.
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 had a great inversion workshop Jordan Bloom at Thrive Yoga today. Jordan is a gifted Anusara instructor who's based in the DC area, but travels around the world. I can tell why he is such a popular teacher. He spent a lot of time dealing with the basic truths of alignment, building gradually so that when it came time to "invert," it was relatively easy to take the plunge. For me the key was working on my shoulders. One of the first pose that he had us do was a deep lunge with arms stretched above the head. Jordan then had us repeated take our shoulders further back and then reach the arms higher and toward the back. Each time, I got a little deeper back bend. But then, Jordan came behind me and gently pulled my shoulders back even further. It was not a forced pressure, more like the touch used in breaking an egg shell. I could feel the knot of muscle between my shoulder blades dissolve. Once I knew where to focus my efforts, I was able to work on bringing my shoulders back in other poses, like downward-facing dog. The three-hours of the class went flying by.
Another adjustment that Jordan made was for me to widen the placement of my hands on the mat in poses like downward and updward dog, chataranga and other prone poses. He said that the middle of my hand should be even with the outside of my shoulder. That put the little finger of my hand of the edge of the mat and my ring finger running parallel to the edge. They don't make yoga mats wide enough for many men. This adjustment also helped me broaden my shoulders.
Jordan will be coming back to thrive for a three-day workshop in February next year.
