2 Months of Tough Love.

What is going on in that last backbend, then?  Why is everyone so intent on taking ankles?  So I am not an exclusionary author, let me explain.  After you do all your jumping around, your sun salutations, standing postures, and seated (or not so seated) postures, you do the backbend- upward facing bow.  Urdhva Danurasana.  This is performed by lying down, bending the knees, placing the feet near the bum at hip’s width, placing the palms on the floor beside the ears, now lifting up so your head comes off the floor and you are on all fours, belly facing up.  Over time, you walk the hands in closer to the feet.  Someday you “walk walk walk” the hands until you touch the feet, and someday later, walk up and hold your ankles, balancing freely on the legs while holding on and looking up towards the backs of your knees.

I’m just holding on right below the knees these days and balancing in a tentative way most days.  A teacher can help one by taking the hand for you, up from the ankle and helping you place the hands higher, one by one.  It’s a real trust exercise, and one the most beautiful gifts about teaching.  Not that helping someone do just about anything scary and seemingly-impossible isn’t awesome.  It’s all relative to the individual what is scary and impossible. 

Once the hands are moved up, then we get the cracks in the spine.  We hope they are in the upper back, not the low back.  Everybody needs to learn how to keep the pose in the upper back by keeping the elbows in and lifting the chest.  Thing is, you don’t know which end is up and where your elbows are, and where your feet are, although you are actually standing on them. And wait- am I breathing?  Relaxing?

This year, I realized I need to look up, really open my eyes and look.  The last thing I wanted to do was watch my body get bent, but it seems to be a key.  Then I can see my left arm is out to lunch, as is the right foot.  Once I have a sense of the landscape, I can get to the center of things.  I am still here.  In this unfamiliar zone, I am still me.  Consciousness steps in and begins to marshal the body around again.  That seems to be how I roll in life.  I do better with a little sense of my environment, a little info on the situation before I charge ahead.  Then Sharath comes and takes the hands higher still, so I am again groundless, and that’s how this system works.  Find ground, lose it.  Sounds like life, doesn’t it?  Forget, remember.

Doesn’t this all sound a little, um, extreme?  Well, I’m so careful. So frickin careful with my body.  I come out of the Ayurveda center today, where I’ve been oiled into submission on a wooden table with no pads or pillows, steamed within an inch of proper hydration, and I’m thinking this is so not a spa.  Out on the street, a rabid rickshaw driver skims by me at break speed.  No coddling here.  It’s a part of the culture, things are a little bit rough.  It’s tough love, in the Ayurveda, the yoga, in everything Indian.  Westerners would do good to step back a bit from the safety obsession in yoga classes.  I feel very lucky to have smaller classes, and one-and-one instruction, because I don’t have to think about how to keep a large group safe.  It’s no accident that I teach Mysore-style Ashtanga.  I certainly had chances to make more money and success in vinyasa.  

But ah, I always knew I wouldn’t be happy.  Here, the yoga becomes specific, effective, and mystic.  Sometimes I watch a student hurt themselves, and I think, well the yoga’s doing some teaching over there.  Other times I have to pound them into a new habit before they get hurt, depends on what type of hurt we are talking about here. 

Tough love.  And I’m getting mine over here this winter.