Kaleidoyoga

†NOTE:  This post is full of yoga geekery and may not be suitable for all readers, i.e. it might not make much sense…reader discretion is advised.  Heh.

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

Actually, I haven’t thought I was “out” of Anusara in a long time.  I haven’t committed to being IN it for very long, so perhaps that’s why.  I expect that most people go through this periodically:  they look at their state of mind and their chosen path and perhaps something weird’s happened and so they think:  “Hm, maybe I’d better reexamine this whole thing.  Is this really where I want to be?”.  Now that I’m writing that down I think that assessment doesn’t happen as much as it should, but that’s a topic for another post.

What I wanted to write about was the realization that this method accommodates and teaches to a larger framework of time than just an asana or a yoga class.  Here, I’m-a break it down.

OPEN TO GRACE:  The escape of the yoga class

I’m pretty sure this is the perspective of most people coming to the mat, at least in the evenings.  I’d been working at a desk for long hours, 9-5 [really more like 8:30 - 7:00 in the early days]. This was like 3 or 4 years ago. When I would land on the mat after a long day, I was in NO MOOD to get anything right.  My mat was the place for anarchy:  sighing, rolling around, emphatically not doing what I was told.  Because quite frankly I got told what to do all day long.  One aspect of the practice that I still maintain most yoga instructors, even those of the Anusara stripe, do not sufficiently emphasize:  soften and feel. If your neck and shoulders are hard and guarded, you are still doing data entry/programming/consumer goods marketing &c.  Or, you’re doing 25 lb leg lifts, or Pilates or something [I don't know anything about Pilates so I am just beaking off here.].  You’re “doing yoga”, sure, but that’s just it:  you’re “doing” it.  It’s not doing you.  You’re not being it.  I realize this is an oft-belaboured cleverism but it doesn’t always take, in spite of our best attempts.  So I would come to yoga to get soft after a day of hardening to a brittle, frazzled emotional crisp.  At that point: to heck with the tailbone.  I’m about to blow up and you’re worried about my FEMUR?  Srsly.

Weirdly, it took a long time for the real lesson to take:  if you are that ruined when you get to your mat, maybe the shift you need to make is not ON the mat.  It wasn’t in an Anusara class when I finally had the realization that I needed to leave my day job, but my recent immersion studies had at least taught me that perhaps there was life beyond the known.

MUSCULAR ENERGY: Oh, you mean this is for real

I left my job and started teaching.  A honeymoon period ensued, which was joyous and delicious and everything one might want.  I softened like crazy, letting myself watch episodes of “The Wire” in my iPod at 2 am so I slept until 11 and didn’t do anything for the rest of the day, including laundry and dishes.

It.  Was.  The.  BEST.  Except, of course, that prana was dwindling down that long dark hallway of inertia, where the lazy go to die.  You so rarely think that you will want a kick in the pants when your pants were being kicked on a regular basis for so long…and yet, so it was.  And so we travelled to Boston for the last John Friend Level II teacher training, and during a particularly traumatic emotional breakdown [that would be mine] he explicitly said that muscle energy was the generator for creativity…that one’s strength was one’s capacity to expand…that “life is not so hard if you are not so soft”.  Yowza.  Muscle energy it is.  I shinsinned* until my fibulae ended up in my gastrointestinal cavity.  I did my homework.  I rose at a reasonable hour, for no reason it turned out [I spent a bunch of time with Breakfast Television in the background, wondering, so do I meditate?  or go back to bed?  or what?  this feels terrible], but by God I would honour my teachers’ instructions.  I knew Adho Mukha Vrksasana [Handstand] was the weakness in my practice so I literally girded my loins to practice that every day, flailing against the wall and with partners and alone and things were happening but they weren’t really desirable things:  I was angry at students for not doing what they were asked to do.  My digestion went south but not in a good way.  I was like The Hulk:  HULK SMASH.  Gotta pay your cell bill?  HULK SMASH.  Teach a workshop?  HULK SMASH.  Cook dinner?  HULK SMASH!  GARLIC BREAD!  EXTRA SPICY!  PASTA AL ARRABIATA!  RAWR!!!1!!eleven!!!11!!  My loins were so girded I wanted to eat constantly but could never calm down.  I had anxiety attacks in the middle of the night.

*a perfectly cromulent word that relates to the oft-instructed “shins in, thighs out” concept

INNER SPIRAL: Relax, guy

At the Costa Rica retreat our practice space was amply outfitted with all sorts of props, up to and including sandbags, which I actually didn’t know what they were when I walked in there.  There was another proficient backbender in there with a similar build, and she and I ended up doing BJ Galvan’s practice together on our day off.  When John prescribed sandbags on the top of her thighs I decided I’d follow along…I knew that in spite of my build my thighs were still always moving towards front plane; that is, in Vira II or Parsva Konasana the back leg always defaults to being forward, even though my rump still protudes behind me.  When I was about to do a dropback, and my partner [overwhelmed, no doubt, by my bottom and figuring I had no purpose being so fat at a yoga retreat] was grappling with me like a side of beef, John wandered by and just said [as he always does, for the record; I've never gotten so much as a whiff of kidney loop or tailbone from John]:  “Thighs back, head back….no, let her go…thighs back head back Sunny” [which is his version of my name, which I don't mind at all actually].

And I did my first dropback unassisted.

This was a hint at a real revelation:  Even if you think it is not pretty, your thighs belong back in the back part of the acetabulum and it doesn’t matter how strong you think you are:  the sweet ease of that action is your birthright.  I bounced around all day, lettin’ er all hang out…I felt better that day than I had in weeks.  I felt SEEN, as though the person I really am shone through my glutes and my belly and my angry face.  Hulk did not smash.  I signed up for an Ayurvedic massage, which I parenthesized in my posts around that time but was really interesting, because it shattered my previous Ayurvedic self-diagnosis [which, wtf, I have little to no training on the subject] and let me know that all the things I desired [sleeping, eating comfortable warm food, TAKING MY THIGHS BACK] were Ayurvedically mandatory.   That is, I wasn’t a kapha who needed electrically rousing, I am actually VATA who needs to be greased, tranquilized, and gently released back into the wild.  I was prescribed body oils and sandbags.  I went home, taught my first class, went IMMEDIATELY to Halfmoon Yoga and bought 2 10 lb sandbags, took the water taxi therafter to Shoppers’ and got a bottle of sweet almond oil.  I rolled like that for many weeks.

OUTER SPIRAL: That’s the work, right there

Martin Kirk came to us recently and he co-taught my Level 1 teacher training so I knew, I KNEW we were in for some serious goodness.  Martin, with all due respect, is a nerd like I’m a nerd…he is deeply enamoured of subjects that are widely acknowledged as nerdly, like engineering and math and NOVA and anatomy and the Space Shuttle and “Star Trek” and “The Matrix” and “Lost In Space” and music theory and Linux and optics and fractals and “Star Wars” and holograms.  God, he’s so awesome.

And yet I’m almost always a bit resistant to all great teachers, like there’s this part of me that needs to keep its shell on no matter how much I encourage it to soften.  So when Martin wanted me to do big tailbone, after my sandbag/John/vata/Costa Rica experience, I was resistant.  I knew that in spite of the shape of my butt, unnecessary tailbone would actually make my back hurt a lot and make my brain all crazy.  I’d been living it for 2.5 months and it did NOT feel good, so I was a bit aversion-conditioned.

We had a question about scoliosis which I conveniently have and I got to demo, and Martin brought his confident and powerful therapeutics to bear on what you’d think wouldn’t even be something you could change inside your own body:  an S-shaped curve of the spine.  He offered me a couple of exercises and I thanked him, and still in my heart I was like, “Dude, I’m all thighs back, now.  Check my sandbags.  That’s how I roll”.

It wasn’t until I had a MASSIVE adjustment in the practice the next morning [just a really simple practice, mostly Parsva Konasana] where I managed somehow to drag all the erector spinae of my lumbar spine over towards the right [or at least that's what it felt like], giving me feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, and peace, that I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten the first principle in all of this:  Listen.  You don’t have the answers, and conveniently you don’t NEED to have the answers.  Yeah, sure it feels weird.  That’s what it means to have a teacher.  At some point he looked at me and said [I'm paraphrasing], “Sjanie, you’re doing what we did yesterday?  full back of the waistline on the right side, big tailbone on the right side? Muscle energy in the shoulder on the left side?  That’s the work“.

God, I can get so feisty about that phrase.  But my heart and body were undeniably pain free and buoyant.  I also learned over the course of our anatomy training that the “glutes” as we so coarsely refer to them can occupy a space that is much further towards the front plane than expected, and [more to the point] act as internal rotators, taking those thighs back in a much more delicious and profound way.  Mmm….thighs back.  That IS the work, I started to belatedly think to myself.

We had a great practice together on the Sunday afternoon, and then learned even more about the anatomy of the legs, at which point [as often happens with these workshops or trainings] I’m thinking how the hell can I go back to working all day when I’m accustomed to studying material of this level and calibre of joy?  This, when I was so salty and recalcitrant not hours earlier.  Oh, well.  Our workshop concluded well and I taught what I think was a respectable class this morning, and had a delicious practice where I implemented Martin’s teachings.  That was the work.  It was hard work.  It felt AMAZING.

ORGANIC ENERGY: Step 2: ???  Step 3:  ENLIGHTENMENT!!

I only just got started on the last phase, here, so frankly I don’t know what will happen.  I did come home and, on my day off, perform a crapton of chores with the intrinsic joy of one who knows that more energy will come from somewhere.  Clearly once again I have tapped into the main vein.  Judging by the year-long rhythm of this cycle, I suppose I will peak at the time of my retreats [roll over the "workshops" tab at the top of the homepage for the deets] so you’d better sign up.

The point is that every one of these concepts in its varying forms will move cyclically through varying phases of life, needing to be amplified or dampened to create an optimal balance…and the study of this yoga will encourage you to strike the balance that is needful.  In spite of, or because of, the power of these teachings we tend to attach to the one that worked the most the last time [cause we're pragmatic, and amnesiac, like that] and run with that revelation until it expires.  This is just me, but I’m thinking I need to increase my shraddha, my faith, and stop running with the last successful thing and accept the sequence of the principles as they stand…their optimal *balance* will yield freedom and peace.  It’s a moving target, a kaleidoscope of experience and y oga and life that culminates in, well [to use an oft-belaboured New Agism] The Zone.

Anusara, why do you have to be so awesome.  Srsly.  You’re freaking me out right now.

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