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Chakrasana. How do I love thee?

Not so much, though getting better.

What’s my problem with chakrasana, you ask? I think it may be my tight shoulders and traps. Or my back that doesn’t like to curl up into a ball. Likely both.

For a long time, I just ignored it. Transition — not important. But I knew I was fooling myself. So the day came that I had to face chakrasana. I wish I could say it was a moment of self-revelation, but it actually happened in Singapore, when — after I blithely skipped chakrasana — I heard Celeste Lau ask, “Karen, why don’t you do chakrasana?”

“Because I’m lazy,” answered my remarkably honest inner monolog. For Celeste, I just shrugged.

And then she made me try chakrasana. A BUNCH of times. It was excruciating, in large part because I had just flown for 25 hours, and was in a new shala in a new city in a new time zone far, far from my normal time zone, and had hopped into a cab with a slip of paper with an address, and asked a driver who didn’t speak English to take me somewhere I wouldn’t recognize even when I got there. I was a little stressed.

I keep my stress in my traps and shoulders.

Okay, so Celeste put me through my paces, in terms of trying. She put a towel under my shoulders to prop me up. She gave me a boost over the top of the roll. I’d understood for a while, of course, that I couldn’t go around feeling like I was doing primary series until I squared chakrasana away. I just hadn’t decided that it was time to actually do the work. So Celeste decided.

Those practices in Singapore were very chakrasana-centric. She kept an eye on me, and when I flopped through the one after supta padangusthasana, would say, “Well, you’ve got a few more.” Before the post-urdhva dhanurasana paschimottanasana or sirsasana, she’d ask, “Did you do chakrasana?”

So chakrasana’s what I’ve been doing since November. Every single one. It’s been interesting, too. What I have found, as I mentioned, is that my neck and shoulders are very resistant to the roll. Not in an injury sort of way — more in a stubborn, I don’t like this kind of way. Chakrasana was really the last hold out of my relationship with primary. I learned the asana, I learned the vinyasas: correct breathing, correct driste, yada, yada. But I was willfully thoughtless about chakrasana.

‘Til Singapore.

So now I do my dutiful chakrasanas. And they are coming together. Interestingly, chakrasana has taught me a lot about my relationship with urdhva padmasana, which is a pose I’ve always struggled with. Look at the picture. It’s all about getting into the traps. Oh, and I always feel like my butt is pulling me out of balance. How amusing is it that the sense that I have of being too big-butted for the pose is actually all about the tensions I hold in my shoulders/traps? Consciousness gets so turned around in a body! All those years (perhaps lifetimes) of beliefs about physical reality.

Anyhow, all of the finishing poses now speak to me about the tensions I keep in my traps. Courtesy of what I’ve learned in chakrasana. I can’t say I love this lesson, but I think I will be transformed once it’s done. How weird is it that some day I’ll look back and remember the decades I spent with my shoulders and traps tensed up? Ashtanga really does provide a way into the long view.

So for now I muddle through my chakrasanas using a pad to raise my shoulders. Yesterday I understood the little “pop” of the bandhas that launches/coordinates the roll. I don’t love it now, but I think I’ll really like chakrasana in the future.