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The puppy was adorable. Wiley. Akita/lab mix. God, there is nothing The Cop loves more than a puppy.

***

This morning’s practice was, as I promised myself yesterday, about softness. What a challenging concept for me. It reeeeeaaally feels good, though. I stayed right in each breath and kept “soft, soft, soft” as my mantra, and it was quite pleasant.

The Cop mentioned that he was noticing that when he gets to the edge of a pose, the tension moves into his neck.

“Can you use your breath to move it out of there?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “It moves here [slaps his chest] and yells ‘fuck you!’”

Mkay.

At ardha baddha padmottanasana, he asks, “Will my knee eventually stop hurting?”

“Yes,” I say.

He looks relieved.

“Unless you screw it up enough that it hurts forever.”

Ah, the subtleties of Ashtanga.

***

Urdhva dhanurasana has all kinds of new challenges now that my neck is not longer the limiting factor. It is very interesting to be in the pose and kind of “thinking around” in it. I check my neck, my hands and feet, my hipbones. I am thrilled just to be able to be conscious in the pose. Up ’til now, it’s been kind of a blind faith and persistence that kept me going.

There is distinct pain in my left shoulder now that I am pushing up through the arms more effectively. Remnant of the rotator cuff tear. I look forward to resolving it.

The sternum “opening” continues. It doesn’t really hurt — it’s an emotional resistance. I’ve learned enough to want to push further into it. The resolutions of these kinds of things have been overwhelmingly positive, even though they seem sketchy at first.

And then The Cop calls my attention to his uth pluthi. He’s got a lotus going on.

Blech. Well, not entirely.

Practice was fine and then I did my urdhva dhanurasanas, and perhaps pushed too much. (Who, me?) Got that weird nauseated feeling I used to get back at the shala when I first started doing the intermediate backbends. I recognize it as the nauseated feeling I got after lifting too heavy or hiking too long in the desert, or however Ive chosen to overtax my nervous system in the past.

It kind of feels like where I’m at right now is breaking my tummy open. Wasn’t it supposed to be my heart? Oh well. My sternum had a workout and it all felt like something new, which is always nice.

Tomorrow I’ll focus on softness. Damn, why do I always forget about softness? I need to just do yoga and meditate 24 hours a day. I think that would help me stay focused.

***

After practice I did a bunch of cooking: kale, turnips, and brown rice for the week’s lunches, and blueberry turnovers for The Cop, and lasagna noodles because he wants to make lasagna this week. And angel hair with the leftover pasta dough.

I do notice that when I cook more, I clean less. My Gift would suggest this is healthy. She calls me “Monica,” after Monica the obsessive-compulsive on “Friends.”

This afternoon, The Cop and I will visit my parents’ house. My sister and her girlfriend are visiting from San Diego with their new puppy.

New puppy! Squee!

I was all harried yesterday with work, but between home practice and insanity in the office, I decided to post and ask you all for pictures of UD. Part of me felt dorky for asking, but I decided to just go with it.

I’m so happy I did! I got some really helpful pictures via links and emails. Thanks, you guys! I am a visual learner and seeing your different pictures is quite instructive.

And reading the different explanations people sent is also instructive.

And reading everyone’s comments was wonderful. Thanks for your humor and your insights and just your general community. And now I know what manties are.

I’m an instructional designer by trade, and part of our process is to analyze the input of a number of SMEs (subject matter experts) in order to extract general principles as they apply to a specific learning audience. In this case, you all are the SMEs, and I am the very specific audience.

***

My list of things to do today is short and very pleasant and included some cooking and some shopping.

Cooking

Shopping

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the definition of vata. So I have really dry skin. It’s been pretty flaky lately, so I wanted to get some body scrub. Without any chemicals. A little online research to decide if I wanted salt or sugar scrub came up with no criteria for rating one over the other, but I did come across some recipes for homemade scrubs.

Well, duh, right? What could be easier? It’s just sugar or salt in an oil suspension. The reason you buy it at the store is so you can get a nice package and some extra chemicals or fragrances.

I decided to make my own. Both salt AND sugar versions.

Salt Scrub

1 cup sea salt (I mixed large and small crystal salt)
Organic extra virgin coconut oil (enough to bind it all together in a paste)

Sugar Scrub

1 cup brown sugar
Organic extra virgin coconut oil (enough to bind it all together in a paste)

Okay, that was easy. It smells terrific, costs pennies, and I didn’t even have to leave the house. And the dog licked the sugar scrub mixing spoon and thought it quite yummy.

Then she licked my feet where I tried out the salt scrub. Seemed to think that was quite good, too.

I will have smooth skin and be tasty to dogs. What more can I ask for?

***

Before dough mixing, I’m off to read my “Residential Landscape Revitalization Workbook” which I downloaded from the city of Scottsdale website. The dirt yard will slowly be transformed. But not until I’ve done my “Analysis of Existing Conditions,” and chosen a design scheme (“Nativescape” is looking like a winner).

I love this booklet! Step 5 is “Implement the Landscape Plan,” and includes sections on “Order of Installation,” and “Maintaining Your Vision.” It’s a really well-designed booklet.

In the end, I hope to have a back yard that looks like undeveloped desert.

I’m looking for a picture of one (or many) of the cybershalamates in urdhva dhanurasana. Ideally, how about a 5′4″ gal on a Manduka mat? I’m trying to get a visual of hand/foot placement…

Generally, I prefer to be the rock, emotionally.

As it turns out, though, this business about thinking about whether I want to blow open the heart chakra seems to be out of my control.

Great practice this morning. No pain. At least, body-wise. My heart, on the other hand, was all scrunched up again with missing Scotty. He was my morning yoga buddy — not a participant, but always with one eye open as he watched from the top of the easy chair, or peered into the yoga room from the top of the couch. I really miss him.

***

The Cop and I are taking a vacation in mid-April. He has a notion to drive to Montana and look around.

***

Urdhva dhanurasana this morning. Duh! I realized I shouldn’t be cranking my neck to look at the ground. I guess there was some idea that the crank helped the curved of the upper spine, but that’s a dopey idea! All it did was push all the tension into my neck/traps.

So this morning, I tried it with my neck in neutral. Whoa! All of the stress/opening transferred right into my pecs. Which is what needs to open. Duh, again! And my arms can go straighter.

And it’s a hell of a lot more pleasurable to feel the stress in the pecs instead of having it explode my neck.

Still need to push more into the legs, but hey, one nice discovery per day is good by me.

So, check it out: Older picture, with cranked neck:

Today’s uncranked neck:

It’s ok with the second series.

A smart yogi (we’ll call her “Smargi”) was chatting with me a bit about my post yesterday. About what’s supposed to happen in second series: sensitized nerves, freed shoulders, blown-open heart chakra. Okay, I’m fine with the nerve thing. Being vata, I’m accustomed to wiredness and spaciness and general nervous system chaos. The freed shoulders? Rock on. If second series can pry these shoulders loose and make ‘em free, I’m ALL for it! But the blown-open heart? Yeah. I’m gonna need to do some thinking on that one.

I mean, think about it: I spend a good portion of my day in a corporate environment. Heart-openness is not the quality of choice. It’s about bullet-point thinking and smart, logical decision-making. Oh, I’m not really getting away with the charade: they’ve noticed my hippie nature. At last year’s performance review, my boss said, in relation to my management style: “You have a gift. You really seem to LIKE people.” Hilarious, when you stop and think about it. Being human is now a skill set.

But what about when your heart is all open and you get super smooshy compassionate and everything has *emotional* stickiness all over it? Gah! It makes me feel like I’m smothering!

That’s just one reaction, of course. Letting my heart be open won’t give me the experience I “expect.” Even pretending I get to decide to “let” it be open is a weird illusion. I wonder if, underneath it all, I am worried that I’ve held my cards so close to the vest for so long that maybe my HEART is the illusion.

Ah, no matter.

***

Practice this morning was good. Quite good. I didn’t have a meeting until 8, and I took it here from the house, so I could practice without thinking about moving along and getting on to the next thing. Beside me, The Cop practiced in his manties. He tried shorts a couple of times this week, but I protested. The uniform of male home practitioners is unders, and that’s just the way it is.

It’s getting nice and warm again here in the desert, and the morning grows light earlier, so all in all, it’s quite pleasant. Does chakrasana still torment me? Indeed, it does. At this point, it is all about my being too literal, too much thinking, too much tryyyyyyying. It’s hilarious when it isn’t busy humiliating me. In the end, though, isn’t it good to be bad at something?

***

Got a pasta roller tool set for the KitchenAid. Struggled with it last night, because I couldn’t wait to play with it. Made some angel hair… finally. Spent a good bit of time overthinking and overhandling and just generally “not getting it” first. I am not good in the evening — tired, hungry, easily frustrated. In the end, though, I suddenly saw that there was a lighter-touch, more graceful way to handle the dough and use the tools. Which suddenly turned into delicate instruments of artistry.

So interesting, that transition.

Well worth trusting.

Yup. Rick and Vanessa are both right (comments in previous post). Intermediate makes you crazy. Crazy happy, crazy sad, crazy scared, crazy whatever.

I tend to be quite even-keeled by nature, with no huge ups and downs. So Intermediate, infinitely adjustable, seems to be coming after my own personal weakness: blind discipline.

Yes, people always say, “How can you practice every day?” In the past it was how could I: sit zazen every day, go to the gym every day, practice tae kwon do every day, climb every day, lift weights every day, write every day, draw every day, study every day… You can see the pattern. There are lots of things that I do every day. Things other people call disciplines, but which I just… well, I just do.

And as per usual, I always do my practice. But there is something at the core of it, the something is that gets me all wondering what the HELL I’m supposed to be doing (primary only? first third of second? pasasana only?), that is all about unravelling my blind discipline.

Vanessa suggested that there is a level of discomfort that one needs to endure when working through Intermediate. And she went on to say that perhaps the difficulty for a home practitioner is to gauge the correct “speed” at which to progress through the sequence.

No doubt about that! I was given a big hunk of Intermediate all in one fell swoop, and I am having trouble digesting it. I don’t mind having a pose or two that need work at the end of practice, but quite honestly, I feel like the whole pack of Intermediate poses are quite lame. Like I’m trying to chew too big a bite.

So to anyone who thinks yoga is about blind discipline, I can unequivocally say: it’s not. Trust me, if anyone could make it so, I could. But I can’t. So there’s a piece of definitive research to add to the archives.

I’ve been out of sorts for the past couple of days, as has The Cop. He has a better reason than I, though. Friday night, he was at the city’s “problem spot,” a bar where gang members from all over the valley tend to congregate on the weekend. It was closing time, the parking lot was full of people, The Cop was there checking everything out and keeping the crowd moving, and all of a sudden, someone decided to shoot a couple of people.

Needless to say, I don’t like the idea of The Cop milling about with gang members, and I particularly don’t like the idea of people shooting each other in crowds. The crowd burst into utter chaos as everyone tried to run away in a small space, and The Cop, following his training, ran TOWARD the shots, looking for the shooter. Of course, it was pandemonium.

In the end, two people died and the shooter got away. It’s bothering The Cop that it was so easy for the shooter. He could have just walked right past The Cop after killing a couple of people.

This is hard to process.

Practice was kind of low energy yesterday and today. I am haunted by work energy, which was super-vata last week. Gah! I hate being caught up in work like that. Yet, it must serve some purpose, right? There must be something gratifying about it, if I get swept up in it so frequently? Or is it just the mind trying to keep busy? Same same as the desire to avoid meditation, to skip practice, to never just BE?

BEing is scary, though, because what if I’m just BEing and something bad happens? (This is my mind’s favorite idea, kernel of desire to control the world…)

Good and evil have no self-nature.
Holy and unholy are empty names.
In front of the door is the land of stillness and light.
Spring comes, the grass grows by itself.

This is me cheering myself up.

And this, too.

P.S.: Once again, the intermediate poses make me crazy and driven. What’s the deal?? Too much all at once, perhaps? If I do just primary, I am a happy, content person. If I go to kapotasana for a few weeks, I turn into a nut case. Cut back to ustrasana for a while. Still pretty insane — all hyper and driven and triumph-at-all-costs at work. God save my coworkers. Today I knocked off after pasasana. I seem pretty human, even for a Monday…

Saguna (Form) and Nirguna (Formless)

Listened to a good podcast from Swami J’s site on saguna and nirguna. Boodi, your dive into yoga theory is appreciated.

As someone who’s always been zen-focused, I guess I have always taken a nirguna perspective on things spiritual. As it turns out, I like my art formless, too. In fact, this morning, I pulled out an old favorite: Formless: A User’s Guide. I love this book, because I find it quite evocative. It is chock full of the discourse of late 90s art criticism, AND it’s a Zone book (MIT Press, artsy fartsy division). But whereas the discourse appeals to me in its slipperiness, it also repulses me if I read it too closely. Both art criticism and psychoanalytic texts just BEG to be read glancingly, perhaps with Freud’s hovering attention. They are evocative as hell, but only if you don’t take them literally.

***

I have callouses on my triceps! Well, not really callouses. Dry skin patches, though. I have one on the outside of my right foot, too, which is where I scrape on jump backs. The arm ones really bother me, though. The skin is all rubbed kind of leathery. This is from holding my arms really close to my sides on chaturangas, of course. And exacerbated by wearing long-sleeved shirts during the winter — the fabric chaffs. I guess I need to get Under Armour tee shirts — that’ll solve the problem.

The Cop loves Under Armour. He is less amused when I call them his “underalls.” Similarly, he scowls when I call his yoga togs “manties.” I offered to pick up some Prana shorts for him, but he wants nothing to do with that. He sees how Prana has taken over my life, and I guess that serves as a warning for him.

***

My psoai are feeling pretty good after reading the Psoas Book. The “read text with brain/effect change with body” channel on my psoai seems to be quite well-tuned. Not so much the shoulders. The book I got is Relax Your Neck, Liberate Your Shoulders. Apparently my suggestibility is limited. As far as the neck and shoulders go, they seem to be saying, “Eff you!” to the whole program.

Truth be told, it’s hard for my brain to believe that my shoulders and neck can relax because I think of my head as a balloon, but maybe that’s just a lack of imagination on my part. There is actually a great image of how to imagine the traps as moving in different directions, but that’s it, so far, as far as strong suggestions go. I’ll read through the book again and see if I can get more traction the second time around. First time, it was mostly a case of feeling like the author is crazy if he thinks his gentle awareness exercises can relax THIS neck and THESE shoulders. Doesn’t he know I carry the weight of the world?

***

The other current book is The Pig Who Sang to the Moon. Oh man, what a terrific book.

The Cop came home the other evening and said he’d heard a vet talking on NPR (yes, it is amusing that conservative Cop loves NPR and yogi Karen is annoyed by it). The vet was talking about euthanasia of animals, which choked up The Cop. I told him that I’d bought my book on the emotional life of farm animals because I, too, have been thinking about the inner experiences of animals.

So here we are, Easter Sunday. I’m thinking about formlessness and silence and the consciousness of animals.

Practice was a little tough after a Moon Day and Saturday.

I’m going to make some spice muffins before The Cop wakes up.

There’s not much else to say.

I am suggestible as all get-out. I think it’s something cultivated in the art student and poetry grad school days. Last night, I read my Psoas Book before bed. Woke repeatedly during the night, conscious of how my psoai were tensed — and magically knew just how to move to relieve/release them.

Got up first thing, and had a delightful little sacrum crack with just the slightest of movement. Definitely going to have to keep reading the book before sleep.

And then I’ll move on to the shoulders book. Because I’m greedy like that.

***

After standing poses this morning, The Cop inspected My Gift’s car. She came down from school last night — Spring Break! This morning, she and a friend left for a road trip to Disneyland and a visit with another friend in CA.

She had to leave before we were done practicing, hence the intermission between standing and seated poses. The Cop and I bundled up and went into the garage, where he added air to her tires and checked the lug nuts and the oil and the engine and all that other stuff in there under the hood.

Karma yoga. Very sweet.

***

Ustrasana feels great without a tight butt. I like putting my thighs against the wall and then taking a deep breath and stretching my tummy and putting my lower ribs against the wall before I arch back. Delightful. There is something really nice about putting my lower ribs on a stable surface like that. No idea what the appeal is, really, but I’m going with it.

Urdhva dhanurasana was all hold. Hold hold hold. No pushing. Went up and stayed where I was, breathing and breathing. No micromovement of pushing and holding and pushing again. With the stillness, a kind of opening up ensues. I can’t really understand it well enough to put it in words, but nice to find it there. And once again, at the end of the last looooooong exhale, a delicate crack in the sacrum, fruition of the breath.

Whoa, how good is this gentle stuff??