Laghu vajrasana: Now available with criminality and rationale
Posted in ashtanga yoga on 06/18/2008 08:50 am by karen
It is a Moon Day, so I will muse about a recent indiscretion.
Yesterday, I did laghu vajrasana the David Swenson way.
As my backbends improve, my laghu vajrasana has changed. Before, it was all tension, tension, tension. I could lever myself back using my thighs, grab my ankles, hold, and then pop back up. All courtesy of the inflexibility of my back and the strength of my quads.
Now, I curl back more into the pose, and there are alternations of relax/bend and tension-to-sustain-the-return. More a play of relax, tension, relax, tension as I touch my head to the floor but don’t release all the way down.
This feels good, from a bending perspective, but it also makes it much harder to come up.
For a good while, I stopped at ustrasana, because I knew I could do the laghu vajrasana using strength and inflexibility, but didn’t want to cultivate it that way. So how to turn laghu vajrasana into more bend, into more of a transition (bendwise, rather then strength-wise) between ustrasana and kapotasana?
I want the ustrasana/laghu v/kapo gauntlet to be a step-by-step ratcheting up of the backbend. This is a “losing” proposition, given my inherent strengths (i.e., not backbending). My performance will only degrade over the course of the three asanas, since I am basically upping the ante and asking myself to do more and more of what I don’t do well.
Alternatively, I could use the gauntlet as a way to showcase strength. In that scenario, which I’ve been avoiding, I can feel like I am “successful” at ustrasana and laghu vajrasana, but be foiled by kapo. It is, honestly, tempting to use this latter plan, because I get two successes and one failure. In the former scenario, it’s a more disappointing trajectory: success, struggle, disaster.
Anyhow, that was my thinking yesterday at the crack of dawn.
So I went for the David Swenson version (yes, I know, not-Mysore-approved) of holding thighs rather than ankles. It required more bend, more chest opening — and was a b*tch to come up from.
Success (ustrasana), struggle (DS laghu v), disaster (kapotasana).
Oh well, if I don’t make this more difficult for myself, who will?