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Yesterday I started taking some Zyflamend supplements to see if they’d be useful for reducing inflammation & soreness. I didn’t notice much of anything yesterday, aside from a sketchy tummy last night, but today at practice I felt like I was going to burst into flames.

Turmeric, anyone?

As far as soreness goes, I am in good shape. One thing I make note of during practice is the way my lower back feels when I vinyasa out of dhanurasana, parsva dhanurasana, and ustrasana. It’s one of my superstitions: I am very happy if there is no soreness in those down dogs, and I believe I’ll have an easy kapotasana. Now, the weird thing about this superstition is that I have often had soreness and then gone on to have a painless kapotasana — in fact, painless kapotasanas (I’m talking about the lower back here) are the norm. Still, I love when all those down dogs are painless. And this makes me wonder: do other people sometimes feel sore in the vinyasas between dhanurasana through ustrasana?

Kapotasana: Muscle Man can easily guide me to my toes in kapotasana these days. I get the little crease between toes and soles and feel happy. Well, except for the fact that my forearms aren’t on the floor. Too much tension between my shoulderblades. That’s the weak link in kapo for me. Muscle Man expects me to grab my toes and hang on, so he can let go of my hands and push down on my elbows. But as soon as he lets go of my hands, they slip off my toes. I got this idea that I needed to curl my toes up so I’d have something to hang onto, but I was too busy pushing the tops of my toes into the floor. Plus, I couldn’t figure out which way was up and which down anyhow. Which way should I curl my toes to make them go UP? I wondered. Why am I even thinking something like this?!? Finally he brought my hands to my toes and then stood on my hands. Then he pushed my elbows down. Nice work, MM! Sorry I couldn’t be any help.

Acceptance. I am working with acceptance. 1) My shoulder is hinky — specifically, the right collarbone has a compression issue. As in, it doesn’t want to be compressed right now.

What that means is I can do my eka padas, and the left side of dwi pada, but the second side isn’t happening without significant teacher-intervention. The compression thing happened when I had dwi pada halfway there, then tried to wriggle my shoulder under the right leg. Using an internally rotated shoulder to press hard against the weight of two legs folded up behind your back is, apparently, not the best idea. Still, I suspect I’d do it the same way, given the same situation. So for a little while, I’m gonna do eka pada and skip the dwi, unless MM wants to make me do it help me out with it.

More acceptance: I’d gotten to a point with primary where I felt at least minimally competent. I could do a consistent practice with some super-duper days and some eh, not so great days. But not much variability between those two possibilities. Even a bad day wasn’t too terribly bad. Now, though, it’s a total crapshoot. I’m good through suryas and standing — all even drishti and still mind. Once I hit the intermediate poses, though, it can be like driving off a superhighway onto a dirt road bump! bump! bump! Some days are great, some are like a bad climb, where you drag yourself up using your fingernails and elbows and forearms and knees and even the insides of your ankles (all of which get skinned to hell in the process) ’cause there’s no other option than to crawl up that rock.

Today, as I rolled around on my back with my left leg behind my head and the right one flapping in the breeze, I thought: God, it’s come to this.

Gah! The pain of learning supta kurmasana is back! You know, that horrifying clavicle pain? Yup.

I know where this is from: dwi pada sirsasana. And yoga nidrasana. But especially dwi pada. I totally felt it today when I had my left leg back and then pulled my right leg up — whatever inward rotation I’m doing to tuck my right arm through and shove my shoulder under the leg is OWIE!

MM pointed out that I have to push my chest forward and extend through the lower back. Yeah. You know, generally I’m more likely to kinda internally rotate inward and get more concave through the front body. Especially when I’m stressed.

So this is turning into a psychological event: have to keep my spirits up during practice, or else I retreat to the inward-folding.

No matter what, though, post-practice I’m a cheerful little creature.

Slow and steady. Slow and steady…

Wow, great practice today. One of those ones that feels good right from the first breath.

The heat was on, for some reason, and Muscle Man couldn’t get it to turn off. So we had both heat and air-conditioning running, in an attempt to even things out.

The room was HOT. It was great! Haha! Okay, the panting from the heat part during tough portions of the practice wasn’t so pleasant, but the bendiness was pretty sweet.

Kapotasana is coming along nicely. At this point, the weak link is the tightness in my shoulders. I’m good with that, because my lower back feels perfectly fine as MM keeps me in the pose for a bazillion breaths as he directs me to pull my shoulder blades down and stretch my triceps and all that sort of thing. It’s more an endurance exercise than anything else at this point.

Eka pada sirsasana! Woohoo! I had SUCH a sucky practice on Monday that I really felt some despair about eka pada. Liz mentioned (somewhere in the blogosphere) that she used to feel she’d never get her leg behind her head, that maybe it was a pose she just would NEVER get — and that’s how I felt on Monday. Reading about her experience, though (i.e., she got it & now really loves it), inspired me. Tuesday’s eka pada was pretty good (especially considering Tuesdays and Thursdays are home practices, so there’s no one to crank my leg), and today’s was REALLY good. Really good as in not hurting and also being able to sit more upright and not feel so CRUSHED by my leg. Which weighs a LOT, you guys.

Oh, did I mention I wore my short shorts? Seriously. The ones I wear at home that are super short. Handy, given our heated room in the desert summer. But I still felt like an ass. To my own credit, though, I thought about where I was going to throw down my mat, and I made sure that when I turned, my butt’d be facing the wall and not any people. Also set up at an oblique angle to the mirrors, so I wouldn’t be in danger of flashing anyone. I never have any flashing issues in the home yoga room, but I wanted to just be super sure in the shala. I mean, really — who needs to be flashed at 6 in the morning?

Why all this fuss about shorts? Well, ’cause practice is SO much easier with bare legs. And I also was happy because I had on my “home practice” clothes. Like a security blanket.

Dwi pada on my own is rather horrifying, and if Muscle Man isn’t available to wrestle me into it, I like to ignore it and just do some extra eka padas, but he told me today that I have to keep struggling to do it by myself. Sigh. Doesn’t he understand? I only like to look like an idiot at home. Still, I’ll do it because he said so.

Yoga nidrasana all by myself this morning! A first. I find yoga nidrasana really frightening for some reason, though I’m not sure why. I quite like supta kurmasana, so you’d think it’d feel the same way. Not so, though. It makes me feel very anxious. So usually I bail before I’m fully in. Not today. Woohoo!

Went through to pincha mayurasana, which makes me feel exactly the way I imagine I’d feel in a guns ‘n skis biathalon: too shaky for precision. I won’t say anything about the titthibasana sequence because I can’t try to do EVERYTHING well, especially something so ridiculous that burns my quads so much. If I keep at my lame attempts, I will get better at it. That’s my official strategy. ‘Nuff said.

But is that the end? Oh no. MM is into the backbending extravaganza: urdhva dhanurasanas, assisted backbends to the floor, backbends with arms folded, hop up into handstand, handstand into backbend (assisted, but still!). Quite a little circus workout. Definitely a challenge. I rather hate it, but I’m sure I’d miss it if I wasn’t given the opportunity forced to do it.

This is all so fun, though I have to laugh when I try to figure out why.

Felt like crap last night, this morning, and now.

Sigh.

Okay, yesterday I went to visit my Dad for Father’s Day. I brought him his two favorite things: bourbon and homemade Snickerdoodle cookies. He was VERY pleased.

While I was there, my Mom made me eat a meal. Sigh. She is a VERY persistent Italian mother.

One of the things I ate was some fish. She was *thrilled*. Usually she can’t make me eat anything, and here was this bonus — I was going to eat some animal! Woohoo.

Oh, and I had a bourbon and coke with my Dad. I love having a drink with my Dad. As he handed it to me, I noticed he’d used Diet Coke. Whatever. Maybe he thinks I’m fat.

During all of the eating and drinking, my Dad was loving Waylon. We had a dog when I was growing up and when he died, my Dad was so sad he never got another dog. Oh, and my Mom doesn’t like dogs in the house. That may have played into the decision as well.

Still, Waylon gets to romp around their house, and he and my Dad played tug-of-war and catch and “here, let’s eat some cookies together, and maybe you’d like to try a jellybean.”

Nice.

On my way home, I reached to turn on the radio and realized my right arm was all pins and needles. Uh oh. This can be a precursor to a migraine. Yup, then the right foot was pins and needles, and then the right side of my face. Unpleasant but nothing new, so not a huge deal. I blamed the neurologically toxic effects of Diet Coke.

By the time Waylon and I got home, I felt headachey and gross. I tried to feed him and Maxine. Maxine was into it, but Waylon wouldn’t get near his bowl.

I lay on the couch, he lay on the floor. Bleh.

Early to bed.

***

Felt like crap this morning. Waylon ate last night’s dinner for breakfast. It’s a Moon Day, I shouldn’t go to the shala. But you only get to go Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You should take the opportunity. You can take a Moon Day on Tuesday if you still feel bad. Maybe practice will make you feel better.

I shouldn’t have listened to myself. I felt like crap at the beginning and I felt like crap at the end. Only now my stomach felt bad, too. Great. I blame the toxic effect of the fish. Or maybe mercury poisoning, as I had tuna last week, too. I can develop a pretty bad tuna problem pretty quickly. It gets out of hand.

***

Kapotasana: crap.
Eka pada sirsasana: crap.
Dwi pada: ditched it because I felt like crap.

Thought: I need to do some chest and hip openers in my yin practice. Oh right, I don’t have a yin practice.

Maybe Mom tried to poison me with the fish because she was bitter that I figured out such a cool present for Dad.

***

You know what makes me feel better? “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” They had a marathon on yesterday. I saw two of them. For some reason, the show makes me feel very happy.

I was talking on the phone with My Gift and said, “I hate to tell you what I’m watching right now.”

She was appalled. “Don’t tell me you watch ‘The Girls Next Door’…”

“Of course not!” I scoffed.

“Right, because even though you watch ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ the thought of watching ‘The Girls Next Door’ is preposterous!”

She shames me.

Led primary yesterday. There doesn’t seem to be any overlap between Mysore and led class — totally different people. And yes, I’ll admit it: in the few minutes that we sit outside waiting for the class before us to leave, I usually end up not liking everyone around me. Actually, that’s too harsh. I don’t care for the general atmosphere of the studio on a Saturday at 10 AM. I prefer the “everyone wanders in on their own and doesn’t say much to anyone else” energy of Mysore mornings. I suppose it’s possible that if all of the Mysore people sat outside and chatted ahead of practice, I’d get annoyed with that, too.

Anyhow, Saturday seems more about fashion and seeing and being seen and presenting yourself to the rest of the community, etc. Or perhaps I am just projecting.

Still, Muscle Man opened practice with a few words about practice being practice and about how people should be happy with their practices. But not too happy. Oooh, is he talking about ego and greed? Indeed he is. I love lectures about ego and greed. Seems like they aren’t mentioned enough in yoga circles. I know, it’s hard to focus on ego and greed when there are rainbows and unicorns to talk about.

I remember talking to my brother — who was a personal trainer — when he was teaching me weight training techniques. I was focused on something detail-oriented and commenting that I needed to think about it more, when he offered the following teaching (which has stayed with me to this very day): “Instead of thinking about that, maybe you should think a little about impatience and greed.”

Haha! Yes, that is very good advice in almost any situation.

So led practice was good. I practiced next to a very tall, very skinny, very flexible, very young emo guy. I was immediately aware of how wispy his breath was. He absolutely (from a physical perspective) has all the makings of a natural Ashtangi. What he’ll have to realize, though, is where energy comes from in the breath. I am frightened for him, too — because I am a vata rabbit-breather. And if I saw his breath as ethereal, he’s got some serious grounding to do.

***

It feels like the habits/tensions in my body are rising up out of me. Seriously. The tension that usually resides in the mid to upper back region is migrating upwards. There’s “stuck” energy around the collarbone area, but everything below that is transparent. It’s a very cool feeling.

At my massage yesterday, Candice kept looking for all of the usual knots — in my shoulders, in the QLs, but there was nothing to be found, even in my neck. I figured that after all the LBH work, my neck’d be a mess.

“Wow, your body feels really good,” she said as I was leaving.

“Right?” I agreed, “Yoga’s been really hard this week, but it seems to be sorting everything out.”

“Are you still putting your leg behind your head?” she asked, kind of shaking her head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it seems to be a good idea!”

Muscle Man is kicking my butt. Or, I guess more accurately, intermediate through pincha mayurasana is kicking my butt. Or, to be even more precise, kapotasana, eka pada sirsasana and dwi pada sirsasana are kicking my butt.

And then he threw in three assisted tics this morning.

Waaaaah!

***

Nah, it’s okay. It’s certainly strenuous. And I feel my sacrum shifting around (on the move). A little weird, but not as frightening as when I first started this particular sequence.

This morning’s dwi pada assist went particularly well, but then he backed off a bit and said, “I don’t want to push it much more. I know what I’m feeling when I get assisted, and I know how to work with it…” I immediately interrupted to say I’m still not quite sure what’s going on with the pose, so I appreciate his concern and the fact that he’s not going to try to push me too far.

I am in this for inquiry and incremental change. Not to be forced into anything. Though, goodness knows, I suppose that would seem like hair-splitting to any civilians who witnessed the Mysore room. I’m sure it all looks like forcing.

***

The energy thing is pretty trippy. I get huge surges of very strong energy, and it’s funny because I don’t quite know how to surf it or channel it or anything. The other day, I felt like I had an ongoing energy leak — the image in my head was of a sun just radiating all of its energy straight out. Other days, it feels very focused and intense. I feel quite cheerful and kind of… I don’t know, transparent, I guess would be the word for it.

But man, am I crashing at night. And vivid dreams.

This is a very interesting exercise.

Karen, whining: “Practice hurt today. It hurts to put your leg behind your head.”

The Cop: “They aren’t made to go that way. It hurts because you are defying the will of God.”

Uh oh, I thought when I woke up in the middle of the night last night, it’s not *just* the hamstring. No, I seem to have an ache in the left hip area. Hmmm.

Went to practice this morning and discussed with MM. Explained to him that I have had all kinds of sports injuries, which I am perfectly fine with — I don’t mind getting hurt as a by-product of my physical entertainments. I mean, I don’t love it, but it’s just part of the deal sometimes. That said, I am super vigilant about sacrum and neck. I do NOT want to injure myself in those places.

When I did taekwondo, I was totally fine with getting beat up in a sparring match, but would NOT go along with hard kicks to the head. There was one woman who was a total headhunter. I could watch her eyes trying to time a kick to my head. She was so focused, in fact, that it was easy for me to time her and punch her in the face (not too hard), which I did to distract her. Until one day when I was so fed up with it that I punched her in the nose HARD. She ended up with a bloody nose and her contacts came out from how much her eyes watered. I felt bad — I’d never really tried to hurt anyone when sparring. I just wanted her to quit trying to kick me in the head.

Luckily, I don’t think I can get sufficient leverage for an angry punch during the eka pada sirsasana assist.

Anyhow, I can’t quite tell what’s happening yet. At first I thought it was IT band irritation, but no, I can do IT band stretches without any pain. Now I’m wondering if it’s the piriformis. Crap. I worked out the piriformis on the right, and now it’s fussing on the left? Sigh. Okay. Must stretch it!

Here’s what I found online:

What Causes Piriformis Syndrome?

Treatment

Piriformis syndrome is a soft tissue injury of the piriformis muscle and therefore should be treated like any other soft tissue injury. Immediately following an injury, or at the onset of pain, the R.I.C.E.R. S.Y.L.B.Y.H.B.C.R. regime should be employed. This involves Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation Sticking Your Leg Behind Your Head, But Carefully, and Referral to an appropriate professional for an accurate diagnosis a careful adjustment.

The rehab pictures include this:

And this:

And then it says this:

Stretching is one of the most under-utilized techniques for improving athletic performance and getting rid of those annoying sports injuries. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that something as simple as stretching won’t be effective.

Okay, apparently I have to practice in running clothes. I wonder if Muscle Man will be amused by my sneakers.

***

For all of my whining, practice was quite good. Before eka pada I did pigeon, akarna dhanurasana, and agnistambasana.

“Are you preparing for eka pada?” Muscle Man asked.

“Mostly just avoiding,” I replied.

During eka pada, I had mula bandha turned up to 11, and tried to really keep length in my back. Okay, this length in the back thing is all well and good, but I actually find it counterintuitive in strenuous poses. I think I default to the body mechanics of weightlifting: when you are doing a heavy squat, you contract around the abdominal cavity to stabilize the core. Now I have to remember to l-e-n-g-t-h-e-n. Seriously, if you did that when squatting heavy, you’d probably snap in half. Hey, maybe I should wear a weightlifting belt with my running clothes and sneakers during practice!

Okay, enough silliness. This morning’s practice was fine, backbends felt terrific, and I got to my early Monday meeting on time.

Oh, but there was this one other thing. Yesterday I decided to remove some of the color in my hair. I got a product that essentially leeches out the old hair color molecules. Cool, right? Also kind of scary (What if my hair turns orange? What if it falls out?). It all came out okay, but the chemicals smell like fart. I washed my hair a bunch of times and it was fine. But guess what happens when you sweat up your hair the next day? Oh yeah, super fart smell.

I guess that counts as another advantage to home practice.

Lots of yoga thoughts all coming together these days.

Okay, so what if you find out the practice is wrecking your neck? What if there’s a pose that might “break” you? Traditionalists Fundamentalists might suggest that the practice will NOT wreck your neck, and that there is no pose that could break you. You know, because the practice is perfect. But wait a minute. Is that the answer? Do you take it on faith and keep cranking away?

I consider myself a traditionalist, though — humorously — the Universe has blessed me with a sequence of non-traditional teachers. Volleyball Guy, Muscle Man, Matthew Sweeney, Celeste Lau, and most recently Troy Lucero (aka, The Diver).

You know what I think The Diver saw, within moments of observing my practice? Well, yeah, that I tend to fly upwards out of my hands and feet. But that’s easy, because anyone can see that. No, I think he saw something even better: he saw my devotion to the tradition.

At one point he came over, crouched down, and tipped his head to listen to my breath.

“Are you inhaling to jump through?”

“Uhhhh, yeah…” I said, trying to figure out, at 6 AM, whether I had misperceived everything I’d ever been taught about the breath in jump throughs.

“Try exhaling on the jump throughs.”

What?!?! Have I been doing this wrong? What does Yoga Mala say? What does Lino’s book say? What did VBG teach me? Why didn’t Matthew Sweeney notice this, if I’m doing it wrong?

Oh, my.

Busy, busy mind.

Geez, Karen. Just try it.

Another little lesson came during utthita hasta padangusthasana, when he moved around in front of me in erratic patterns as if he couldn’t decide which student to go help. Then he stopped and asked me if I knew why he’d done it.

“Because people fall over when there’s movement in front of them.”

Yes, that’s why. But he wasn’t doing it to get me to focus MORE. Nope. This was all a lead in for a discussion about drishti. And habits.

Is there a correct placement for drishti? Karen votes “yes.” Do I use it? Yes. Religiously.

Interestingly, drishti is something I cling to because I am very visual. I fly up out of my hands and feet (i.e., have great difficulty staying grounded), and I fly out of my eyes (i.e., I get ungrounded in response to visual stimuli). So I hang on to drishti for dear life.

The Diver asked me to try practicing UHP and letting my eyes go everywhere: all around the room, to objects up close, to objects far away, etc., etc., etc. As he suggested this, I felt a surge of freedom that was quite remarkable. Let my eyes go anywhere? Learn to remain grounded regardless the visual stimuli? Whoa! What kind of flexibility is this?

“Close your eyes,” he said, as I was practicing the flexible drishti.

I did.

Am I doing good? Can I nail this? Am I falling? Do I like this?

Sigh. Just feel it.

He also asked me to change my hands on my feet in forward bends. Including not touching the feet at all. And to toy around with entries into poses so that I wouldn’t be defaulting to automatic.

Suddenly it dawned on me that what he probably saw was someone practicing “by the book.” And he wanted to hold out the suggestion that “by the book” is a habit like any other. A healthier habit than smoking cigarettes, certainly, but a habit nonetheless.

Before I left the shala, he made a point of telling me that the kinds of flexibilities we’d discussed do not preclude a bhakti practice. I felt so energized by this idea that mental flexibility and devotion can go hand in hand. I mean, I know that to be true, but I tend to fall into a kind of automaticity that I cultivate with my nerdish curiousity about technical details.

What I felt when practicing with The Diver was an incredible sense of freedom and joy and inquiry.

It could have gone two ways: I could have felt defensive and angry that he was telling me to do the “wrong” thing, or I could open my mind to the possibility that my practice really *is* mine, if only I can loosen up my mind’s (often) tyrannical fundamentalism.

It was some pretty advanced teaching, and I’m still pretty blown away by it.

***

Okay, so Saturday is led primary at the shala and I’ve been going the past few weeks. Everything was rolling along swimmingly yesterday until we got to purvottanasana. I went up and gah! my left hamstring was… well, it was like it was frozen/cramped. Not a huge pain cramp, but like a frozen sore spot right in the belly of the muscle.

All the rest of primary was fine, but I know I’m gonna feel it again tomorrow when I get to eka pada sirsasana. ‘Cause that’s where it came from.

Candice did some work on the hammy knot, including some deep work with her ELBOW (gulp!). At the end she said, “You should ice that. I worked in pretty deep.” Um, yeah — I noticed!

My right hamstring insert is the weak link usually (thanks to a tae kwon do incident years ago), so it’s surprising to have the left act up. Muscle bellies are easier to heal than inserts, though, so I’m happy.

We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. In the meantime, some akarna dhanurasana to the rescue.

There are two ways to do eka pada. One, by wriggling the foot and calf as far down and across the back as is possible; and two, by catching the foot just behind the head and bringing the knee out and back.

This is from the Ashtanga Voices blog. Owl just mentioned it. But I’m confused. Which way is the “external rotation method”? Either solution seems to involve significant external rotation.

Anyone want to hazard a guess or an opinion?