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Yesterday must have been “visit a Mysore room” day for the current crop of teacher-trainees at Starbucks of Yoga. Lots of young women giggling and chatting with each other and consulting cheat sheets. MM was very busy with so many people, but managed to be standing on hand to assist in all the places I really need help (i.e., kapotasana, karandavasana, assisted dropbacks and dropovers). I was on my own for bhekasana, which is okay by me. He likes to do that adjustment, and it’s an adjustment I love, but it’s interesting to go without every so often.

Shoulder’s getting better — woohoo! I always wonder if I’m stupid to practice through pain, but then it always heals and I wonder if I’m stupid to wonder.

Kapo’s on the move — getting past toes with MM’s assist. Interestingly, I am feeling the pose most in my lower lats. That’s something entirely new.

Skipping a few poses due to shoulder issue:

Why is it that when I’m injured, I feel like it will never get better? It’s been proven, over and over, that these things resolve, but when I’m in the experience, I can’t seem to ever remember that. Candice says it’s a stuck spot very high up on the pec muscle and a stuck spot in the trapezius. A matching set.

High points yesterday: left side of eka pada sirsasana was easy and felt great. Right side still kinda sticky, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

In urdhva dhanurasana I actually felt a *stretch* in the upper pecs! Yay! Something must be happening after all these years. Obviously, this has to do with the kapo work (did I mention MM keeps me in kapo for about 15 breaths at a go?!) and the dropovers.

This week, three things helped me feel better about the psychological hurdles of intermediate (and I stand behind my assessment that transitioning from primary to intermediate is like zooming down a superhighway onto a dirt road. As Grimmly wisely noted: “my negativity towards the series was coming from an insecurity about the practice itself.” Is this part of the nadi challenge — confronting your own insecurities?)

1. Muscle Man gave me a two sentence pep talk that can be paraphrased thusly: “You don’t suck. You’re getting there.”

2. In a probably (from a yogic standpoint) shameful instance of comparision, it felt good to see a whole bunch of people (the teacher trainees) struggling with primary. I’m sorry that it made me feel better about my practice, but it did and I’m happy for the boost.

3. Urdhva dhanurasana and kapotasana are starting to be poses I really look forward to doing. They are turning into favorites. Who’d a thunk? It’s like baddha konasana; took me years and a six-month phase of piriformis hell to get my chin on the ground, but now it’s an enormously satisfying favorite pose.

***

Forrest yoga. Hey, you guys, it’s really fun and horrifying at the same time. The long holds? I want to scream. The balancing poses and arm balances? What fun! The abs work? Yeah, in just two sessions, it’s made a difference to my regular practice.

I’ll be doing a Forrest practice tomorrow. Usually Sunday is my day off, but I’m going to rest today, then practice tomorrow. Mostly ’cause Monday Mysore is usually awfully stiff after a day off. If I practice tomorrow, maybe I can avoid the Monday blues.

AF sounds formidable, and I am a fan of formidable women. Kali. Definitely Kali. I keep having dreams of a big Kali tattoo between my shoulderblades. Something about an energetic convergence. We’ll see…

Forrest Yoga feel like exercise.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

MM has Mysore class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Led primary on Saturdays. Sunday is my day off. Tuesday and Thursday I do home practice.

Today I decided to try Ana Forrest’s UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERIES OF NECK, SHOULDERS AND HIPS. I do have a very mysterious neck.

Anyhow, I did it because I take suggestions from people on the internet (thanks, Elizabeth!). That’s a little bit of a joke. Still, I did some reading on AF last night and indulged in some nostalgia for my muscles.

Back in the 90s and 00s, I was all about cultivating my muscles. How I loved them. Giving up lifting and turning to an all yoga all the time practice was, at least in the beginning, a lesson in letting things go. And by things I mean hard muscles.

So I let them (sometimes grudgingly) go. In return, a lot of tangles and tensions of muscle and tendon and ligament (and breath!) unravelled. It felt like I was coming apart, in a way, and I really like(d) that feeling.

I am in a weird place now, though. I need more unravelling for kapotasana and LBH, but I also need to recultivate some strength for the stand-ups and tics.

Been letting everything go, but maybe need to pull some of it back in. Especially around the abs.

Okay, so I did an AF practice this morning and was happy to do lots of inversions, and irritated to do (what seemed like) really long holds. The fun of something new. The annoyance of something strange. Good times.

I am onto something here about rebuilding some strength. Ideally, a less tense kind of strength. I’ll play with it on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a month. And we’ll see what happens.

When Muscle Man first suggested I do an intermediate practice, I was scared about what would happen to primary. Would it slip away, if I only practiced it once a week? I thought of the story about catching monkeys: if you put a treat at the bottom of a jar that a monkey can slip its hand into, but narrow enough that he can’t remove his hand once he makes a fist around the treat, then you’ve caught yourself a monkey.

Yeah, I was hanging on to my idea of primary…

No need to be concerned, though. Saturday is led primary, and about half way through, I realized my primary is actually improving.

This kinda begs the question about the efficacy of practicing the same thing every single day: sports science suggests you take a day in between workouts of specific muscle groups so you can recover and, in turn, optimize your progress.

The rationale for every day yoga practice (at least the one I use) is that yoga practice is about more than physical progress: the every day practice, far as I can tell, is about cultivating tapas more than about optimizing physical progress.

***

Gonna go over to My Gift’s to help hang up curtains today. Not just hang ‘em, though. Put up the hardware. With a drill. On a ladder. Sigh. Can you tell I’m not really looking forward to that?

***

So last night, I look over and there’s Waylon, sitting on the couch and watching TV. (No, we don’t have a blue and white print couch — that’s just a blanket for the dogs to sit on…)

As I mentioned to MM after a good, headbandless kapotasana assist today, the pain in my shoulder is on the move. It started off on one end of the right collarbone, moved to the other end, then into the middle of my trapezius, and has now settled under the shoulderblade.

My premise, straight out of Naive Science Journal, is that all’s well if the pain keeps moving. It means there is some structural rebalancing going on.

That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt like hell sometimes.

Yesterday, when My Gift and I were at Ikea, my neck started getting sore. Sore as in progressively more excruciating as we looked for a lamp, nightstand and bed frame for her new apartment. The pain was right where the neck meets the occipital bone at the back of the skull. As if God was trying to pop my head off like a bottle cap. Then it started spreading down the back of my neck and into my traps, which suddenly felt like they were made of rock. Rock that was on fire. Jesus. Would I make it through Ikea and help her find a can opener before I had to be hospitalized for meningitis?

Yeah. My meningitis ran its course in about an hour. Seriously, I have no idea what that was all about, but it was nasty and I’m glad it’s over. I suspect it has something to do with all this shoulder business in intermediate. And don’t even get me started on the heart opening stuff.

***

Current practice is through to yoga nidrasana, followed by urdhva dhanurasana, assisted dropbacks, and tics. Tics were okay today. Sometimes I rather dread them, primarily because MM insists on a two footed kick up. Me, I like a nice scissor kick. I can actually manage handstands rather well when left to my own scissor-kicking devices. But no, he wants the bunny hop thing.

With scissor kicks, I feel like my legs are driving the bus, and I trust my legs. With bunny hops, my butt is at the wheel, and God knows what it’ll do. Crash, most likely. Look out, Muscle Man!

Despite my reservations, we got through the tics and it wasn’t too bad. I quite like the cracklings that run up my spine as I go over. MM is amused by them, as well. Vata music.

It’s delightful to have some days off where I can loll about in savasana. Afterwards, I chatted for a while with The Poetess. She is teaching in a teacher training program in California, and has been commuting back and forth (via car!) every week. She’s decided to just stay in CA for the last couple of weeks. It was either that or fall asleep at the wheel. I don’t know how she managed for as long as she did. Anyhow, it was lovely to have time to talk after practice — usually I finish up, savasana quickly, then race to the shower so I can get in to the office on time.

Today, though, savasana, chat, then home to make a big mug of chai. Mmmmmmm.

I don’t mind going back to the office next week, but I REALLY don’t want to go back to the hurrying. I wonder if there’s any way to avoid that?

I am on my 5th day of doing one thing at a time and not hurrying. It’s delightful. “Are you single-tasking?” The Cop asked this morning, as I read on the bed.

Yes! Yes, I am.

This morning, practice was relaxed and open. I had a glimpse of how I usually practice: with an eye toward the upcoming day at the office. A sense of urgency. I don’t know if it’s possible to get rid of this feeling (unless I win the lottery), but I want to minimize it.

All the usual ups and downs of intermediate. I’ve been doing prep poses ahead of kapotasana, to try to open up my shoulders and lengthen my triceps, etc. So I did all of those, then set up for kapotasana. MM came over to help out. Now, for a short digression. My hair is cut in layers and kind of crazy curly. I used to have it longer, and wore it tied back in pigtails, but then I got the bright idea that cutting it short would be useful for practice. Except, as it turns out, my crazy curly hair, when short, just goes berserk and stores up humidity and sweat. Basically it just expands like a rain cloud over the course of practice. Now I’m trying to grow it back out. In the meantime, I have lots of loose ends. So my solution is to put teeny pigtails in the back. But what about all the layers on top and on the side? I know! A stretchy headband! Yesterday I bought a bunch of headbands, just generic ones in subdued colors. Problem solved. Okay, back to kapotasana. I go back, MM helps me find my toes, then leans forward to press down on my elbows (getting them to the ground is one of our goals). At this point, I push into my legs more, my head slides closer to my feet, and the arch deepens. Except this morning, what I realize is that my headband is made of some kind of space age fabric that sticks like velcro to Manduka mats. Uh. I’m stuck.

I come out of the pose and MM looks perplexed. “It seemed like it was going to be really easy…” he says.

“My headband got stuck,” I tell him.

“What?”

“My headband got stuck.” I show him the headband. He tips his head like Waylon when he is confronted by an unfathomable situation.

“Uh, okay.” And off he goes.

Note to self: Take off headband before kapotasana. And consider greasing top of head somehow.

In eka pada sirsasana, I am happy to find myself able to look straight across the room (instead of curling down under the weight of my leg). Woohoo! MM comes over to adjust me. He pushes down on my shin. Down, down, down. I have one of my little instantaneous visions: my femur bending. Yup, like a chicken bone in science class, made flexible by soaking the bone in vinegar for a few days.

I guess that’s better than feeling it in the knee.

On Wednesday, we (as in, 90% of this work fell to The Cop) moved My Gift back down to the next town over, where she will do her senior year. On moving day, I took a meeting from 10 AM until noon, then we drove up to her place up north (a 2 hour drive), picked up a U-Haul, packed it (Go, Cop!), drove back down here, unpacked (You’re a god, Cop!) and got her set up a bit. Wrapped up at 11 PM. Note to self: next time she moves, hire a mover. It wasn’t fun. (Thank goodness The Cop does Crossfit.)

Still, it’s great to have her close by again. Today I’ll bring her coffee and meet the new kitten she adopted on Friday & we’ll wait for the internet/cable guy.

I am taking a week and a half off from work. Badly needed down time. My goal? To not think about more than one thing at a time and to not hurry to do anything for the whole time I’m off. God, it’s sweet. My job is all about multi-tasking and moving as fast as possible at all times. Not healthy. Not by a long shot. And not optimally efficient, for that matter. The illusion is that the more I do and the faster I do it, the more gets done. But 1) at what cost? and 2) is it even true (that more’s getting done)?

I’m going to try to experiment with one-thing at a time when I get back to work. If nothing else, it makes life MUCH more pleasant. I was definitely work- and task-crazed. It’s an insidious addiction.

Practice. I’ve been suffering a bit with this business of having a practice I suck at. Feeling pretty discouraged for a couple of days there — probably in part because of overwork and burnt-outness. I didn’t have huge reserves of emotional resilience. I don’t care what anyone says — intermediate practice is tough for me, and it takes some oomph to go in and work through it day after day.

But I haven’t done jack since Wednesday except practice and read and sleep (woohoo!) and it seems like yesterday’s practice got me back in a more stable frame of mind. And the fact that it is led primary on
Saturday helps.

There was a small contingent of guys who appeared to be friends of Muscle Man at led primary. Young (in their 20s), muscle heavy, highly tattooed. Still working on their binds and lotuses, but pressing up into handstands & doing aerial transitions all over the place. Now that I think about it, they may be climbers. Definitely had the bohemian sub-culture thing going on. I am so accustomed to the noodly people (generally female) of yoga that I was happy to see some guys troop into the room. And not noodly yoga guys. Mesomorphs.

Class was primary and then a quick selection of intermediate favorites. MM asked me to demonstrate laghu vajrasana before we all tried it. No prob. I can laghu v ’til the cows come home and always have been able to. I don’t even think about it when I practice it every morning, ’cause I’m in the midst of trying to wring all the kapo prep out of ustrasana, then turning my thoughts toward the imminent attempt at kapotasana.

So when one of the tattooed contingent came over as I was leaving class and said, “That was awesome,” I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “That pose you demoed,” he said, “It was beautiful.”

Ha! Silly me. I’ve managed to totally devalue what I’m good at and hyperfocus on the stuff that needs work. (“If I can do laghu vajrasana, it must not be that hard!”) I have to admit, though, it really pleased me to have someone strong give me props about a strength pose. I need to savor my strength a bit more. And I also think we need more focus on strength in Ashtanga. The hell with this flexibility BS.