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2.5 out of 5.

Intra-abdominal pressure seems to be key.

Landed bakasana B twice out of four tries this morning. I was gonna try a fifth, but decided to cut my loses when I had a 50% success rate.

No idea how I managed to land it, and it was only for a couple moments before I keeled over — but hey, it’s a beginning!

Ran out after practice for a quick cup of coffee with The Poetess. Great to see her and catch up a bit. Want to make a point of keeping in touch more often. Home practice needs a community supplement!

Wasn’t sure if I wanted to blog about the Tucson yoga vacation, but now that I’ve been back a week, I think it’s time to say a little something.

I had a great visit at Yoga Flow with Lisa Schrempp, her assistant, Scott, and one of the other teachers on the staff, Jason.

What I was hoping for, when I booked this trip, was to get some assessment of my current practice and some direction for my home practice.

First off: it was great to get some adjustments! Lisa is a very tall, very thin woman, so when she came over to adjust me in pasanasa, I was figuring it’d be pretty airy and light. Wrong! I have no idea how she did it, but she gave the most stable, strong adjustment I’ve ever had in that posture. Bhekasana adjustments were also delightful — from both Scott and Lisa.

Kapotasana, point of insecurity because so hard-won, made me realize that inside my head, I am like the fat girl who lost weight. I think outside observers can see how hard it was for me to work this pose out; I have the sensation that they can see all the flaws. But you know what? Not so. I did my kapos and grabbed my toes. They adjusted me to heels. No fuss, no cheering, no medals.

“This is where I usually stop,” I said to Lisa.

Her response: “Why?”

Alrighty then. So the current sitch is that I have to figure out how to land bakasana B pretty regularly. Then I have directions about how to proceed from there. I told her I’d be back in 3-6 months to work with her some more, so I got some homework for the meantime.

This is a pretty low key shala, which I love. Lisa teaches Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Scott teaches on Tuesday and Thursday. On Scott’s days, Lisa comes in, rolls out her mat, and practices with everyone else. I didn’t watch her (I was busy!) but I loved that her energy was there in the room. No flourishes, no bids for attention — everyone just did their practice together. What a great community!

I don’t really want to say a lot about this, but I do recognize that there is discussion about “tradition,” which often polarizes as people reject it as authoritarian and inflexible, or cling to it as a kind of holy grail. Here’s my experience (and it happened again with Lisa) — when I’ve worked with authorized/certified teachers, it has been very apparent that they see individuals before them. They have a clarity about the relation of the person in front of them to the practice as handed down by Guruji (and now Sharath). There is a structure to the system of Ashtanga, but there is not any kind of authoritarian blindness as a result. As I said, that’s been my experience in actual rooms with authorized/certified teachers.

I’m sure the same thing can be said for some un-authorized teachers, as well. But I’ve experienced both sides (blind adherence, total free-for-all, some combo of both) with “unofficial” teachers, so I guess the quality control is different in these cases.

My point, though, is that all of the stuff we debate online totally dissolves in the actual room with the actual authorized/certified teacher. Not unlike dokusan, you get into the room and realize all of your questions are beside the point: it’s time to just shut up and be there.