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Three of six on the bakasana B. The first couple were totally discombobulated, and accompanied by the inner monolog: “How’d I do this before?? How’d I…” as I plunked to the ground.

A slightly more frantic, “I’ve forgotten how to do it!” moment, accompanied by furious thinking about how I did it last time I did it, finally followed by three that I landed seemingly magically (i.e., without thinking).

So, just do it.

Right.

***

The weather here is spectacular — so warm, in fact, that I didn’t turn on the space heater this morning. And The Cop and I agreed it was time to get back to our Sunday Starbucks visit. Waylon LOVES a chance to ride in the car, and he LOVES sitting outside at Starbucks, where people give him tons of attention (LOVES it!) and there are tiny birds (LOVES them!) looking for crumbs and he gets hunks of The Cop’s muffin and my scone (LOVES to scarf them down and drool muffiny-sconey saliva all over my feet).

So that was nice.

This afternoon, My Gift, Waylon and I will pick up Italian food at a great restaurant here in town and bring it to my parents’ house for Mother’s Day. All of us LOVE Italian food — well, not so much my Dad, but he will enjoy making me, My Gift and himself some bourbon and Cokes. And there’s a really good thing going on for me at work (must be kept secret until tomorrow), and my Dad loves to talk to me about career stuff. So it should be lovely. On the menu:

Antipasto

Chicken Marsala

Baked ziti

Gnocchi

Eggplant Parmesan

Cheesecake

Tiramisu

I will have lots of energy for practice tomorrow morning…

Q: “Aren’t those earbuds designed so the wires go behind your head instead of in front?”

A: “If they’re on the back of my neck, my calf gets caught on them.”

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.

The Cop and I (and Waylon!) are on vacation in Tucson. A yoga vacation for me (practicing with Lisa Schrempp) and mountain biking vacation for him. I’m just practicing and indulging myself with lots of reading (contemporary Japanese novels and historical novels) and writing. Pretty sweet.

Okay, here’s a quote from Jaron Lanier, technogeek supreme, whose new book, You Are Not A Gadget, shot to the top of my reading list when I read this:

The ratio of passivity to creativity in people is what will determine the ratio of socialism to capitalism in the long term future, as technology gets better and better.

Here’s a link to some thoughts he shares about the book/his theories. A good intro.

It’s been a long, dedicated haul, and now there is significant movement in my backbending practice. It feels transformative. Here’s the catch though: I’m breaking out. Yes, my skin. Worse than when I was a teenager.

It’s both astonishing and horrifying, and I have no idea what to do about it. I guess if it’s some kind of detoxification, it’ll have to subside eventually? In the meantime, though, it’s rather disconcerting.

I’ve been missing my feet lately in kapotasana. It was a huge mystery: my backbends are much more comfortable and deep, and yet I’d be in kapo, crawling my hands forward and then out to the sides, but my feet were nowhere to be found. I didn’t freak out, since the kapo Bs were in a huge improvement cycle, but I was perplexed, ’cause I could feel my hair brushing my feet, but couldn’t find my toes!

This morning, I set up the video camera and aimed it at my left foot. What I discovered was that I was crawling my hands up past my toes on the outside. Duh! Then I’d vainly search around, moving my hands out toward the edges of my mat — further away from my feet!

The most amusing thing about this discovery is the camera set-up. Below is my rig: a foam block strapped at an angle to the yoga room lamp holds the video camera at the correct angle to keep an eye on my left foot and hand. (The image is taken on the iPhone, using the Hipstamatic app. Cool, huh?? I love that the pic is square.)

No more pain at all in my back = priceless.

“You come from the west, you see postures, you say ‘I want it.’ And then you take. All of this is taking, it is the western thinking. I want it I want it. If you don’t understand yoga because of that way of thinking, not my fault. Your fault.”