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A little sore in the right knee. ‘Cause of enthusiastic coming-up-from-dropbacks (and probably exacerbated a bit by LBH poses, since the right hip is tighter than the left). These are my downfalls in practice: fear and grasping. The coming-up thing is grasping. It was hard to learn to come up (fear!) and it is VERY hard for me to accept that there might be days when I don’t. “Just be patient,” my brain tells me. “Carry on and it will eventually ‘stick,’ and then you’ll be able to do it always, forever.” Yeah, yeah, I know that’s true — but *in the moment*, when I’m hanging in the balance, I am turning my toes out *just* a bit more to grasp the up. Sigh.

So now the practice is not about coming up, but about paying attention to the soreness (which is always gone when I am warmed up and doing drop backs) and *letting go of the willfulness*. Until, I dunno, maybe Thursday?

In the meantime, I am also dealing with the fear thing in kapo. It fascinates me how people are comfortable in their bodies in different ways. Rock climbing falls: acceptable. Falling off a mountain bike onto cactus and desert boulders: unacceptable. The Cop’s parameters are exactly opposite. Curling my head under so I can rest my forehead on the floor in kapo (where’re my hips?!) is a little scary, even though it actually feels pretty good. Extending my neck backwards that way is not a comfort move for me. I avoid it. Why do we have these weird kinesthetic preferences? Swami Jyotirmayananda would say “karma,” I’ll bet.

The mechanics of the neck/shoulder curl is good, though, because it means I can always grasp further up my feet in kapotasana. As is often the case, my fear has been overcome by grasping. (She said ruefully.)

At drop backs I thought about my knee and then, magically, also thought about the curled-under feeling of kapo. Uh, duh? Yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing as I arch back for a drop back. Teachers have told me to arch back, but I didn’t understand what they meant. I wish I were one of those people who can figure things out kinesthetically, instead of having to figure physical things out (slowly!) through my head.

So yeah, forehead on the floor in kapo seems equivalent to curling back for drop backs. My backbend intuition is astonishingly poor. It cracks me up.

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New books coming out!

Richard Freeman!

Yoga and Buddhism!

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New class in October!

Check out the classes!

I registered yesterday. Classes will start when I’m on vacation in Tucson in October. I was planning on visiting Lisa’s shala in September, but September is now jam packed with a board meeting (DC), a conference (Chicago), and a summit (Phoenix). I’ll be ready for vacay in October, that’s for sure.

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Dwi pada. I can bring my right foot up enough to bring it even with the left. Just a couple more inches before I ought to be able to make the hook. As Susan suggested, sitting up straight and bandha-ing through it does in fact seem to work better than leaning my head forward.

Owl brought up an interesting point re: shoulders. Primary series teaches us a lot about working the hips in different directions, but generally speaking, the shoulders are worked in tandem/symmetrically. As I’m trying to sort out dwi pada, independent movement of the shoulders looks like something worth developing.

During practice this morning I paid attention to my shoulders. Indeed, there is lots of symmetrical movement throughout primary. But there are also opportunities to explore independent movement — particularly in the marichyasanas (A & B especially, it seems).

I think my shoulders are where I do my mind/body split. When I am thinking, I like the way it feels to have all of the energy in my head (like a brain in a jar!), and when I am doing physical things, I like to keep the energy more around my center of gravity/hips. Shoulders are where I make the split. They’ve been left out for a long time. Ought to be interesting trying to integrate them back in. Both for thinking and for doing.

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Not yet.

I’m getting the right foot to within 4 inches of the hook, but as I tip forward a bit to catch it behind the left, boing! out shoots the left from behind my head.

And in kapo news, it finally dawned on me that the whole thing is much easier if I put my forehead on the floor instead of the top of my head. Duh?

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Can I post an entry with a photo from iPad?

Daisy! Yup, that’s her name. Petunia was a close runner up.

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Daisy is super food motivated. As I was preparing dinner, she worked up her courage and took a flying leap, trying to get up on the counter. Missed by three feet, but it was a noble attempt.

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Waylon’s favorite game (aside from the bitey game), is the pully game. He pulls, I resist, he drags the object out of my hands, then returns so you can give it another try. Sure enough, he had his blue cloth snake & brought it by for Daisy to grab. They pulled a bit and he won. He stood there for a moment, then went back to her and dipped his head down so she could grasp the other end of the snake. Round two goes to Waylon. And round three. And four. You get the picture.

Essence of the Upanishads-Katha – Friday, May 21, 2010

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Bakasana B. Yay! Fun because I don’t know how I’m doing it.

Also fun: the fact that the pain in my lower back really does seem to be gone. I’ve been reluctant to say that because it seemed like I’d be tempting fate and it’d come back (superstition!). But I think it’s over. There’s a tightness in the lower left lumbar region, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. It just has “sensation.” Hard to describe, but you know the kind of deal where there’s a tight spot and it feels really good when you stretch into it.

How long did that last, the pain? I was thinking about it this morning. Six months, maybe? Eight? It is kind of like the awful hamstring pain I had for months when I first started practicing. I remember sitting on frozen peas every morning while I drank coffee before practice. Why did I do that? A weird kind of drive to carry on, and a dose of faith. Likewise the back pain. Something has unravelled, or is unravelling.

Zazen podcast. Scroll down to the very bottom — Zazen Mind. You will hear some interesting and familiar stuff, yogis. One thing that’s curious is to hear zen practitioners talk about awareness (and suffering) of the body. So do yogis cultivate a mirror-image suffering of the mind? We come to the same thing, from different entry points.

Promotion. Yup, a promotion at work. I’m happy. My Mom asked, “Does this mean you’ll have more free time?” Um, I think she must be thinking of the days when a promotion meant you sat in your office with your feet up on your desk and a cigar in your mouth. Anyhow, no, that’s not what it means. Still, it’s sweet.

No more pain at all in my back = priceless.

Experimented with a hot bath before practice, followed by a few minutes on the rack.

Miscalculated slightly, and ended up in a SCALDING bath. I’m a fan of much-too-hot water, but this was even hotter than that. Pain receptors are less sensitive in the morning, perhaps? It wasn’t until I was lying in the water that I realized I was burning. “Oh well, I’m already in,” I thought.

Read for 15 minutes about research done on yogis in the (um, I think) 50s, re: how they could control their sympathetic nervous systems. Hearts running at super low speeds, imperceptible pulses. The conclusion was that they were using the valsalva maneuver to slow things down, and muscular contractions to possibly move their hearts outside of the range of the EKG probes.

Yeah, whatever, you crazy rational scientists. It’s savasana! And it’s MAGIC.

Alrighty, so 15 minutes in the HOT bath. Perfect, right? Uh, well… if feeling super faint upon exiting the bath is perfect. Then a few minutes on the rack and out the door.

Practice was bendy, which was the purpose of all of this, but there was a bit of a catch. I had a REALLY hard time regulating my breath. I did intermediate instead of primary today, and my breath wanted to default to shallow — which isn’t really anything new, but it was less fixable than usual. I attribute that to the stimulation of the overly hot water.

I managed pretty well to make the in- and exhales even, until kapotasana. Everything went to hell there, because MM is having me do long holds of kapo B over and over before we do kapo A. Then another B at the end.

I don’t think it’s my imagination here: MM is happier when I do second than when I do primary. I have no idea why this is.