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The Cop’s work schedule has changed, which is great, because I get to see him a lot more. I’m kinda silly giddy with how happy I am about this. Another nice aspect of the change is that I get more kapo and dwi pada assists!

The elbows-in-and-down adjustment in kapotasana is crazy powerful. And the dwi pada assist much appreciated. Kinda worth the charge of admission to a shala. Generally speaking, I feel like I can sort out the things I need to work on in practice, but I can’t seem to solve for those two adjustments. Luckily The Cop is here to help out.

This morning, The Cop gave me an excellent elbows-down-and-in assist in kapotasana, followed by a solid dwi pada sirsasana assist.

Me, I would be annoyed if someone asked me for assists when I was just sitting down with my first cup of coffee. Just sayin’.

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Meanwhile, a woodpecker is making a hole in the side of our stucco house.

I haven’t grabbed any video in a while, so here’s one of my weirdly dark vids. It’s kapo time!

kapo 09-02-10

I laughed out loud when I looked at this and saw how crazy my shoulders are. Some day my elbows will reach the floor. But you know, for as insanely tight as my shoulders are now, they are a billion times more flexible than when I started. And it’s too dark to really see in the vid, but I am managing to touch my feet before my head touches the floor, which is bouncy and extremely entertaining. (If anyone wants to opine on ways to get my elbows to the floor, go for it!)

But that’s not the fun part. The fun part is that after three years of kapo pain and anxiety, this posture now feels delightful and I actually look forward to doing it! It actually makes me happy! But that kind of begs the question, when you look at it from the perspective of a normal person: why in the world would you do something that hurt and was scary every single day (except Fridays and Saturdays and moon days!) for three years?

Then I thought of Dogen:
To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

And then I thought of what Sharath says in Guruji:
It is a way of worshipping God.

Oh, and this morning’s practice was topped off with a terrific dwi pada sirsasana adjustment by The Cop. He’s getting really good at it!

Marching along.

In a couple of weeks, I am due to travel to DC to do a presentation to the Board of Directors about learning innovation.

Did you know there’s a study somewhere that apparently indicates that there are a good number of people who fear public speaking more than they fear death?

This whole thing isn’t as bad as it could be — learning and educational technology is my field, so I can endlessly chatter on about it. The worst are presentations when I’m talking about topics I don’t know a lot about. You think presenters always know what they’re talking about? Think again.

Anyhow, here’s how this plays into Ashtanga practice: Every morning, I march through primary and intermediate to yoga nidrasana. There are two places where I feel some chitta chatter: kapotasana and at the leg behind the head poses.

This morning I recognized that the anxiety around kapo is not about the posture physically. It actually feels *great* these days. Not EASY, of course, but good. Finally, my back is opening, my psoas muscles are releasing, etc., etc. I walk halfway up my feet and feel fine about that. With more practice, it’ll just keep getting better.

So what’s the anxiety? I’m anxious that I’m going to regress, after all of these years of hard work. So every morning I wonder if I’ll not be able to do as well as the day before.

I just have to get over myself on that one. Because there will eventually be regression, and worrying about it won’t affect its eventual manifestation — but it will taint my experience NOW.

The other anxiety is around LBH. Here’s how my body/mind cut me some slack and had a little joke at the same time. When I started LBH, I heard a lot of horror stories about LBH injuries, specifically back injuries. So I was concerned. I didn’t stop working the poses, but I did (do) always feel a bit of a black cloud over my head when I’m sticking my leg behind my head. (There was a similar black cloud over kapo for a good while, where I worried about my spine snapping and a puff of dust rising up out of it — desert-inflected nightmare!) Anyhow, as I was going about my slightly anxious business with LBH, I managed to irritate my right knee. It has kindly stepped up to divert me from my spine anxiety. Surprise!

So back to the public speaking gig. All of the backbends are opening, opening, opening my back, which is great, but I am also conscious of the fact that after a stressful day at work, my back gets kinda crunched back up. Like a flower closing. I feel like I’m going to be having a push-pull with it as the presentation approaches and I try to avoid curling up into myself like the introvert I am.

And that’s when it hit me that the LBH poses are exactly the counterpoint, psychically, to the backbending work. They are strengthening me and insisting I be present. I felt pretty raw during the months when I was doing the intermediate backbends but none of the LBHs: it was all opening up and no strength/resistance to counteract it. I suspect I even seemed overly flexible at work — all openness and not enough steadfastness.

So now I’m building the internal resilience. I am curious to see how that plays out as the presentation approaches. Will it feel different than the usual run up to a Board presentation? Will I default to my usual introverted… um, introversion?