i’ve lately been pondering my voice and presence in a yoga class. the type of yoga i learned originally, sri swami satchidananda’s integral yoga, teaches a particular language, sequencing, and orientation for students in the class. the vinyasa style of yoga, derived from modern-day ashtanga yoga, also arranges the class (ashtanga more than vinyasa, in this case) in a particular way.

to be sure, most forms of hatha yoga have a style of teaching rooted in similar language (inhale/exhale), sequencing (standing poses before inverted poses), and orientation to what you are actually doing in the room (pray to the divine, or just notice your muscles). today what’s interesting to me is whether or how that approach gets stale if you don’t challenge yourself to renew your approach occasionally.

i wonder what other teachers and students think about the kinds of words they want to say or hear. it’s easy to be rote; you can say the same thing about the same pose every time. on the other hand, the ways of describing the body in space and time are endless — and experimenting too much maddens.

teachers: do you find yourself wanting to repeat yourself sometimes, or are you always thinking of new ways to describe the class experience? students: do you want to hear the same thing week to week, perhaps in order to learn the poses better, or do you like the language fresh and changing each time you come to class?

if you’ve played music for any length of time, you’ve probably used a metronome. this what one looks like:

imagine your spine as the pendulum rod (the thing that moves) in standing poses, especially ones in which the hips are open. when we attempt to do warrior two pose (virabadrasana 2) or side angle pose (parsvokanasana),

and

, settling into the poses can feel very much like the pendulum coming to rest at its center. you might even see here how pose 1 sets the foundation for pose 2.

one of the main ways to experience this sensation is to firm the legs. for most of us, desk jobs preclude the active use of legs during the day. sitting in chairs creates bad circulation, bad backs, and weak leg muscles.

in standing yoga poses, the direct result of using the legs is freeing the spine and releasing the back muscles into more efficient, well-distributed, graceul use.

if we consider open-hipped standing poses as though the spine were able to move back and forth, in rhythm, on a stable base, eventually settling in toward center, we might then orient ourselves toward using the legs to relax the spine, the organs, the mind.

i was teaching handstand (adho mukha vriksasana) tuesday night in the 630 p open hatha class. a student, also a teacher at this studio, had settled into what my eyes told me was a quite well-executed pose. as she balanced there, i called the attention of the class to the pose because i wanted us all to observe.

as i described the various ways in which she was strong, balanced, graceful, and nearing a sensation of zero-gravity (one of the coolest side effects of any pose, and also, some would argue, the esoteric point of doing any pose in the first place), another student and yoga teacher in class commented that the back of this handstanding student’s neck looked compressed because she was lifting it to look between her hands. they wanted to know how the pose could be so well done if she was this tight in one area of her body.

the root of this observation comes from a different teaching of handstand that i, or other teachers i later discussed this exchange with, have been taught. indeed, if you look at p. 288 of iyengar’s light on yoga, or at this pose, the students (p. 288 is iyengar himself) are gazing in between their hands or further up as a point of focus.

(if you’re already bored, jump off now and save yourself).

this point of focus is called a drishti in sanskrit. drishtis have great importance in a yoga pose: the smaller the point, the greater the focus; when there is no point, there is little or no focus. this is why i have been taught to have the head raised in handstand, and also as a means of opening the chest. this can be done with no bowing of the back if the student’s core is engaged.

ana forrest, on the other hand, teaches that your head should be dropped in all poses, no matter what, as means for relaxing the neck. my understanding is that this teaching stems from modern-day issues we all have in the neck and shoulders (anyone who has studied with ana, feel free to chime in).

the teacher who questioned the head-raising-in-handstand choice and i later e-discussed this issue. showing this link and referring to a workshop where he’d learned to deepen his own inversion practice, he wrote:

The picture gives an indication of her [his example, in the link above] level of integration.During the workshop, we did a huge amount of lunge practise. One of the keys to all poses being the preparation. She was a strong believer that dropping the head was important in integrating when inverted, which then enables walking on the hands.

In my own experience, dropping the head is key. As you pointed out the cranial base and the sacro lumbar junction each require the other to release, for their [sic] to be freedom in the spine. Cranial sacral understanding of spinal fluidity seems to confer with this view. But there are no single answers and yoga requires an embrace of all possibilities.

exactly. and as i further contemplated his answer, the pose itself and, generally, what happens to the spine in inversion, i concluded, still, that in fact head dropped is unintegrated for me, and head raised is a more evolved way of looking at the pose (and, perhaps by extension, our own experience in general) for me. here are my reasons:

1) there is no such thing as a straight line. we know this from physics.

2) to this end, if the vertebrae were in fact to totally straighten (which to me the dopping of the head suggests a goal of), the spine would either implode or explode.

3) the eyes, like every other part of the pose, need to ground. that’s what relaxing into that eyes-half-closed-stare is in a drishti (think kevin smith’s mall rats: the picture of the boat)

4) when the head lifts, the heart opens. in meditation and pranayama, the idea is to keep the eyes looking downward, in an act of deference to the body and breath as guide, and to calm the nervous system. but in a yoga asana like handstand (as opposed to pachimottanasana, seated forward fold), we express our evolutionary capacity by looking up.

it’s almost as though, in this case, the heart is doing the real taking in, the actual assimilation (which by the way is where prana makes it most indelible mark). the eyes are simply two little data centers. they are ferrying in less and less distracting information by focusing on a smaller and smaller point of the outside world. this opens us up fully to the experience within.

so we (boundless teachers and staff) are finalizing our agreement on boundless’s values. we’ve got the mission down (see right if you are reading this on the home page), but we have been debating and discussing the values. they will be up this week.

if you can vote or give me info on this piece; i think it’s an important thing to reflect on:

• honoring the body as our first home, and trusting it at all times

versus

• honoring the body as our first home, and keeping it safe at all times

because sometimes we need to feel a little unsafe in order to effect
change, right? surely a butterfly emerging from its cocoon doesn’t feel
totally SAFE, but i would suggest that it feels TRUST. when we are facing
our demons in meditation, or handstand, or in a deep backbend, playing the
edge of safety is, in effect, deepening your TRUST in the fact that it’s
all good.

the purpose of this bullet is to identify the importance of rooting into
the first chakra, or (in a combined first/second chakra) MOTHER EARTH. i
don’t think we feel SAFE in a hailstorm, but we have to TRUST that she’s
throwing ice down on us for a reason.

the most common thing we hear from guys contemplating yoga is their fear over being inflexible. they’re concerned that when they get into the class, they’ll feel stupid or strange or uncomfortable trying to touch their toes when surrounded by “bendy” chicks who might as well have the floor removed under their hands because they can reach further than gravity.

here’s the news flash: bendy people are inflexible also, to such a degree that many yoga teachers, “flexible” themselves, don’t notice that, for example, a willowy woman with joints that bend like gumby is actually holding tremendous blocks in her groin, between her shoulder blades and, often, in her neck. this happens because she is so “flexible” elsewhere.

think about it as a pulse within a closed system, like the give a bridge has with all that weight traveling over it. when one spot gives, another has to tighten or else the entire structure will collapse. so make no mistake: what appears to be flexibility is often a mask for painful tightness elsewhere.

most important for most western men out there: in many ways you’re starting from a better place if you feel tight everywhere.

a) unlike the flexi-ladies, you don’t have to unlearn the pattern of being too loose in one place, and too tight in another, and

b) you are basically starting from scratch.

everything will hurt so good (thanks john cougar), and the changes in your body will appear more wide-reaching, and more pleasurable, faster. it’s easier on the mind if it has only one place to focus on (even if that one place is the entire body), versus it having to figure out what’s tight, what’s loose, and how everything works together in a more appropriately executed yoga pose.

so i’m back in the saddle after living out of a suitcase for a month. i’ve found that traveling is oppositionally correlated to sustaining a regular blog. this is an interesting first chakra issue: when you are not grounded (and can you be, traveling? that is my question to the energy practitioners out there.), it is difficult to manifest anything, especially from your creative source.

this entry, and the ones coming up for the rest of the month, are devoted to explaining not just the types of classes we have at boundless, but our teachers and their approach. and mine. i will first start with the types of classes to answer the many questions we always receive at the beginning of every year: how should i get into yoga? how many times a week should i practice? what should i wear? what type of yoga do you teach at boundless? should i do the intro to yoga series or the beginning classes? what, in god’s name, is a “challenge” class, and how do i know if i’m up for that? can i do an open hatha class if i am a beginner? and so on.

i am recounting questions our front-desk sirens, teachers, and i have received. i’m sure there are more. start posting, start asking, and i’ll respond daily (or every other day, as i continue to unpack the suitcase) with answers explaining what class is right for you at boundless.

from thisislondon.co.uk.

and what you don’t: this is what’s on my mind. i’m curious what problems or questions people are having in specific poses. ask here if you have questions.