Adho mukha svanasana or the Hat and Ha of it all

Talk about frustrating. I can't tell you how many years I've been working on doing handstands away from the wall. I find them so elusive. The progress I make is so seemingly incremental. Some days are better than others. The Diver sees how close I am yet so far away from nailing this pose.
It's interesting to observe that this pose is a deal breaker for a lot of students. I see people take their bathroom break when the teacher says, "Let's go to the wall." A colleague at work who is a serious marathon runner expressed an interest in doing more yoga, but has bailed out on the teacher she likes because they've started to do lots of handstands.

I do like how The Diver introduces them to his students early on. Hee. It humbles you really fast.

I have to also say that in his mysore classes The Diver is relentlessly patient and encouraging to keep me and other folks working on them when most of the time, I just want to race through my 5 lame attempts very quickly when he's out of the room or while he's helping another student.

What I've learned about myself and handstands is this:

1) It doesn't come naturally to me. Apparently I have oodles of strength in my shoulders (so he says), but I have a mental block about possible falling and cracking open my head or knocking the wind out of myself when I flop down on my back. This is very rational fear though, don't you think?

2) There are many elements to this pose. The kick-up, the breathing, the balancing, the exit. Just to make things even harder, the Diver likes to make handstand part of a whole sequence: navasana, pull it up into adho mukha svanasana, hang there for an eternity or so, then slowly squeeze your body down into navasana again. Easy! Yah.

3) It's possible to think too much while trying to do it. Feel the pose! Do this! Don't do that! So much inner talk for my little brain to process. Usually thinking less or not thinking comes so easily for me, especially at work. All of a sudden my mind is now filled with terrifying thoughts.

So today I got a clue. The Diver has been trying to wean me off the wall, while I've been secretly inching my way back towards it. This morning, he moved me so far away from the wall, I knew that if it I went overboard, it wasn't going to help me much at all. Then he reminded me about my hands. Shift the weight, spread your fingers, work your hands. All of my weight is on the back part of my hand. Not stable at all. And when I feel that I'm going to lose it, my fingers go into a death grip and the fingertips go white. So he talks me through an similar pose that I know--bakasana. Shift your weight forward like you're almost going to plant your face into the floor.

Ahh, ok. Then I try handstand.

Ding.

I feel it. All this time, I've been hearing him say this repeatedly and I understood the theory of what he was saying. I thought I was doing it but I wasn't really. Now he's given me a new idea to work with. Press down on the front mounds of my palm. Now when I'm in downward dog and other similar poses, I notice how I'm doing the death grip all over the place. Need to rewire. But now at least, I have that awareness, which is very informative.