Over at Ashtanga Yoga Vancouver

I wanted to get a quick post in before I got to bed.

This morning, the lovely Fiona Stang was teaching the mysore class. She usually teaches during the week, so I miss her, but it was good to have her help.

She gave me a few reminders/pointers that were super helpful:

1.) Ustrasana: Keep pushing those hips forward while lifting the chest up. Get the thighs parallel so they do the work and help open up the hip flexors. Having the knees wide works other muscles and is not as prodcutive.

Do the pendulum swing of going back more and more with each successive try. The Diver recommended this too. Time to re-incorporate it into my routine.


2.) Urdhva Dhanurasana (Backbends):
The neck: In prep, lie flat on your back, lift your legs straight up with toes upward. Get your neck in state of flexion by raising your head vertebrae by vertabrae. It's like an ab crunch.

The arms: Placing the hands in prep for backbends, keep the arms tight in the shoulder sockets. Fiona said you can do it yourself, but it's better if someone helps you.

The feet: Then place your feet on the ground. You can raise your heels as you come up on your toes and roll up to your backbend.

These tips were really great in helping me open the mid-upper chest. These pose felt totally different and it seemed to take a lot of the weight/strain off my legs when I did my backbends.

Can't wait to try it again tomorrow! Before I left, Fiona gave me a bunch of flyers for John Scott's workshop. Please join me! It will be fun!

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

This morning, the Diver dismantled my attachment to a certain spot in the studio where I ALWAYS practice and suggested that I find another spot, other than the one I usually take. Apparently, he had to clean up some dust and crumbs that were falling from the ceiling. Knowing how old that building is, I could see the possibility of larger chunks of the floor above come tumbling down on me. I trusted that the Diver was not just messing with me.

I chose a lovely corner spot away from the dust, and next to a mirror to my right and another one behind me. The Diver is not big on mirrors, but he did suggest on occasion that I do a few poses in front on a mirror to check my hand placement in utthita parsvakonasa, for example, and the angle of my knees in Parivritta Parsvakonasana.

Don't know why I hadn't done that sooner. It was very informative and helped me to do a bit of self-adjustment.

BTW, today I got one adjustment. Woo-hoo! If only I could remember what it was. Oh well. The Diver did say in his adjustment workshop that you want to be unobtrusive as little as possible when working with a student.

I know I can get more attention if I ask for it. Yesterday I asked him to do some backbending acro-yoga, which was awesome. He does all the work balancing and stretching you. The less you do, the better it is.

Yoga injuries: Healing a tweaky right knee

As any primary series practitioner will tell you, there are a lot of poses that involve bent and possibly torqued knees. I won't list of them here, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, in June of last year, the inside of my right knee started to complain in lotus and ardha baddha padmottanasa. I hadn't had problems with my knees before and have been happily going through my routine. I thought it was just a nagging tightness that I needed to relax into, but the pain started to increase each time I did these particular poses. Oddly enough, my knee felt free of pain otherwise.

I decided to cut out the particularly problematic poses and spend a lot of time babying my knee, doing lots of hamstring and hip-opening warm-ups. I also got some good advice from the Diver, as well as regular acupuncture and massage treatments. Sparkle Pony was particularly helpful in working her magic to zero in on my adductors and other weird little attachment points along my shin.

It's been getting better gradually. I took the Diver's advice about approaching the healing very slowly and to not overwork the shit of my knee. Patience and aparigraha (abstaining from greed of wanting to make my knee better) were keys to success.

I also consciously didn't want to blog about it and get all sorts of advice that might or might not have worked. Thanks, but too distracting. At one point, I pulled out a particularly painful Iyengar exercise that involves a dowel stick and wedging it in the crease of my knees and sitting in virasana. It's supposed to create space in your kneeds. Talk about excruciating! When I mentioned this to the Diver, his eyes just about popped out. After that reaction, I stopped doing it.

So finally, just over a year, I can comfortably work these poses without fearing I'm going to shred my knee. I still approach them with a bit of caution and try to make sure that area is warmed up. But what a lesson. It's not only working on the poses that are to come, but to revisit the old ones with a new sense of respect and perspective.

Sukha Sthira Asanam.

John Scott: Check. Burning Man: Check.

This morning's class was great with the master. The Diver was on top of his game. He paid attention to all of the 20+ students, which is no small feat, especially when there were a few newbs amongst a number of advanced practitioners.

We started off with his deconstructed Surya Namaskar A: Beginning with the synchronization of breath and the raising of the arms and adding the next element one by one before doing the full blown version. He reminded us that the practice is just about two elements, even though your body is moving and twisting in all sorts of directions and positions: feet grounded and breathing throughout practice.

He was also giving out the love on "frog pose" or adhvo mukha bekasana (knees bent heels up, grounding toe mounds), sprinkled at the end of each Surya B, and after each second series pose. Relatively new in this class, he had us lower the heels SLOWLY, SLOWLY while we tried to keep the deep crease in our hips.

Later, he worked in a super-wide-leg utkatasana and a "table-top" version, where the back is flat, arms are reaching straight out and the upper body is parallel with the floor. He called this the "shameless pose" because you are sticking your sitting bones out. You do that too for the previously mentioned poses too. Give them a try. They add a little zing as well as help you to remember the natural curves in your spine.
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Diver announcements: Some scheduled changes coming up. It's TBC, but he wants Sunday's class to be held in the afternoons so that he can "reclaim his Saturday nights." He also plans to add a Thurs night class at 7:30 pm. (Just be there Fri mornings, dude!) Velocity Dance (and ergo, the Diver) are still in the Oddfellows space for the time being (they're tearing up the 2nd floor bathrooms and there's construction shit going on in the main space). Apparently the builder is coming to a realization that he cannot find as good a tenant as Velocity AND also charge 3.5 times the rent. So, it sounds like we'll continue to practice yoga among the sawing and hammering. Good for focusing the driste.
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And from the Lame Department: I've not been blogging for the past couple of weeks. Got sick again with a cold and for an added bonus, caught pneumonia. I'm pretty well clearing out the last of it now (Azithromycin rocks!). Practice was a little congested last week and this morning, but doing it is very healing.
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Oh yeah, and I'm trying a new tactic of blogging without getting too involved with the pics. I'll still post pics, but I want to see if this helps me blog more entries. The next few might be catch-up posts from events past.

Now, looking forward, I'm doing prep for Burning Man, which takes place on the last week of August. I'm stoked. John Scott's workshop in Vancouver will take place shortly after that. He gives a great class. It'll be awesome, for sure.

Life in the fast lane

Practice for the past few days has been rather interesting.

Usually I rush through the last part of my practice or abbreviate in order to get to work on time at 8:00 am. Sometimes I defiantly work through my finishing poses, past 8 am and stroll my yogacized ass late into the office. Not that there's anything really wrong with that. No one really cares, but people in my office tend to arrive early and start firing emails and voice messages while pile up before I even start my day.

Anyway, my recent practices have been been (dare I say?) crisp and efficient. Wednesday, I was doing standing and half second, but I blasted through those poses so quickly, I thought I skipped a bunch of them, which has been known to happen occasionally, but actually I didn't. It's been this way the past few days.

It definitely helped that the construction workers get in before 6 am, so if I get there early enough I have enough time for a very thorough practice, finish after 7:30am, do my ablutions and carry on to work. I'd like to get through all of second one of these days, but I find I do need to do all of standing before feeling warmed up enough. Ideally, I would do a 2 hour practice, which is preferred.

There are also the acroyoga partnering poses/fireside chats with the Diver that occur during or after my practice, which have been minimal of late. Always welcome, but without them, my practice does move faster.

More adjustments, longer practice. Less attention, faster practice.*

* See note from Matthew Sweeney's core adjustments about holding off on doing adjustments for one day of the week.

And so it goes.

Random practice notes for criminals

The Diver was out this weekend, so he announced a sub in advance.

Just like in high school, attendance for class was lower than usual this morning. It was a shame because our sub had a nice, graceful style and stuck with the Diver's approach for most of the class. My feeling is that anyone who is asked by Diver to teach is going to be okay by me.

Some might have thought it was Diver Lite, since she dialed things back and broke down advanced poses into easier-to-approach parts. She skipped a few of poses from primary and I don't think we did anything that took anyone over the edge. She did however add a few poses that mixed things up a bit and kept it interesting. For us criminals, she threw in parvritta janu sirsasna inbetween the janu's, a pose which I haven't done in ages. There was also a familiar hip flexor sequence beginning with a forward lunge, then straight arms over the head and lifting the hands that go over and keep reaching back. That's a Diver favorite.

One of my faves was a mini-set around eka pada raja kapotasana with some nice variations. After folding and laying your torso over the shin of your bent right leg with hands and arms straight in front of you, you then bend your straight left leg, reach behind and across your back with your right hand taking the left foot. After working the hip flexors, glutes, back thigh and piriformis, it's a bonus pose that stretches your quads.

And as a final random practice note, I liked how she intro'd navasana and said to roll your shoulders back, keeping your chest lifted before you straighten your legs and extend your arms. It's easy to cave your chest in while you're trying hold the pose with your abs.

Photo credit to houseoflucas.com. Thanks, Rob!

Yoga all-stars moving forward

This morning's class was smaller in number than its usual packed-to-the-rafters Sunday crowd. The Diver said this was perfect, and with the "yoga all-stars" in attendance (the inner core of regulars, I'm guessing), he didn't need to give as much instruction, meaning he wasn't going to have his voice intrude and break our inward focus. There were a few disbelieving giggles, but he did pretty well actually. He also made an interesting comparison about not playing music during classes because it adds to your practice with "sentiment," distracting you away from what's going on inside. Makes sense to me.

So we went through half-primary with an emphasis on vinyasa transitions between poses and navasana-handstand combos (he loves this!). Specifically he wanted everyone to jump back by "crossing the legs, lifting in lolasana and bringing the legs through to chat." I've found the trick to this is to cross high up on the shins, make a tight ball and tilt my weight forward as I uncross my legs.

He continued this theme of tilting forward when we were working on the navasana-handstand combo by the wall. Same deal with crossing legs and lolasana after 5 breaths of boat.

Specifically for me, when I've been in morning mysore, he's wanted me to lift it all the way to handstand. Of course, he does this so effortlessly. Flotation Device and another dude can do this as well, but I've put it on my list of long-term projects.

Anyway, getting back to the tilt forward, when we're done hanging out for 5 breaths in handstand, we're supposed to come down as slowly as possible ("slowly, slowly") and land back into navasana.

To help us get the feeling of having our shoulders over and past our hands, he had us partner up for a little exercise. Partner One goes into plank pose and Partner Two stands over P1's feet while lifting their feet about a foot off the ground. Then P2 gently moves P1's upper body forward and past the shoulder-hand plumbline.

For part two, P1 goes into a half pike hand-stand and P2 moves P1's upper body forward and past their shoulders. The shoulders don't have to move as far forward as the previous exercice in order to get this feeling.

Then we go back to the wall to apply what we've just learned.

I don't remember doing this particular exercise with the Diver before, but it was helpful to reinforce the concept of shoulders forward and shifting my weight while upside down. Must recreate the feeling in tomorrow's class.

Oh, and see my previous posts on handstands in January 21 and 23, 2008.

Photo credit to bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com

Practice Notes: Embody Your Yoga

A reminder that yoga is different than aerobics and is not just a physical practice.

The Diver caught me 'sleeping at the switch' the other morning when I was going through the prasarita padottanasana series. It was simple, straightforward stuff. It's what I do almost every practice when I do standing poses. But he noticed that I had messed up the arms-breath combo getting into C, which led to a general comment about taking my practice beyond the mechanical pose details. Legs, arms where they should be, yes. Breath, yes. I'm doing the pose, so I think. And I have done the transitions. 'But can move your body and breath with your prana?' He says he sees all this energy in my hands and lots going on in my head. 'But can you put it all together and flow from pose to pose?'

He asked me if I had heard his Popeye and spinach talk. Well, I hadn't but I knew exactly what he was saying. Here's one vid that I found. Check it out. The magic starts at 5:50.

Later in the day, his observation made me think about all the led classes I took when I first started doing yoga and I was repeating bits of instructions of my instructor's voice (not the Diver) stuck in my head like a broken record. I hope by now I've internalized the important technical details and have started to focus on my breath and intention.

Practice Notes: A word about driste

Focus.

Meowth, roar, roar, right back at ya, Annabella!