Gettin’ down with chaturanga

Tags

ah-ha, anti-chaturanga attitude, bakasana, balancing, chaturanga, force, headstands, lightning strike, Natarajasana, resistance, Shazam, upper body strength, vrksasana, wobble, Yoga, yogi

From the Daily Doodle: http://mydailydoodle.blogspot.com/2011/05/chaturanga-dandasana.html

Monday night’s yoga class included one of those “ah-ha” moments every yogi has from time to time. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing yoga – your body still has things to show you about how to use it best. Two, twelve or twenty years later, it doesn’t matter.

My wee lightning strike was to do with one of my least favourite poses – chaturanga.

Of course, I can’t be sure whether or not I received this instruction once upon a time. Perhaps one of my teachers gave me this tip but if they did, I was too busy focusing on something else to take it in. Or maybe not. I don’t think I’ve noticed too many teachers giving this particular piece of advice.

Who knows? But this insight was an internal moment of oh-my-goddess how come I didn’t get that until now?

Let’s talk about chaturanga a little. It’s a polarising pose, isn’t it?

People can either do it or they can’t. It requires upper body and core strength, and a truckload of patience for those who don’t find it easy.

Men do chaturanga with pride because it’s often a pose they can do well, having spent their teenage years doing push ups and generally having more upper body strength than women.

We gals on the other hand often find it to be one of the most challenging and frustrating poses ever. The upper body and head are heavy parts of the body and I think women have quite a bit of fear attached to hovering their body over the floor.

I suspect the fear is part of the problem. When I took my first beginner’s yoga course, I aced all the poses requiring flexibility but I was “no good” at the ones that needed upper body strength. It’s an attitude I’ve carried with me for years!

Then in some Iyengar classes I did once upon a time, the teacher was obsessed with helping us improve our chaturanga. Which meant that a small section of every class was dedicated to trying and failing. Or trying and falling. More anti-chaturanga attitude!

I blamed my busty-ness. How was I ever supposed to hold my body off the floor with massive… yeah, you know what I mean. I blamed my arms – despite years of kick boxing and swimming and generally being taller and stronger than most women, they were still too weak! I also blamed my (many) left-shoulder injuries.

Whatever. The upshot is that I’ve never been very good at this pose or had a teacher successfully explain how to do it. Yep, I’ve had the cues about making sure your shoulders/head are in front of your arms, not parallel with them. And keeping your elbows tucked into your sides.

But at most, I’ve been able to hold it for a few seconds only. Until now.

The yoga classes I currently attend include a lot of vinyasa-style movement through chaturanga/down-dog and all that jazz. So I’ve been determined to improve my access to this pose, and have been paying particular attention to how I use my body parts.

Which is why I noticed that I’ve been putting too much pressure on my shoulders and not spreading my body weight through my wrists, hands and feet properly. That’s not the insight, but it did help me get there.

Putting too much pressure on your shoulders when one of them is still weak… forces a yogi to look harder. Consider alternatives. Dig deeper. So I did.

Suddenly I’m thinking to myself:

Wait a minute! That opposite forces thing. Heh. Like, how to gain balance in tree pose it isn’t just about standing on one leg, but pressing back up away from the ground. That! Yep, it applies here too. Shazam!!

Okay, that mightn’t make sense if you don’t do a lot of yoga. To translate – in yoga, we work with opposites. So, if there’s force in one direction, then there’s also force in the other. For some poses this comes naturally.

But balancing is generally more challenging. Often, people are so busy trying not to fall over that technique goes out the window. And chaturanga IS a balance pose.

For many years I found tree (vrksasana) a little impossible. It wasn’t until I realised that I wasn’t *just* balancing all of my weight on one leg, that I was able to get it.

From: http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/picture/25109758/A_group_of_women_demonstrating_Vrksasana

To get the wobble out of my tree, I had to use the ground to reach UP through my standing leg, and all the way up my spine. Every part of your body is involved in balancing, not just the appendage(s) you’re balancing on. Pressing my non-standing leg foot more firmly into my thigh, and reaching with my spine upwards (instead of collapsing downwards) was the answer. It blew my mind.

Monday night, it was blown again when I realised that DOH!, the same thing applies to chaturanga! It’s not just that your body is hovering above the ground. You’re using your body to push back AWAY from the ground, too. It’s a little something called resistance.

Specifically, using your fingers and toes to press down like you’re trying to dig them into the earth, and not just resting them against the ground like lumps of concrete. By pressing down we’re actually pushing back up, if that makes sense. Combine that with tucking your pelvis to engage your core and protect your lower back, and suddenly chaturanga is a VERY different pose.

When I explained this to my own students last night (it really helped them, too), I also asked them to think about how headstand or handstand works. Neither pose is held by simply letting your body weight collapse into the ground. You need to send force/energy in the other direction to maintain them, right?

RIGHT! So all this time I’ve been doing headstands, natarajasana, vrksasana, bakasana and other balances… perhaps it was my mental block/fear around chaturanga, but I hadn’t translated this learning across. Silly girly!

Or rather, “ah-ha”! 😀

~ Svasti

**UPDATE** Y’all should also read Linda’s & Rachel’s comments below about how “yoga is all in the bones”. That is also important when figuring out how to make any pose work for you!

Non-attachment or advancing vs simplicity

Tags

achievement, advancing, Awareness, bakasana, Injuries, progression, Road to Nowhere, Talking Heads, Yoga, yoga teaching

Just how attached to your yoga practice, or any other practice (like art, writing etc) are you, anyway?

This is the question I’ve been facing up to lately, in the wake of my ongoing physical injuries and ill health.

Right now in my yoga practice I can’t do everything I normally would. I can’t stand on one leg, or even put too much pressure or weight onto my right leg. Heck, I’m still Ms Limpy and dealing with the strain my injury places on the rest of my body. It sucks.

Fortunately for me, the style of yoga I’m doing right now is more concerned with the gathering of energy in the body and working the kinks out of the most compressed parts of our spine, than it is with “stretching” or “getting a good workout”.

That doesn’t mean the practice isn’t a sweaty or intense one, because it can be. There’s a lot of focus on the body’s natural movement without pulling or swinging or using force to get into various poses.

My teacher (who knows what’s going on with my health and injuries) is constantly telling me to do less, be softer, and right now… to do an “appropriate” practice.

This is VERY challenging because my ego still wants to do more!

My teacher insists that I only do with the left side of my body what the right side can do. For the balance. So most of my standing postures are extremely limited and I’m trying to be okay with that and keep my frustrations in check. (There’s a small victory for my ego though, when we get to arm balance poses like bakasana – heehee!)

Of course, this is quite ironic. I often tell my own yoga students things like this:

When doing simpler movements that your mind doesn’t have to concentrate on very much, don’t start doing your shopping list in your head! These poses are just as beneficial as something you find more challenging, but they present an opportunity to learn to keep your mind with your body. So focus on your breathing. Look at your body and what it’s doing. Pay attention to the minutiae. Inhabit yourself.

Teacher, take your own advice, right? Also, the words of my beloved teacher sound off in my mind: Work right where you’re at.

I remember hating that advice the first time I heard it…

So when my ego takes off on one of it’s BUT I WANT TO DO MORE riffs, I chuckle and remind myself to inhabit my body and the work that it’s doing right now, and NOT what it could do before or what it will do once I’m healed.

Of course even reminding myself like this, it’s still hard to let go of wanting MORE because our society worships at the altar of BIGGER. BETTER. NOW.

Just the other day my sister sent a photo of my four year old niece holding up a piece of paper with her name written in squiggly hand-writing. She was all Cheshire-cat grins because she can now write her own name! Actually, she’s been able to do it for a little while now, but has only just recently learned how to write “Y” the correct way up. Hehe.

While I adore the photo and the happiness on my niece’s face, it occurred to me that all of this celebration of achievement just sets us up for feeling terrible when we can’t or don’t achieve something we really want.

It also drew my attention to the fact that we tend to praise growth, advancement, development. We cheer on babies and children for walking and talking etc, we get all proud when people excel at their schooling and we high five ourselves when we can suddenly do a yoga pose we’ve been working on for ages. We deify our sporting heroes and Olympic athletes. Being the best is considered to be all-important, right?

Advancing is what counts – someone wrote this to me recently on Twitter. I beg to differ because really, what is “advancing” anyway?

Don’t get me wrong – enjoying progression isn’t a bad thing, as long as it isn’t our central/only focus. As long as it doesn’t stop us from enjoying other things, like a simpler yoga practice for example.

To expand: for every person who masters a new yoga pose and gets a hit of pride for what they can now do, there’s someone else who finds that years of practice have NOT made them more flexible. And in the face of our celebration of achievement, this can make a person feel like crap.

But what’s important here? Encouraging a student to keep going? Telling them their flexibility will come eventually (which might or might not be true)? Or helping them understand that yoga/life isn’t all about being the bendiest person in the room?

Yoga teachers – what are we saying when we give compliments for doing poses well? Do we balance that with information that can help less physically able students to feel like yoga isn’t a waste of their time?

There’s much to be learned by doing less.

Right now when I stop berating myself for not being able to do everything, I notice that I’m fine-tuning the small details of my practice. Like strengthening my lower back, checking what my knees are up to, and relaxing the tension from my shoulders. I’m learning to concentrate on the small details of moving my body in a way that my “normal” practice – with its focus on “achieving” – often glosses over. My awareness of what I’m doing is increasing.

So chill the heck out everyone (including myself)! Where are we trying to get to with all this achievement, anyway?

We’re on a road to nowhere

Come on inside

Takin’ that ride to nowhere

We’ll take that ride

~ Svasti