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!

You’ve come a long way, baby

Tags

Asana, bird’s eye view, Blogging, Depression, Fat Boy Slim, Happy blog birthday, Healing, Meditation, Nataraj, Natarajasana, Post, Post-traumatic stress, PTSD, Recovery, Retreat, Spirituality, Therapy, Trauma, Truth, Unemployed, Yoga, yoga teacher training, Yogasana

For years I was totally hopeless with balancing asana in my yoga practice. I’d wobble, fall over and enviously look at others, wondering why I couldn’t do what they did.

Then some time ago, wobbling through Natarajasana (dancer pose) I had a realisation that changed everything… You’re not just trying to balance on one leg – you need to stabilise yourself by engaging every little piece of your body!

Oh! Seems so obvious in retrospect, but for some reason I really didn’t get that, until I did.

In turn, this taught me something important about life, in a very practical (not theoretical) way: Nothing in our lives is disconnected. Nothing.

Funnily enough, I’ve had this realisation many times – during meditation, from reading books and listening to dozens of lectures on the matter too.

Seems we don’t get it, until we do. Nothing is disconnected.

We’ve come a long long way together
Through the hard times and the good
I have to celebrate you baby
I have to praise you like I should
~Fat Boy Slim

For those of us consciously trying to heal our inner wounds, with our fragmented selves desperately trying to keep up… we’re often so busy focusing on the trauma, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.

Just for now though, I’m taking a bird’s eye view, trying to see the lay of the land, so to speak.

Why? Well, today marks the first birthday of Svasti! Hip-hip-hooray!!

To quote my last post, this blog grew as something of an impulse – a very strong desire to save my sanity. A much needed space to expel the violence, sadness and struggles I’d been dealing with all alone. Screaming into cyberspace seemed like a good idea, and I was right.

Blogging I’ve found… is sort of like travelling the world with an entirely different perspective. Instead of seeing museums and temples and the like, I find myself surveying the inner workings of people’s minds all ‘round the world.

In the process, I’ve made a lot of friends and learned plenty about myself and others.

Such as: There’s no simple cure to PTSD or depression. And there’s peaks and troughs to recovery. The peaks make me feel like I’m finally getting somewhere. The troughs make me feel like checking out of Hotel de Life.

Healing is not a one-shot deal. There’s no magic pill to solve all my ills, or anyone else’s. But the more we express, the better it gets (in the long run, if not straight away).

And given human nature is how it is, we find resonance in each other’s words. We discover we aren’t alone. We’re all connected. So, what we write can benefit others. That’s a good thing!

But I’ve also learned the assault I started writing about was only a small part of the story – a kind of bookend really, to a certain era of my life. An era I’m learning I need to write about. That’s all connected, too.

In the last twelve months I’ve: started therapy, quit a stable (but soul-destroying job), spent five weeks in spiritual retreat, conquered the worst of my PTSD symptoms (although I’m far from symptom-free), gained and lost another job, had a second niece arrive, found new friends, started yoga teacher training and struggled with a very morbid attack of depression. And I’ve spent the better part of this year unemployed, surviving on a fraction of what I usually earn.

Seems I’ve been shedding one skin after the other, kinda like an onion and with just as many tears.

But none of it is disconnected, I’m convinced of that. Where we’re at is a result of where we’ve been. There’s no plot device that led me down this path.

Gotta say this much – it’s a glorious place from which to find my balance in life, and I know I can do it.

So, here’s to the next twelve months in my/everyone else’s journey.

And thanks everyone for reading!

~Svasti