Wrist discovery, practice, backbends

Aha!

I was reading Matthew Sweeney's book, re: injuries and rest, and found that he recommended turning the wrists slightly OUT, to address soreness there. The index finger points forward, rather than the middle finger. I did this, this morning, and found it quite marvelous in reducing wrist pain, hurrah!

Bhujapidasana was the pose which was hardest on the wrists, and while doing it, I also found out WHY this is true; a day of discoveries, no doubt.

Here's the backstory: on Friday's climbing, I also noticed soreness in exactly the usual "yoga spot" in the left hand, and that was curious, because I've always chalked that wrist pain up to PRESSING the hand DOWN, not to PULLING. The reverse movement should have avoided the strain, yes? So I had to re-think, and I realized that I'd been climbing a route full of SLOPERS. A sloper is a big, rounded hold, and climbing slopers is a bit like palming a basketball, or, if you're lucky, a softball. You can't "dig in" like you can on other holds, or even fingertip a crimper or something. A sloper has to be grasped with the ligament-strength of the WHOLE HAND. Once I realized that, I realized what kind of injury this is.

Bhujapidasana (at least, the full expression, with the chin down), requires me to "crimp" the floor; my fingers fold and my hands sort of grab the floor. Bakasana B (jumping from down dog) often requires the same thing. I think David Williams was once quoted as saying, "Anyone who balances on his hands with the hands FLAT, doesn't know how to do it." This "crimping" motion is a lot like climbing slopers; the whole hand activates, which also powers up the forearm, and you get more balance power out of the whole arm. And, just like climbing slopers, the "floor grab" makes my wrist sore. So it IS an overuse injury, but it's not a PRESSURE injury as much as it is a PULLING injury, just "floor pulling."

The remedy remains the same: pull less. Fewer slopers, continue to lay off handstands, find a way to ease Bhuja off.

Anyway, I had a great practice; good energy, really solid on breath pace, loving the "index finger points" adjustment for the wrists. I did jumps-back-and-through, which streamline the practice, and really only noticed tiredness around Marichyasanas C and D, and I'm usually a bit tired there anyway.

I am finally bending the right arm enough, in Garbha Pindasana, to firmly get both hands to the chin, and press the ears shut. That's been a LONG time coming.

Baddha Konasana was much deeper today, than yesterday; I was afraid that it too was retreating, but it's not. Chin to floor, beyond feet, in both folds.

Couldn't one-stick the rollups in Ubhaya Padangusthasana and Urdhva Mukha Paschimottanasana, but that's fine, that happens sometimes.

Bound Pasasana as usual, but it's tight and shallow, not big and twisty and pretty.

The Dhanurasanas really made me tired; a LOT of sensation in the back and, during the Parsvas, also in the hip flexors.

I didn't really do Kapo; I did an Ustrasana to begin, and then took my hands up, and just hung; breathing was beginning to get ragged, and the hip flexors were on fire with sensation. That was enough.

Three wheels, that's all: each one had this amazing circle of pulling, deep stretching, in the hip flexors, and the "ring of stress" made of the glute max and glute medius. I emphasize the inner thighs moving towards each other and this intensifies the stretch into the "ring of stress."

A pleasant closing series, and 25 breaths in Sirsasana, which is getting easier.

I cannot IMAGINE standing up from a backbend, even though I've had assisted standups and know the anatomy and have seen almost two dozen people stand up, seen it with my own eyes. It looks like something out of THE MATRIX, when I try to imagine doing it. It seems as realistically approachable as dodging bullets.

This isn't about frustration, it's just my actual perception. I can't freakin' imagine doing something that insane. This, of course, is hilarious, because I not only imagine, but DO insane things like put my foot behind my head and pop into arm balances and so forth, but we've talked about that before.

I really, REALLY want a teacher for dropping-back-standing-up. The teacher BELIEVES its possible, and that means I don't have to, and THAT is the hardest part.

Climbing. Yoga. Food.

On Thursday I did Primary up to Marichyasana C, and called it a practice. I simply was not in the mood for more. The wrist was kind of sore, but tolerable; it was just that my whole energy management system wasn't interested, so I let that be that.

On Friday, I finally admitted to myself that solitude (while partner is in London, particularly) is very very bad for me on all levels. Not that one should chalk this sort of thing up to this kind of armchair psychology, but I'm deeply extroverted, so I gain energy from human company, and I lose it to solitude. In the Indianapolis incarnation of my life, I am frequently low on human company (teaching fixes this, somewhat, and having my partner's company is ESSENTIAL to my sanity, here).

So, I decided that I would pack up and head to Bloomington, maybe to set some routes in the gym, and also to get books from the big library down there, for research projects that I've promised various people I would complete, this summer. I brought the yoga rug, just in case the urge struck.

I was in town for about two hours, on the rug, doing a really easy variation on Matthew Sweeney's "moon practice" (it's wrist-light) when I discovered that I'd totally spaced my climbing gear: all of it. Harness, shoes, all of it. So I'm there, kneeling on the mat, deciding to cut even my light practice short (because doing Camel pose created ripping sensations in the low belly and gave me vertigo in low lunge, afterwards), and I'm cracking up at how cleanly I totally forgot all of that stuff. Didn't even think about it once on the hour-long car trip down.

I took a nice long svasana, and got up, had lunch and drove down to the gym anyway. They let me rent shoes or whatever I need, for free, anyway, that's been the policy for years, and so I walked in and was talking to Jordan, the guy in charge that afternoon, and he said, they needed some new boulder problems on this giant overhanging feature that was built a couple years ago. Bouldering's NOT my specialty, but I set about it anyway, and learned some interesting things about how one must move the body, in order to efficiently STEP UP, on an overhanging wall. Usually, in vertical, gravity helps pull your hand DOWN onto the hold, but when you're overhanging, gravity seems to pull you BACK, and so you have to move to arrange your body not in an UP-DOWN orientation, but almost into a SIDEWAYS orientation, to keep from pumping out your forearms and pecs.

That's more information than you needed, but you're used to that now.

I put up four problems, which were thinky (as usual) but cool, and I liked them. Then, a guy I used to climb with, years ago, appeared, and we decided to pull some plastic in the big room. Hurrah! My usual "gang" of climbers tends to climb on Wednesdays, when I can't, because I can often only come down on Saturdays, when I do my grad-student-reading-group thing with my advisor. I'd almost forgotten that a whole gang of people I know, still climb in that place.

So, rarity of rarities, I had an ACTUAL climbing day! These were the goodies, which will probably be unintelligible unless you speak climbing (I can translate, ask me):

5.10c, full of high steps and hip-swinging step-ins. Got it in one go (which is common for me, that's about where my "on-sight" ability has been for years).

5.10c or d, full of sideways traversing movements and laybacks and backsteps.

5.11b, all slopers and dihedral (that's climbing for "corner") moves. Fun as all get out.

5.11c, slightly overhanging crimper-fest. Crimpers are small ledgy things on which you have to dig in with as many fingertips as you can. This route RULED, but it also handed me my ass. There were lovely technical moves, and sequence-based areas where it was just NOT possible to, say, step up right foot first. It HAD to be left foot, or else. I LOVE setting stuff like this, but, as usual, Rich sets me right out of the room.

5.11b/c, another sloperfest, with an actual HEEL HOOK (read: put heel on hold, and use the hamstring to crank yourself upward) on it. Not often you see THAT on a vertical toprope. It beat me up, but it was still fun.

I learned that I can still pull a wide variety of 5.11 moves, even though I barely have actual climbing days anymore, and still only set about two days a month. It's really pleasant to discover that I still have my age-old climbing strength and, as a guy pointed out, "substantial flexibility." Yeah.

While watching a dude climb up a big overhang, I was lying out on the floor, so I took each foot back, one at a time, and tucked it behind my head. Today, the right glutes and low back are all cranked up, but the left side of me is not. That's par for the course. I did 3 wheels after the crimpfest, and 3 more after the climbing day was over. LOVE backbending after a climbing or setting day. Mmm mm good.

Climbing and transformation:

Now admittedly, I pull plastic, not stone, but I find climbing to be DEEPLY transformative. Technical movement is, essentially, dance. You learn to think with the hips, not the head. On a couple of the routes I climbed yesterday, I got quiet, tuned into breathing, centered, focused, marched onward. I fell off things effortlessly, with no anger, no resentment (I learned to do that years ago, and it definitely improved my climbing: no emotional leaks!). There are problems to solve, footholds to look for, cognition-physicality-power-grace, all at once, instantaneous.

Sound like advanced asana, at all?

I work up a pouring sweat, every muscle becomes liquid, the mind locks in as it does in few other situations. I get super flexible and I ENJOY bending, after a climb. No pressure, no "you have to learn to stand up," no FUTURE.

Best of all, no FUCKING SOLITUDE. Sorry; I apologize to the introverts, but really, solitude makes me feel like I'm being emotionally starved to death, and I resent that I have so much of it here.

So I find climbing to be just delicious, full, chewy transformation. And more than that, it's EASY transformation. Pull, swing, step, stand up, onward. Like Larry once told me, but regarding yoga, "The climbing DOES YOU."

For me, it's very, VERY similar to an asana practice in a full classroom or a workshop environment. People, energy, sweat, movement. And then you chill on the floor and everything is just dance and wonder and eternal present.

Now then:

I don't write a lot about bodies and food and so forth, first because I'm a firm believer in what Larry said: "Dude, if you have a six-a-week ashtanga practice, you can eat WHATEVER YOU WANT." Second, I don't feel like I have any kind of special knowledge which would allow me AT ALL to prescribe what anyone should or should not eat. I have my own experience, but I have a MONSTER metabolism and, apparently, a pitta constitution (ayurvedically speaking), and so STILL, I don't feel like my experience with food can be, really, of any use to anyone but me.

I have learned some things: foods to avoid, just for heaviness, include spinach-artichoke dip, cream cheese, meat chili, and overindulgence in seafood.

Perhaps suprising things which I like and which like me: whole milk, yogurt, bread (but not bagels, as much), pasta, virtually any cheese which is NOT of the cream variety, and beer.

My metabolism burns through bread/grain products like a California wildfire in a heavy breeze. I find that pasta both feels entirely nourishing, and also light in weight, nearly regardless of how much of it I eat. Cream cheese feels like meat in my belly, which I think is strange, because all other variations of cheese do not, and that includes the processed 18-ounce blocks you can buy in American supermarkets.

Whole milk, particularly after practice, is like a warm bath in pure love. If I've practiced in the afternoon or night, beer feels the same way. I think that these loaded beverages really answer the heat of practice, in me. If you will, they seem to BALANCE the blazing light-and-heat of practice. Yogurt, like pasta, I find nourishing and also quick-to-pass. It can NOT stand up to my metabolism. I also have bottomless love for ice cream, and likewise, I find it lightweight.

Veggie burgers, of any variety I've ever tried (even the ones which are determined to approach meat texture as closely as possible) are a STAPLE. I have GREAT LOVE for veggie burgers. I also LOVE nightshades, which maybe is typical, since pittas are supposed to avoid them: tomatoes? eggplant? There can NEVER be enough.

Other great loves: raw nuts. raisins. most leafy greens, carrots in any form, the occasional potato (now THAT is something I've historically loved, for which I seem to be losing some appetite), any kind of berry whatsoever (strawberries probably come first on the list), peas (favorite, FAVORITE veggie EVER), peanut butter, beans of virtually any kind, curried anything, salsa, garlic (MUST have garlic), citrus fruit, olive oil, honey, green peppers (second favorite veggie EVER), mushrooms, ANYTHING with crust (pizza, pie of any kind, artisanal bread, ANYTHING; I will cross molten lava, if there's crust on the other side).

Do I eat nonsense? Sure, I'll eat whatever-chips if they're in the house (potato, nacho, tortilla, whichever) and I'll munch on cookies if they show up, too. I eat french fries when served them, and peppermint-chocolate snackies are the hardest thing in the world for me to resist.

It seems that as long as I avoid meat and apparently any kind of cream cheese (but BRIE somehow is fine), I can avoid heaviness in my belly. I have found, perhaps predictably, that if I don't practice or climb for a while, it's MUCH easier for heaviness to accumulate. Duh. Also, yes, veggies are lighter than anything else, I've noticed this. But particularly if I've been climbing or if I'm doing double practice days, I NEED pasta or whole milk or beer or something.

So far, my yoga/climbing/transformation practice does not need me to become food-ascetic, at least that I can tell. To eat less than I do, would seem a denial, and it would backfire. So be it.

Tales of Bohemia: Pink Floyd and Travis Bickle.

I figure that, since I'm in an autobiographical mode, and the universe could use some lightness after last installment, that I would fill in some of the surrounding years both before 1995 and after 2003.

Have you noticed that the early 1990s have, for some, the same mythologized nostalgia as the late 1960s? No, that's not quite right...better to say that, for some of those for whom the late 1960s are ONLY nostalgia and mythology, the early 1990s are an ATTEMPT at an impossible recovery...but witness the harsh differences between, say, Woodstock 1969 and Woodstock 1994...

Anyway:

Tales of Bohemia. I went to a small private college in Connecticut for five years, from fall 1988 to spring 1993. I was a nice, clean-cut little thing in 1988, and was made like a marathoner, and had all of the predictable neuroses of a lay Catholic Irish kid from the suburbs of a big northeastern city.

I took up a Russian major, and even went to a 7-week immersion in Vermont in the summer of 1990, where a woman sitting on a sunny rock handed me a short book called "The Metamorphosis," which cracked open all of the bohemian impulses I'd had at great distance and in embryonic form, for a few years.

I hear that there are "Ayn Rand" people and "Kafka" people. I, to this day, have never read a single WORD of Ayn Rand, but I have read every single letter of Kafka, with the exception of his letters, that I've been able to lay hands on. If the transformation could be chalked up to literature, he would be the start of it.

I met my first hippies up there in Vermont, two women from the southwest, who were all tie-dyed and anti-Bush I and anti-Reagan, and who GOT AWAY WITH IT. I started growing my hair out, like I meant it, that year. I acquired Birkenstocks (which was, to be true, what all the good preppy kids were doing in college about then).

I started playing guitar in 1989, because I had this idea that being "the man with the guitar" would lead to all kinds of fame and love and attention. I faked that mythological illusion until, to my great suprise, I turned into that guy. By 1991, I could rip off the same Beatles and Zeppelin riffs that EVERYONE can rip off at 20. Debates were held as to the exact way to do "Over the Hills and Far Away." I cultivated a not-very-healthy-at-all disrespect for authority. I only wanted to obey what I thought was productive, and I didn't at all want to obey anything that simply seemed authoritative for authority's sake. This made office work interesting.

I started learning about the actual events of "the 1960s." This was easy on campus, because more than a few authentic old hippies ran for the shelter of The Academy in the 70s and 80s, and they wound up in private colleges like the one I went to. So I learned about Kent State and Nixon and stuff like that. I heard about Timothy Leary and MLK and Reagan's gassing of non-violent protesters in California.

This made careerism difficult; the Russian major I had declared, was turning significantly more serious than I was. It would have been a brilliant career move: can you imagine where a Russian major in 1992 would have led? Oh well.

I took my first unregulated chemical in February, 1991, with punk rock friends who were big into Fugazi and the Pixies and Jane's Addiction. It wasn't hard for me, with my Zeppelin and my Floyd, to adjust to this. I also discovered a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche at this time. We spent probably six hours that first night, realizing that we'd never REALLY SEEN light on trees before. Our humble group had a matriarch, two years younger than I was, who had been more around-the-block than the rest of us put together. She was totally bisexual, very experienced in all things chemical, well-read (but preferred Balzac, of all things), and brilliant and SOAKED in irony. One time she had beaten a would-be rapist with a fencepost. Six times, she had tried to kill herself. She had scars and stories and, like many of these punkish kids I met, had been put on Lithium by parents who couldn't handle her. I found her company (which only ever extended to conversation) to be something akin to enlightenment itself. Meeting her pulled me out of the suburbs.

For my 21st birthday, in May 1991, my friends acquired for us, tickets to a Jane's Addiction show in Springfield, Massachusetts, a nice small venue. I did my first crowd-surf. There was so much sweat and carnality at the pop-culture altar that band constructed, that booze was not really an option. Half a beer after that show, made me feel all dehydrated and unhealthy.

I spent the summer in my parents' house, reading and thinking and finding suburbia in the early 1990s to be very, VERY small and contained, indeed. That summer, the matriarch and I went to the very first Lollapalooza, and I saw Henry Rollins (who had opened for JA in Springfield), Nine Inch Nails, and another Jane's show.

The next year--my senior year to be--was all about the inner quest and painfully NOT about grades, as transcripts show. In September, two friends and I decided to "go hardcore" and take the chemicals the BIG BOYS take. The apparently permanent spinal-fluid alterers. To do this, we called up a guy who was visiting his family in Greenwich, Connecticut, and we road-tripped down there and spent all afternoon at an "oyster festival," a big, tented, outdoor party. It was great. We were down there for hours, and eventually our man delivered our package to his own streetside mailbox, and we picked it up, and jetted back to the city.

Around midnight, we put on "Supernaut," a Black Sabbath cover by a band called 1000 Homo DJ's (an offshoot of Ministry) and ate the cute little pieces of paper decorated with purple peace signs. We read Dante's Inferno to each other, climbed roofs, watched the sun rise, ran hither and yon, found ourselves completely IMPERMEABLE to liquor, and had other adventures.

We played HARD that year. Booze, chemicals, mixing and matching, pushing the limits of functionality, trying to throw consciousness as far as it would go, just to see what it was capable of. I visited the abyss probably 3-4 days a week, the quest being to see how OUT I could get, and still converse aptly, still function, trying to, as Antonin Artaud would have put it, "signal through the flames." I remember one Wednesday morning at about 10 am, feeling my belly craving booze. At that point, I decided to dry out. A week later, I was back at it. I visited "the spirit world" at least 30 times that year. Maybe as many as 60, but DEFINITELY at least 30. You never come ALL the way down, after developing a habit like that.

The soundtrack was wide and varied: Ministry, Pink Floyd's "Meddle" (I have done EVERYTHING in the human catalog to that album), Pixies, the Dead, Moody Blues, Sex Pistols, Pavement, Bauhaus, Zeppelin, Jane's, some grunge band from Seattle (hah!), the Sugarcubes, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Jethro Tull, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride, on and on and on and on and on.

Nietzsche and LSD is about the most powerful cocktail for transformation that I've ever come across, perhaps prior to my discovery of ashtanga. Ashtanga is considerably less dangerous than those two mixed together. Of course, as you know, launching out of intense emotional compression is also a good vehicle, but sure as hell not one I'd recommend if you can avoid it.

The next year, 1992-3, I decided to "get my act together." The Russian major, like an African violet, had died from neglect. I put together nine courses (in a twelve-course year) and pulled a major out of my hat in something called "Comparative Literature." It required a lot of theater courses: theatrical style, 20th century survey, and so forth. I also took a course in "Symbolists, Aesthetes and Decadents," and discovered a MAJOR hero of mine, one Arthur Rimbaud. "To become a seer, one must undergo a total derangement of all the senses." SING IT!!

But, while my old habits persisted at a somewhat lesser volume, I was able to pull a 3.4 GPA for the year and get out of college, along with a very fun-turned-traumatic relationship that spring, which taught me how much I knew about my intellect and my philosophy and how very LITTLE I knew about my capacity for ACTIVE self-knowledge, intimacy and relating to ACTUAL humanity.

From way over here in 2008, I see now how my first venture into bohemia really left me wide open for what happened in 1995.

And now we jump way, way forward from 1993, to about 2003-4. The return of my bohemian days was different from what it had been in the early 1990s.

I'd treated my late marriage much the same way that I'd treated my 90s bohemia: light on actual body action, high on reading, on concept, on intellectual analysis. The post-leaving panic attack was a lesson. Climbing continued that lesson. The emotional honesty and the sensation-fest of the early 2000s also taught that lesson. People are REAL; nerves REGISTER things. Concept, yes, but BODIES, EMOTIONS, REALITY. To be able to be kind, to realize words can be hurtful, to start understanding the world of ACTUALITY in terms of ENERGY.

In summer 2003 I was finding it difficult to get out of a sustained depression, and so I drove from Bloomington to Indianapolis and got pierced (which was something I'd been considering; it wasn't as impulsive as it sounds). Talk about WHITE PAIN! Instant endorphin rush, SUPER-high. It did exactly what I wanted: put me back in my body immediately, ripped through the cognitive haze like a laser. I still wear the jewelry I got then, and it's not on my face.

Also in summer 2003, facing the kind of credit card debt that only carefree living can accumulate, I got a night job, playing desk clerk at a really uptight, wanna-be Victorian bed and breakfast. What a lesson in postmodernity! The architecture was heavy on the gingerbread, and the quilts were all flower prints, and the color tone was all yellow and off-white cream. Sometimes drunk students would wander in at 2 am, and we'd talk about banking and capitalism or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Fun. This job allowed me to "derange the senses" with insomnia. I spent many weekend nights driving around Bloomington, processing depression and anger. I watched crowds of men come out of strip clubs, and I'd try to analyze their dress and body types and gestures. I raced trains through wooded landscape.

I also, in the name of money, began giving plasma for $25 dollars a shot (this was before the piercing adventure). So my schedule was something like this: go to bed at 3 pm. Wake up at 10 pm. Go to work, out at 7 am. Go to the plasma donation center, all full of coffee, insomniac and dehydrated, and have them drain me and then replace me. Get cash. Go home, have adventures, probably climb (yes, hours after having a needle in my arm). Repeat. In the fall, I started teaching back-to-back sections of English Composition, at 3 pm and 5 pm, and so I'd wake up at 2 pm, go to school, teach, teach again, have supper, work all night, have breakfast, go to sleep, repeat.

So when my current partner met me, I was a polyamorous insomniac with fresh piercings, a dissertation to write, and a climbing habit that would not quit. In a way, it's a miracle we persisted.

That fall, again out of "being in the body," I spent $200 of the accumulated plasma money and got my first and only ink: a big (4" across) eight-pointed star figure between my shoulder blades. It's something that I'd been drawing forever, since I was a teenager, on everything. Notebook doodles, guitar case (in Liquid Paper), everywhere. This ended the plasma donation, and I like the way that the donation of my bodily fluids "transformed" via capitalism into a now-embodied figure of something which I'd been cognitively "creating" and replicating, everywhere. The eight-pointed star is actually one line, which ducks and dodges under its own limbs, and so it's technically a circle, related (apparently) to the age-old cycle of planting and harvest, and the goddess Innana (among others). Regeneration, is what I usually tell people it means.

Regeneration, indeed.

I began collecting things in 2003. From Ebay, I bought about two dozen CDs, almost all grunge; hard, angry music. In part, I wanted to "catch up" on things to which I'd listened, but I found, as I acquired these cd's, that they became a sort of "anger storage" system. Nirvana's "Nevermind." Pearl Jam's "Vs." My Bloody Valentine's priceless "Loveless." Stone Temple Pilots. Live. Stuff like that.

I also began overtly seeing my life experience in terms of what I'll call "archetypes" of masculinity. This is chewy and weird. I've never related easily to any masculine role models--in the eighties, how could you? On the one hand you have the Cure, and on the other, Schwarzenegger? What the fuck were they thinking???

The archetypes that began to sing to me were what film scholars call the "outlaw heroes," and the outlaw hero is actually a common, very very common, character in Hollywood. We love this guy. John McClane, from "Die Hard"? All of the Rambos and the action heroes of the 80s? Most of what Denzel has played? The main character of Memento? Almost ALL of the major men from 70s Hollywood? Nearly anything played by Al Pacino? Clint Eastwood, anyone? Film noir? Humphrey Bogart? Freakin' FIGHT CLUB? This is a DEEP tradition in Hollywood, and perhaps American, masculinity.

I bought a Fight Club poster, with Brad Pitt all cut and topless, looking down at some hapless victim he's just mangled. I bought a Taxi Driver poster, with DeNiro extending a hand full of the big magnum pistol he's just bought. Down the side runs the little monologue about "No more destroyers of my body. Every muscle must be tight." You already, probably, know of my GREAT love for Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY.

This archetype is both about violence, and not. Cormac McCarthy, of all people, rings in here as well. So does the story of Ruben "Hurricane" Carter and Dylan's wonderful song. "I will transform my body into a weapon." It wasn't that I wanted to do violence, or to emulate it, but there's a mythology to these violent, somehow nameless men. Injustice, necessary focus, intensity, transformative drive. Marginalized, alive, predator cunning.

I spent all of high school being the too-skinny kid who lacked both physical and social power. I identified with that, I believed it, I made it true by not turning it over. Nietzsche taught me not to do that anymore. LSD taught me that I too was part and parcel of God himself. This long hair and sweat and sensation-mongering taught me that if I want something, it's right to ask for it, and often, honesty leads to gratification. I got in deep, deep touch with the animal body, the blood moving, beads of sweat individually developing from each pore, the explosive electricity of which bodies are capable, the way the mind is not separate. Climbing taught me that I am powerful, very very strong indeed. I still can't quite believe it all, the old samskaras of self-doubt remain. Is this all a dream, this power, this Fight-Club-looking, Travis-Bickle tight-muscled frame?

And for all that power and that Lion-predatorial earth-ruling archetypality, there's also getting to be reserve, there's getting to be peace and contentment in those closing Padmasanas. There is generosity and happiness. Something which is not, in its pleasure, also vengeance against the world, an irresistible assault on all ignorance and stupidity. There's getting to be self-possession, restraint.

I still love the image, in extreme-long-shot, of Gandalf and the Balrog tangled, pitching down toward the underground sea, lighting the cavern, but more and more, it becomes something that I witness, not something I'm still experiencing.

Did I mention that the Modern Language Association conference this December, at which I will almost certainly be interviewed by a few schools this time around in the job market, is in SAN FRANCISCO?

I think this bodes well, as this bohemian warrior tries to get a "real job."

How I got here: the story of 1995-2003.

As I will, apparently, be processing what I've referred to as "that bad relationship from the past," in my backwardsbending, I wanted to tell some more of my legend. Remember that I think of myself as a Woodstock kid.

Some warnings about this: this isn't a pretty story. If you just like my asana posts, or if you're a casual reader, you may well want to leave this out.

More about this: I'm not going to claim that the following unpleasantness is bigger or badder than anyone else's. Whatever it is, that sits in your crown spot as the most unpleasant thing, IS. There's no competition about "my life is harder than yours," those are all parlor games for bored people who need their pain acknowledged as superior. There'll be none of that here. I'm going to take my BEST shot at being dispassionate about these events, but once they turn over in 2002, I'm going to likely get a bit more lyrical and mythological.

So here we go. Here's what I often meet in intense backwardsbending.

1995: I started graduate school in fall 1994, thinking I'd be some kind of literature scholar. I took a course on Pier Paolo Pasolini and his wonderful book _Heretical Empiricism_ and turned film student overnight. In January 1995 I took a course on Jean-Luc Godard, where I met an important book called _Society of the Spectacle_ by Guy Debord. I was 24.

1995: January. I took a course in basic French (100-level) and started dating the AI who was teaching it. There was energy; we ran with it. I moved out of her section of the course (those were the rules), and we had a Great Big Slice O' Fun for most of the spring semester. She was from New Jersey and had Catholic Republican parents, but claimed to be a sort of bohemian Deadhead type. It worked, and I liked the "subversion" of living under a Republican household, in tie-dye.

The salad days, as Nicolas Cage put it in _Raising Arizona_, came to an odd end in about May 1995. It had been wine women and song and a lot of time spent in various beds for about five months, and it had been magnificent, much the way that people who are in their 40s might mythologize "the twenties" as "those carefree days." The oddity of the end came like this: it became harder to have substantial conversation, and all forms of intimacy (emotional, physical, psychological, even intellectual) got rarer. That most mysterious, and yet common, of relationship problems.

We did maybe what a lot of people do: we worked harder and read more and were good grad students, and we stayed together. I moved into her place, due to financial clusterfucks regarding my old apartment and roommates. Occasionally we struck sparks and a flash of the old carefree days would reappear, and we'd ride that for a month or two, and then things would get oddly frustrating, the same "organic chasm of non-conversation" would seem to grow right up out of us. Strange, but there was too much fear to do anything about it, like break up. Sometimes we fought, quite ferociously, about the future of the relationship. I had gotten a taste for the bohemian life, sort of a cross between Ken Kesey's travelling bus and French cafe culture ala Surrealism, where brilliant starved artists drink wine and coffee and have sparkling conversation. She was turning more toward a familial future, with marriage and stability and kids, "once we get done here." Getting "done" with Indiana, with grad school's instability, maybe with our own instability, was a phrase that showed up at least a few times a week.

We should have known better, really.

We lived like that for a couple more years, going to grad school parties, imbibing a lot of booze, going down to her parents' condo in Orlando, Florida, being well-financed during school. A word about this financing: her father was president of a company, and he did it "old school," starting in the mailroom and everything. A real live Horatio Alger story. They voted Republican because their wallets demanded it. So while we were well-financed from her folks, the daughter was also psychologically "undercut," which first manifested itself in worry about money.

Here I need to get a bit tangential, and to explain what I THINK happened. The following is my first-hand research and my conclusion: this woman's mother was deeply, very deeply Catholic. Catholicism can be a mystical spiritual thing which can, potentially, enlighten its mystics. Catholicism can also be an ego-breaking hammer, which destroys the soul. It has DEEP violence within it. She also grew up poor and then became new rich. I think, after long exposure to seeing this happen, that said mother did not want her children (one female, one male) to abandon her; she worried about this. Out of fear, she clasped onto the children, emotionally, and knowingly or not, used Catholicism to undercut their egos, to sort of clip their wings, to (quite literally) keep them from flying away. She didn't trust familial love enough to grant them full independence.

So, despite our financing, we worried about money, because this woman's parents were giving us two voices: her father had a "let me know what you need" approach to money, but her mother had a "be careful, you need to save" ethic, which came with a VERY substantial guilt-load, of the order "bad children need money." It was a complicated net: the finances which came guilt-free from her father, came guilt-loaded from her mother, so that as the parents attempted to financially liberate us, they wound up SIMULTANEOUSLY committing their daughter to the "you're bad, you're unworthy" bin, PRECISELY because she wasn't financially INDEPENDENT, said independence being FORBIDDEN anyway, due to the fear of the mother, who imposed such fear via guilt, via Catholicism, and who mailed us this paradox with each deposit.

Female body image, you probably already know, is problematic in Western culture. The daughter began to gain weight as we "raged it down" in winter 1995. I figured out later, that being overweight was ALSO subject to the Catholic guilt complex imposed by her mother. It worked like this: "if you're overweight, you don't care about yourself, and so you're unworthy. Only unworthy people are overweight." They had done this sort of "I'm fine as I am/no you're not, you're unworthy" thing for TWO DECADES by the time I got into the picture; they could have this conversation with glances, without saying a damn word.

It is substantially more complicated and ugly than this: in the 1980s, the parents joined the local country club and did the whole golfing-with-business-partners thing, and the golf club didn't let in non-white people, and all of that. Real live conservative stereotypes. A lot of young prep school guys, sons of the nouveau rich, played at said club. One of them in particular was big into being the "virgin collector," of the daughters of these same nouveau rich. Imagine the anti-hero of Larry Clarke's film KIDS, but as a white prep school grad. Now imagine a certain overweight daughter, looking for emotional attention. She's not getting that from her always-busy father, and she's getting "you're unworthy" from the hyper-Catholic mother who is afraid of, herself, lacking emotional attention and love.

Can you see how it goes? She decides to play around with this guy, and his mode of operation is this: he calls her up from his house, or the club, and tells her to go to the liquor cabinet and start drinking vodka. He comes over, sometimes with a friend, and they see exactly how far she'll go, in order to have attention. This goes on for a few months at home, and continues into TWO YEARS of college. She would sometimes say, to me or even to a crowd, out in public, "Yeah, I was a slut in college." Sometimes she meant it more as a badge of pride, and sometimes she meant it more as a perjorative, levelled against all men everywhere.

Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin are famous for associating male desire with, essentially, rape. This is a big, bold streak of 1980s feminism (not the only one, but a big one). This woman that I was living with, more than a few times described her golf-club experiences as rape, but said, "I'm over that, now." Uh-huh.

After college, this woman I eventually married (more about that below) went to a big southern university for graduate school. Her taste in men continued in the same vein. Eventually she wound up with a guy 10 years her senior, who promised to marry her, but she found out he was cheating on her (apparently that was his M.O.; he cheated on everyone he got involved with), and so she "ended it." Except that most of a year later, she really wanted some sexual companionship, so against the advice of many of her friends, she called this guy up and had some fun, until he (as I heard it from her) raped her anally, against her will.

All of that history happened prior to 1994. THAT, my friends, is what I got involved with.

We staggered through our increasing inability to communicate, all the way to November 1997, when she insisted that we should "take the relationship further." I really had no idea what she meant; I always wanted the salad days back, and I got to the point where that was my bargaining chip. What could we do to return to the fun and light of the salad days? The going out and then the staying in all weekend? Essentially, she talked me into going ring-shopping and we "engaged ourselves," that's the most grammatically accurate way to put it. It really wasn't my idea, and while she talked it up as my idea (we even concocted a "suprise her with the ring" story), because that was HOW THIS WAS DONE, we both essentially did this in passive voice. We didn't know WHAT ELSE TO DO.

We got married on June 20, 1998. Not long ago, I watched the decade-anniversary of that date pass, with virtually no passion. Hardly any notice. Predictably, her parents had SUBSTANTIAL input as to how, when, where and what of the wedding, and so there was a golf-club reception, and a big chunk of my family came down to New Jersey and we had, really, a hell of a party. The party itself was great. The relationship was not.

My family is Emersonian Irish Easter-Christmas Catholics. They are big on self-determination, on nurture, on community and family. They are light on doctrine, and their inheritance of Catholic guilt comes mostly down to body-fear. They fear sickness and are completely silent on all aspects of sexuality. But they are, by and large, good people. They were ALL, and I mean ALL, instantly suspicious of the nouveau-riche flavor of my bride's mother, the golf-club mentality, the full embracing of exhibitionistic wealth after a youth full of fear and poverty.

We were invited to honeymoon in the Orlando condo, which I described as an "incestuous" idea (my thinking was this: ONE day we're not allowed to even BE ALONE together in that place, and NOW we have full sanction to get it going in the living room if we so desire? What the fucking fuck kind of fucking contradiction is THAT?). No accord was to be reached. The planning was left to me, and I suggested a site that I'd been mythologizing for fifteen years: how about San Francisco?

My first trip to SF was in late June and early July, 1998. I'd always wanted something from that town, and while I did visit City Lights, and sip Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, and so forth, I just couldn't find the THING that I wanted there. The ten-day tour, as you can probably expect, was many moons but no honey. This did not sit well with me: I got married, I made it OFFICIAL, and still no salad days?

I was stupidly immature about what I wanted, in those days. What I wanted, was January-to-April, 1995. I wasn't DONE with those days, when they vanished. So I spent seven years in a poisonous situation, trying to rediscover them.

On our return to the East and then the Midwest, I got an MA finished, finally, and undertook final coursework for the PhD. Conversational-emotional-sexual frustration continued to rise, but it was stuffed underground, classically repressed, because otherwise we would have had to confront our fear and our great mistake. We would have had to be honest. It was terrifying to be honest, so we ran and ran further into the corner, and as Kafka says, "the mouse turned around, finally cornered, and the cat ate it up." The only way to go was further away, to run from....what? Certain death? Were we THAT afraid of seeing ourselves in full light?

My emotional life began narrowing down to a combination of fear (of acting out, of being honest) and anger (the drive to act out, to be honest). Negativity everywhere; I read more, I drank more, totally to excess. Anything to get away from the narrowing emotional walls. I worked harder on school. Nothing helped. I got more and more numb, had to turn off sensors, nerves, thoughts, had to shut it all down. Nothing worked. Things became desperate. Outside, things looked as they always had. Family vacations, trips to Orlando, and so on. I avidly lied and dodged questions from my family; I was sarcastic or ironic at times, but I never approached real honesty. They STILL have no idea at all what went wrong, or what REALLY happened.

In October 2000 I went to a conference in Philadelphia, in order to become a better, more saleable professional academic. My hair had been cut short (from 1995's ponytail) in 1997. I did in fact go, and my conference paper given there, still sits on my CV. But I also paid for sexual companionship in that town; that was my first official act-out, to ease the desperation. The money was easy: no one was watching the income/out-go, financially. It was all about emotional desperation anyway, who'd miss a couple hundred bucks? The experience was marvelous, very, very fun. So at the age of 30, I officially became, to my thinking, "a normal married guy." I was cynical as hell about marriage, about masculinity, about normalcy, and I was LOADED with rage.

In 2000, I decided not to lie to myself any longer. I began studying the relationship avidly, like a sociologist on tour. I still lied to everyone else, but to myself, no more. I grew to hate the relationship, in toto. All parts of it. Online adventures began, and secrecy became the new thing to which I devoted all of my energy. If you check out online dating now, you'll see cute all-embracing sites like EHarmony and such. Back in the early 2000's, personals sites were edgier, more aggro, more feminist--women read stuff like BITCH and BUST magazine, women with minds full of second-wave feminist anger, trying to figure out how to make a third-wave path. I did a lot of corresponding with other angry people; I got and gave book recommendations, talked about relationships, talked about personal experiences, met a few people. ALL of this was on the sly. I EXCELLED in secrecy.

Everything I saw, heard or did became part of my academic analysis of my own life. Television, conversation, my wife's rhetorical constructions about how desire worked and such. I began teaching courses about my discoveries; in courses on English Composition, I made sure to include the readings on gender roles. I taught a course on popular culture which included Beavis and Butthead and Sex in the City. I found several VERY good friends with whom to actually talk about things, sort of an email therapy session. This was very good. I will never forget an English professor, veteran of a divorce and bad relationship, who sent me an email reading:

"If you leave, you will discover more toxic shit than you can possibly imagine seeing, right now."

By 2002, I was violently angry, ALL the time. Every minute. Do you know how much ENERGY that takes? The "get out of Indiana" lines continued: "You need to write this dissertation, so you can get me out of here and we can get a real life." A real life? Does that include the return of the salad days?

I think some time in the late 90s, I don't remember exactly when, I confronted my wife pretty explicitly about the what and why of our vanishing intimacy on all levels, and she said (I think now in some emotional dire straits), "Men are all the same, you're just like THEM" by which she meant the vodka guy and the grad school guy. That cut me ALL the way through. I didn't approach her for a CALENDAR YEAR after that.

We used to get checks from the student loans I was taking out, to the order of 5,000 dollars a semester sometimes, and we'd deposit them, and then they'd vanish in restaurant outings and clothing purchases, as we both tried to dam up the ever-leaking self-esteem which my wife was unable, ever, to sustain. She couldn't believe in herself, not even when she left grad school to take up a cooking career, which was what she really wanted to do. Her father was supportive; her mother was critical, arguing that "famous chefs aren't NEARLY as prestigious as famous academics." I probably owe 30-40 thousand dollars, from spending those checks on unbuildable self-esteem.

On December 10, 2002, I met an avidly polyamorous woman on campus, after a week of online mail. On December 15, 2002, I ended my marriage in a morning conversation, claiming that I was into stuff that was incompatible with staying married. My soon-to-be-ex argued with me on this point, saying she'd "do whatever." Eventually I just had to say no, over and over. The air turned to water. I packed a small bag in what had been our bedroom and got in a car and drove up and away, in slow motion, but with crystalline photograph-quality memories of the hills and sky (to this day I can see it all) to the apartment of said polyamorous woman, and had an anxiety attack, and told my story to her and then to a good friend of mine who had been a "therapy partner" online for a few years, and then to a few other people.

Huge parts of me died in the months after that, like a rain of stones that peeled off layer after layer of skin. I got a post office box, to be untrackable, unlocatable. On January 8, 2003, I bought a Saturn, which I still drive. Her name is Zelda. I stopped, entirely, drinking booze. I could barely eat, for about three weeks, and I dropped from my high weight of 190, to my regular 165, by early February.

I began keeping a daily journal, most of which is either lyrical poetry, trying to access reality, to "take a real breath," and the rest of which is wonderment that I was still alive. I would sit in a room, watching light on the walls and the wood panelling, and just stare, like someone in an LSD trance. YEARS of emotional paralysis started to fall off.

My new partner took me to a climbing gym in January, saying that the effort would be good for me. The hard pulling, the piercing of rough surface on my so-delicate palms, woke me up. What it woke up, predictably, was all that rage.

Every day, every minute sometimes, was sadness, rage, confusion, and that "staring novelty." I would touch the walls of elevators, in wonderment. I lost EVERY friend that my ex-wife and I had ever had; in two weeks, they had all chosen their sides, and looked at me in disdainful silence. Email outreach was met with polemics. I let them all go.

Dead man walking; climbing brought me back to life, let me get angry, let me deploy physical power, took me out of my head.

I stayed with this new partner, and, as was her condition, became avidly polyamorous. We played monogamy for a few months, at first, while she explained, as well as she knew, what the new rules would be, how it would work. She pointed me to essential books, like _How to be a Couple and Still be Free_. I was instantly attracted to the NECESSARY emotional honesty. When you're in a situation where the relationship is WIDE OPEN, you need to tell your partner what you're interested in, and you then NEGOTIATE who can do what, what you're thinking, feeling, if you're jealous, if you can handle it, and so on. There is NO ROOM for steady silence and quiet resentment. In a way, as hard as this was, it cured, or worked to cure, that long silent brewing violence of my marriage.

Someone asked me, "So, is polyamory like always twice as much fun or something?" I said, "Think of it like this: it's sometimes twice as much fun, but it is ALWAYS twice as much work." Nobody really liked that answer, but I felt that it was honest.

In February 2003, I participated in a rare "Men's Monologue" in the famous Vagina Monologues, with three other guys, and we discovered that we had ALL had relationships with women who had in some cases been savagely abused by men. This became the subject of our monologue. I wrote an ICE-cold summary of the prior seven years of my life, and it chilled us all to the bone in the first public reading, with the brainstorming group. We performed our monologue for three nights, and on the third night, some random guy from the audience said to me, "Thanks man, I needed that."

In March 2003 I was largely responsible for a campus tour made by Jill Nagle, one of the West Coast's famous "sex radicals." I was also behind the campus tour of a film called "Hot and Bothered: Feminist Pornography." I hung out with the Feminist Majority Leadership Foundation, and in May I went (with a trans-man-to-be) to a GenderPAC conference in Washington, D.C. and met Riki Anne Wilchins. In June 2003, my partner and I went to, of all places, San Francisco, and Marin, where I met Carol Queen and had some email correspondence with the Grande Dame of sex radicality, Annie Sprinkle. Many adventures were had. Not all of it was roses; there were occasions in March and April and May, of INTENSE jealousy and difficulty with polyamory, but it was what I'd chosen to do, so that was that.

In August 2003, I met the woman I now live with, and elected to do monogamy. I like that my monogamy, currently, is CHOSEN, is VOLUNTARY.

I am allergic to lying to myself, these days. I still climb and set in that gym. I didn't start a yoga practice until about June, 2004, and no ashtanga til July.

Happy almost anniversary, ashtanga practice.

I started writing the dissertation, finally, in fall 2003, and I finished it in March, 2007, one month before I ran out of time in April 2007.

Booze and I get along, still.

In May 2007, I found the magic in SF that I'd been looking for and fantasizing about since I was 14. It was my third trip out there.

In November 2002, I had my hair cut. Since then, I've had it cut a total of seven times. My ponytail is a sign of a rough period of my life, a long time ago.

In spring 2003, I pawned my wedding ring for $25 in Bloomington, and went downtown, to buy myself something I would REALLY wear every day. I bought a black hat, in tribute to the hats I used to own in college, the FIRST time I decided to be a bohemian. These hats had, gradually, like my long hair, disappeared as my marriage had gone on. When you meet me, you'll probably see me in a black hat, and it is THAT black hat.

Much of my capacity for ignorance died in December 2002. People who meet me now, never think this story is true. I don't look capable of it, and now, I'm not. It's like when I try to convince yoga classes that I too, once could not touch my toes. People just can't imagine it. But it's all true.

There's still plenty I've left out of this novel, but that's the story. When I have intense emotional release in backwardsbending, often it's a release of this business.

If I can gain equanimity about this, I can gain equanimity about anything.

Light practice, wrists, and the past.

Light practice today: Primary to Purvottanasana, 3 bridges, closing. Nice. Some stiffer than usual (body flexible, mind stiff??) but quite pleasant. Then morning errands (which demanded said light practice) and now it's all done.

Wrists: the other wrist is beginning to get sore, which means that the new first priority is to get these healthy again. If this means "take it up, set it down, walk back to chaturanga" all week or longer, so be it. I don't want to go to Minnesota in three weeks with sore wrists and try to handle a led Intermediate and four days of Mysore-style. Minimal arm balances, no handstands, modifications as necessary.

The past: I have further thoughts on yesterday's backbend emotional eruption. First, it's not the only incidence of that. Whenever I really crank my backbends (of any kind), intense emotions come up out of my low abs, in those "white lines of release" that I saw in my mind's eye yesterday, and there is often shaking and loss of breath pace and some chilling out in a child's pose or other easy position, while it all processes. This seems to be par for the course, on intense backbending.

With sufficient practice, it will pass. But here's my suspicion: yesterday I sort of "felt" voices from the past, the way some people talk about the "inner child." Some experiences and memories accompanied that gigantic emotional release, and I can't say that I "saw" thing x or y, but I FELT emotional energy freed from my old deeply fucked-up relationship of the late 1990s. It's the same as when you're having a dream, and you see your living room, but somehow you KNOW you're in Paris, even though what you see doesn't correspond to it.

There was physical-emotional-energetic intensity, and I simply KNOW that part of what released there, well beyond muscles or fascia, was old energy stored, held, in my continuing disdain for the ignorance and badness of that relationship.

This means that as I work with standing up from the wheel and Kapotasana and so forth, the REAL quest, the HARDEST part of that, will be letting go not of tight fascia, but of (if you will) TIGHT MEMORIES, a "clinging" to hating those old days and that old scene.

The sensation of "freedom" yesterday was very much of the type where you feel lighter, happier, and free-er, after a good cry or after finally throwing up. That was a CATHARTIC freedom, not a freedom from restriction, a freedom from "the rules" or "the method" or anything like that. It was a freedom from holding, from a sort of self-imposed safekeeping, emotional constipation, maybe (to put it bluntly).

In 1993 (the evening of October 31 to be specific), my appendix half-exploded, releasing a wave of toxins into my bloodstream. I woke up in shaky, disoriented sweats, with alternating (wildly alternating) hot and cold sensations, and I made my way downstairs and looked in a mirror and watched the sickness pass. Eventually I could "recognize myself" in my eyes again, and then doctors were called and the next day they took the little bugger out, and I still have the scar.

The catharsis of yesterday reminded me of THAT. NO ONE would found a power yoga school on THAT kind of so-called freedom or "liberation." What would you call it? "Freedom from being about to barf" yoga?

So, these backbends, standing up, Kapo: the main reason I pursue these as hotly as I have been for the past two weeks is because they're NOT DONE in Indiana, not anywhere. THE ONLY people who drop back in yoga classes are flexy women who remember the skill from the age of 6. I'm serious. It isn't taught, it isn't done, and it isn't worked toward. The STANDARD setting of Indiana yoga as I've seen it (and I've seen quite a bit) is that you do the wheel, and you work toward getting the arms straight. THAT is the quest here. And that is TOTALLY COOL, unless you're the one weirdo who wants to teach himself to stand up and do Kapo.

So: if I allow my backbending practice to settle in to virtually any part of the Indiana yoga community, I too will eventually devalue dropping back, I'll just gradually lose my taste for it, I won't be able to sustain the effort such work takes.

Therefore, I quite visibly and loudly crank it up to Crazytown. It's going to be a solo flight anyway, so I've made it AS SOLO as I can GET IT. If people ask me why I'm doing it, I'll probably tell them that I'm trying to "put down the past" by intensifying my back-bending, those poses which ready one for the future.

It already is largely not about getting pose Q or taking my hands off the ground. The emotional release is so much more intense than the work of the muscles, that it's turning, already, to being about my inner life. Is that "surrender"? It's hard for me to talk about surrender, since I always know that it's my efforts that lead, almost inadvertently, unconsciously, to a state of surrender for which I did not aim. Patience works the same way. I hate being consciously patient, but apparently I can work myself, sort of from the inside out, INTO patience.

I like the way that the yoga practice subverts me from within.

Now if I can just subvert my hatred of my own ignorance, past ignorance which I can never "fix." See how Jedi Knight this sounds?

In the mood (for Kapo), tiredness, openings, monkeys

The rug and I hit the back yard. The sun is shining, the sky is largely blue. Again, it is stone beautiful. I smell of mosquito repellent; tis the season. Primary: easy, light sun salutations, a sort of "mind-absent" Utthita Hasta, which made the pose easier than ever ("don't think!"), and big, slow, attentive vinyasa.

SLOW vinyasa? Yes, my friends, slow vinyasa. My right wrist is off-and-on sore and has been since late February, when I did too many not-yet-warmed-up arm balances, for a poster for a workshop. The only way, I think, to fix this, is to attentively put weight on my hands. So every jumpback took about three whole seconds, to take it up, lean forward, swing it through, and extend. This lack of ballistics leaves me with a still, but less, sore wrist. Plus, it changes the emphasis in the seated sequence from "forward bend, next" to "some pose or other, VINYASA, next," which I like.

But this isn't what I came on to write about: I was, again, pretty tired by the Konasanas, but persisted. Breathe, move, slow, consistent. Chakrasana. Down dog. Jump through. A bit of an auto-pilot experience, more like dialing down the complaining voice of the ego, "we can't, we're tired, take backbends here, meow meow" and so forth. Setu bandhasana. Chakrasana. Vinyasa. Jump through. Squat. Pasasana. Do; don't think.

I gave good attention to every backbend, not only through the start of Intermediate, but to each up-dog between poses. Point feet, tailbone tucks, ribs rise, belly sinks; inner thighs think themselves toward each other, shoulderblades back and down. Bhekasana began to make its way into the thoracic spine. Dhanurasana, at my urging (looking up), got bigger and began to get active both higher in the spine AND lower in the abs. Same for the Parsvas. I was getting so much action in the spine that Ustrasana wasn't quite comfortable at first. This has happened before (because Dhanurasana is one of my key poses; part of what needs to open in me, opens THERE).

I did Ustrasana twice, first taking the heels, then taking the toes, seeing which bends the spine more. It turns out that heels does more, but it's REALLY necessary to look up, and to sort of take the sternum up with the chin. Laghuvajrasana and I remain friendly; go back, head firmly to ground, five, come up. It's a strength move, which I have learned that I have in some abundance.

And then Kapo. Heh. I started it in Ustrasana, got as big a bend as I could possibly imagine getting (for now), took the hands over, hung for a breath, extended the hands, hung for a breath, dropped, hands to rug. I don't know where they were, I just know they were flat. I pressed the arms as straight (still well-bent) as they'd go, and did a Kapo B, to see if I could walk the hands in. I could not. I asked the bend to move to the front body, out of the lumbar. It did. I FELT two lines of white energy blaze out of the low abs, WAY down by the pubic bone, diagonals linking that to the outer hips, and let the whole pose go.

This energetic moment led to one of those backbending semi-breakdowns you hear about people having. I sat up from something looking like Supta Virasana, and sitting up was too much, so I took sort of a child's pose Virasana and breathed and sort of laugh-cried for a few MINUTES. Minutes! It was a bit of both emotional reactions, and I can't separate it into one or the other. I saw images from the past, got clear emotional readings, like one of those visions that Frodo has throughout Jackson's three movies.

When I could move and breathe and focus again, I laid back into a big deep Supta Virasana, and it felt good. I sat up, slowly stepped into a right-leg-front Hanumanasana, and almost did the full expression; it's as close as I've ever been. Same with left leg front; great, big, massive stretch in the right hip flexors.

I can't recall exactly how my thinking or process went, out of the backbend "zap," can't clearly recall my time in "backbend outer space" as someone once called it, but I know this is progress.

A word on progress: I'm NOT sure that this is progress toward "getting Kapo." This is good. (Good?) Yes, it's good. This is progress toward getting away from the past (certain elements of the past are EXTREMELY HEAVY) and toward a sort of "surrender," by which people usually mean "surrendering the ego" or "surrendering the pose you like." That's not what I experienced today. The surrender was more like freedom, which has, I'm sure you can tell, a MUCH more positive connotation than "surrender" does. It's not simple word play: the feeling was FREEDOM, not SURRENDER.

Not a physical sensation, exactly, or better, to the degree that I DID have physical sensation, it was even moreso energetic and emotional "sensation" (as much as that's possible; call it "subtle body," that makes it work).

It took me a LONG time to set up for a backbend, and when I did, it was all back to gross body, muscular effort: two wheels, which were nice and big, but sort of energetically "uninteresting." I asked the abs to get in on them, and for the energy to kick in, but it was doing other stuff and it ignored me like a cat in a sunny window.

Later, I will take some wheels, and the energy will be better behaved. After all, I'm teaching tonight (as usual).

No closing, I didn't have it in me. This energy experience blew the whole practice wide open, and that's fine. I'd rather have this, than a standard practice which doesn't allow for it.

The keys seem to be:

1) Put the ego to sleep with a certain degree of physical exhaustion; let the eyes sit back (Navasana is good for this);
2) Understand backbends as energetic, above all else (that includes up-dog);
3) Bend the spine, above all else; think with the back of the body.

This brings openings, and all openings that aren't joint-pain are probably good, even if they are, in a sense, sort of cataclysmic, as this one was. I imagine that soon I'll still be able to backbend and close, through one of these.

I think that people who are natively flexible enough to bend into Kapo are completely incomprehensible to me: how is it, how can it POSSIBLY BE, human to be able to bend into that? This stands, even though I've seen, with my own eyes, numerous people bend into that pose with what looks like NO effort at ALL.

The answer to this, of course, is to study my own alien superpowers: for example, I can, nearly AT WILL, put my hands on the ground, put one knee against the upper arm, and kip up into an Eka Pada Bakasana. Anytime, anywhere, with virtually no effort.

Yes, we are all aliens. All of us. It's nice, in a way.

First Corollary of Pointed Focus: You cannot use teaching as practice, anymore.

Now that I have pointed focus in my asana practice (backwardsbending), I find that I cannot use teaching as a "modified" practice anymore, which I frequently did, during my combined 3-job days of "work full time, teach art history at night, and STILL teach 4-5 yoga classes a week." Teaching was a refreshing, free opportunity, to finally practice, in those conditions.

Now, it won't do. I need my own practice, full as it can get, Primary and to Kapo, with whatever recreational backbending experiments I see fit. This is lesson one.

Today was all about errands, automobiles, WD-40, and cat litter. Fun stuff, necessary stuff, readying for the partner to go to London for two weeks on a research trip. Householding speaks louder than practice sometimes.

The week:

teach yoga Monday night; take vinyasa class (much-loved) Tuesday night; teach yoga Wednesday night and Thursday night; take Friday off (well, except for Primary). Teach yoga Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon. Again, teach Monday night (and then subbing gig ends). So on and so forth.

Attempt to find work, as August will soon come calling, with student loan debt, for which right now I have no, absolutely no, funding. It's good to be able to see future need, with time to act.

Seated vinyasa, backbends in the Village

Two hours ago I finished my workshop on the vinyasa of the Primary series. Seven students, four of whom I think are yoga teachers in various places, and so it's always good to have more ashtanga-rific-ness spread 'round in the city.

We covered all the essential vinyasa movements: the jump back, the jump through, even the "cheating" exits called "clipping" (which are essentially eka-pada-bakasana from tiriang mukha and/or from any of the marichyasanas), the tittibhasana-bakasana exits from Bhujapidasana and the Kurmasanas, and chakrasana.

It was a big sweaty joyful thing and I liked it. I adjusted a bunch of poses, pulled people vertical in chakrasana, had people doing "grab-ass-ana," as some instructors of this kind of workshop call it, and so on. It was good.

I ran some errands in the arts-and-scene village in which the studio is located, and wound up thinking, "hey, I'm totally warmed up, how about some backbends?" So I pulled over to a grassy strip next to a movie theater and popped off three wheels, a deep Ustrasana and a Kapo attempt, from the Ustrasana.

About fifteen minutes later, across the village, I pulled over a corner of some guy's back lawn and popped off three bigger wheels. I wanted to start making myself believe that I am someone both who CAN and who WILL backbend AT WILL.

This will become my modus operandi for however long it takes to get backbends to be what I'd like them to be. Anytime, anywhere, as long and as many as it takes.

I figure it this way (I've always thought like this): there is a thing to be achieved. Either that thing is impossible (i.e., cannot be achieved NO MATTER WHAT) or else that thing is possible, but may require extremes of effort, surrender, cash, dedication, or other things. IF a thing is possible, and one puts in the proper KEY, that thing UNLOCKS.

One-pointedness cometh. Don't forget, the summer is the Lion's season, and the Lion is the unwavering force. I'm a Taurus, and we excel at one-pointedness. We are stubborn people.

You and me, backbends. I'm plenty strong, I'm plenty flexy in many places. I can let the vast majority of my practice ride on auto-pilot, while I point all attention to backbending. You transform this time. This time, we clip the next piece on this particular lead route. I want this enough to make substantial sacrifices and untold effort, for it to happen. Whatever metaphor you like: shedding the skin? Walking the coals? Surrendering the will? Whatever. LITERALLY, whatever this takes.

See how, as I said elsewhere earlier, ashtanga maintains contact with the transformative drive? Transformation ALWAYS, for me, begins with an act of oceanic will, an announcement of Wagnerian character and Nietzschean flavor, and then that will sets off some kind of cosmic pool ripples and the ACTUAL transformation comes from deep UNDER and WITHIN, and subverts the very ego which was in fact NECESSARY to announce the eruption in the first place, and THAT's how I know it's transformation.

So I hereby BRING IT!

Official solicitation for dropping back advice.

Yesterday, when no one showed for my Thursday night class, I did some extracurricular backbend research, and again, was able to stand and look back to see the very tip-top edge of the mat. Again, hurrah.

But today's wheels were all tight and compressed in the abs and outer hips and back, and full of the sweet fatigue pain of the days of old. Hmm? Wherever might this have come from? I checked the usual suspects:

1) Nope, I did no more or less computer-sitting than usual.
2) Nope, no extended car driving, no road trips.
3) Nope, no sudden, massive increase in life stress.

So I started checking the unusual suspects:

When I stand up or kneel to drop back (into the wheel or into Kapo), most of the energy is in the thighs and the low back. I experience those positions PRIMARILY as stabilizing, with gradual invitations to let go so that the stretch can deepen. Most of the action is "hold!" and marginally, some stretching also occurs, and most of it happens in the curve of the low back, squeezing out the postural muscles like a gigantic, powerful sponge.

When I was getting dropped back in SF a year ago, things were much more passive. Cross hands over chest, inhale up, exhale back. The psoas eventually got a great, big, lengthening, breath-challenging stretch. Front body opens. Classical backbending logic.

Last night I also used an inflatable ball to get a passive stretch: I knelt, and laid back over it, and immediately, breath moved into the pelvic bowl, deep and not quite comfortably releasing, but yes, stretching, just like being dropped back.

Notably, NOTHING like the "hold!" of a standing hang like I've been doing.

So here's my conclusion:

When I was last hanging back to (what? lengthen the front body? increase the back bend?), my outer hips got tight and my twists ran away.

Recent explorations with hanging back seem to have tightened up my wheel, when my expectation was precisely that they'd expand it.

There will be, therefore, no more hanging back. More pressups from the floor, more walking the hands in, more coming toward standing up. I'm not sure how the heck I'll ever learn to drop back, but apparently I won't learn it from hanging back.

Suggestions?

I'll keep working on Kapo, and probably stop there for some time, but it's frustrating stuff to be stuck on this puzzling, contradictory movement, when I know that I can stick Pasasana, come up from Laghu, jump into Bakasana, survive the Titti walk, put my leg behind my head, balance in Mayurasana, stick a forearm stand AND the chaturanga exit, AND do the seven deadlies. Hell, I can even do the compass-pose-like hand balance that comes early in third, as well as jump into tripod headstand and at least lower into a variety of hand balances.

But it matters not which practice or what kind "is appropriate" or some such question. Down that road, much silliness lies.

I'm simply frustrated that my attempts to learn dropbacks seem to hinder my progress in them. That paradox rubs me the wrong way. I want a teacher to help me with this, and I don't have one. Maybe I'll get a big cozy ball against which to lie, to release the low abs and deep muscles of the pelvis, and just do a ton of wheel pressups.

Navasana, Backwardsbending, Centimeters.

Practice outside again; I wasn't really in the mood, but you know how it is: "You do!"

Primary was easier today, a little more on autopilot; that is, it was psychologically easier. Physically, it was still a bit more demanding than my "day of calm" earlier in the week.

Five rounds of Navasana, shins up for all vinyasas. While that is physically challenging, I find that it's even MORE psychologically challenging, and in a way that is utterly reminiscent of gym-climbing. Let's say you're pulling a power move (in a climbing gym) which requires you to really pull in the core and extend fully to reach the next hold. The temptation, which your mind shouts at you, is "we can't reach it! Quick, retract! Give up! Cease reaching!" but then you stick it, and the wave crashes back against the tank, tipping the OTHER way, and it's "we rule! Climb on!" and if you're really lucky, you remember to EXHALE and pull and to MOVE rather than to LISTEN.

The game is not to WIN, the game is to MOVE, BREATHE.

Anyway: despite loud interior monologue protests, I simply didn't allow the feet or legs to touch the rug, and I pulled it up five times and then jumped back.

Bhujapidasana was still thigh-slippy, but I somehow held the pose (a little lopsided) and stuck the exit and it was fine.

I tried the Intermediate entry to Supta K (sit, put feet behind head, fold forward) but as usual in Dwi Pada, the right foot won't stick without pulling the feet over. Oh well, the experiment was fun. I am getting to the point, in the hand bind, where I can start thinking about taking the hand, or even the wrist. That's cool.

I was pretty tired by the Konasanas (Upavistha and Supta), but I carried on, took a par-for-the-course Pasasana, and let myself chill on the effort in the rest of the march through Intermediate to Kapo.

Bhekasana is getting easier; Dhanurasana is getting bigger again. Laghuvajrasana remains friendly; this is very nice of it. I even tried it BOTH the current way (take ankles) AND the Swenson way (try to take knees; take thighs). I see how the Swenson mode opens the chest more, but it is also a harder pose, in all directions.

I hung back in Kapo, which is comfortable UNLESS I have my hands over my head, and really really challenging to breathe in, when I take the hands up and over. I still drop back soft as can be, but I am, today at least, 8 inches from my fingertips to toes.

Urdhva Dhanurasana remains something of a playground: I took five wheels today and an opening bridge, and walked the hands in to their now-standard 28 inches. I tried to make headstand-hands, to open the thoracic (a variation of Viparita Dandasana), but on grass, that just meant slippy hands; no go. Mostly I am feeling the wheel in the lower spinal muscles; they are accustomed to holding me UP, not holding me in an ARCH while I also at the same time ask them to STRETCH appreciably.

Seeing things: I can see the back of the mat, in a standing hang-back. Hurrah. I can NOT yet see my feet, but I know they are RIGHT THERE, just over my peripheral vision. They are CLOSE.

And for the rest of the world that isn't the US: an inch is 2.54 centimeters.

Kapo: fingertips therefore 20 cm from toes. Today. Working it solo, with no adjustments and no teacher.

Urdhva Dhanurasana: hands vary, between 60 and 70 cm from feet.

I think I'm going to emphasize the ribs' ascending up from the hips, in the days to come. My feeling is that this will create more length in the spine and take some of the challenge off the postural muscles. It should also call more bend up to the thoracic (the ribs, after all, attach to the thoracic spine), and that should make the backbend deeper in the arch, and make the mat easier to see. Also, it might lessen the "weight" of the hands as they reach up and over.

Backwardsbending remains the project: for too long, I've let it be something like lead-climbing. When you lead, you don't just fall from "wherever you let go." You drop to the last piece of protection you set. Therefore, if you climb 8 feet above your last piece, and fall, you fall 8 feet and then the ADDITIONAL 8 feet of rope you've taken up. My backbending practice has been like a difficult lead climbing move: I go up, then I go down. Then I go up, again, and maybe I hang out, and work some stuff, but I don't CLIP the next PIECE, and back down I go.

My mission here, is to, if you will, CLIP THIS BACKBEND so that I can release the effort of getting here. To end the rollercoaster of "working on it, not working on it, returning to my age-old normal backbend." To finally BECOME a different pose.

This act of will (Hi, Nietzsche! How's 0v0's blog these days??) shall, as they all do, be revealed as an opening whose time has come. The effort is an illusion, and I know this, but I partake of the illusion anyway, as I can't see clearly enough NOT to partake in it. So be it. Must remember to surrender the striving EVEN AS IT SEEMS TO OCCUR.

Primary, Pasasana, Urdhva Dhanurasana

Less energy today, less sort of chewy eagerness to get on that rug and have at it.

Nonetheless: sunshine, 70s, stone beautiful, and even the mosquitoes kept their distance. The rug and I headed outside.

Sun salutations were easy, the Vira 1's in the B's are staying deep; they suddenly seem to have arrived (easy to square hips, easy to look at thumbs) without even my request.

Standing poses, with the exception of Parivrtta Parsvakonasana, are stout. The standing twist, while I AM putting the outside hand to the floor, is still challenging; hasn't adjusted fully yet, from surrendering the hip-tightening dropback practice.

Decent balance in Utthita Hasta: it's the swing BACK FROM (not to) the side where the challenge lies, these days.

A little less energy in the bandhas, less magic in taking-it-up today, but still, no real break in the practice, just less lion-power than yesterday.

Back to seven wrist-binds in the Marichyasana sequence. Very nice. I could probably crank the eighth one (right foot half-lotused, in Mari D) but the right trapezius/neck/pecs get so uptight when I do that, that it's not worth it.

Bhuja: better action from the right thigh today, but could NOT stick the swingback to Bakasana. Tiptoed it, kipped up, jumped back.

Kurmasanas: should have given up Supta K today. Face-down in the grass, panicking about not being able to breathe, held the pose anyway, and then met the exhaustion of fight-or-flight hormones from the panic. Blah. Also, this tightens the abs, which I found out later in backbends. Still looked pretty, as a pose, but wasn't worth the inner price.

Ah, and before I forget, for 0v0: five Navasanas. Had to ground the shins on the fourth vinyasa, and the fifth vinyasa was a big scrapy mess :)

I only did Pasasana from Intermediate: feet flat going right, tiptoes going left.

Urdhva Dhanurasana: again, I wasn't as cranked for this as I was yesterday, but that change-in-energy is one of the things all 6/week ashtangis face. We know it well. Anyway: did a bridge, kept all my "check-ins" in mind, did three wheels, felt most of the sensation in the postural muscles (spinal flexors) of the lumbar and maybe lower thoracic. Came down. Did three more; walked the hands in on the third one. Came down. Did three MORE, arms yet straighter, walked the hands in, found the last wheel hard to press up into, because I did NOT feel that I could walk the hands in any further; this is a limit worth exploring. It wasn't exhaustion, or pain, it was more like flexibility; I didn't feel that I could walk in further, without something GIVING somewhere; front body? back body?

I have taken, as OCD as this sounds, to measuring my hand-to-foot distance after backwardsbending. Regularly now, it's about 24-28 inches. I'm 5'11. I think Vanessa once said that when you get your hands about FIFTEEN INCHES from your feet, you can stand up with relative ease. Dude, if I ever get my hands fifteen inches from my feet, I can take my freakin' ankles.

And for the comment last post about the eight limbs: I usually wait for the eight limbs to come to and/or out of me. Ahimsa is growing the more I practice. Pratyahara came quickly at first, and now has slowed; at times, the mind is quiet, the senses too, but other times it's all monkeys. The niyamas and I are generally friendly, but I think that some keen attention to any given one of them would pay off quite a bit. It's like a plant which grows happily, slowly, but would benefit substantially from more active attention. Tapas, I have in abundance. Overabundance, perhaps. Pranayama and I meet, part, then meet again, then part, and on like that. Can't seem to stick a consistent pranayama practice, although I'd really like to. Samadhi and I are still meeting in terms of dharana, which is fine.

Moon day tomorrow!

Primary and up to Kapo: what a.......comfortable...little practice.

This morning's discovery was that most suprising of things in ashtanga practice: Comfort. Ease.

If it is between April and early November, you will find me practicing whenever possible, out on grass with my cotton rug. I LOVE outdoor practice. So this morning I took the rug out and knew from sun salutation A that it would be good; when I don't have to move my feet from chaturanga to updog to downdog, it really focuses me. This wasn't the case with the feet in sun salutation B, but breathing provided focus. Tristana, I've decided finally, is completely real. It's the thing.

Various discoveries:

treat Parivrtta Trikonasana as a twist. Bring the ribs to the opposite thigh. That makes all of the difficulties better.

maintain the gaze, at ALL COSTS, in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana. If you don't look away, or down, for even half a second, you can literally do the whole pose by holding the gaze. It's like changing the emphasis (per Maehle) in Supta Padangusthasana, from the hamstring to the abdominal "crunch." Totally changes the pose. Do the pose with the gaze, lock in tristana, and it's over before it has begun. Easier. Softer.

Utkatasana has something similar to Up Dog in the rib cage. There's a lift there; this emphasizes uddiyana bandha and makes the pose more stable and easier, as well as making it easier to breathe, which is key to ease throughout ashtanga practice.

Jumps: it's hard to smoothly jump back and through on a cotton rug on grass. Grass is like a big cushion or a fat gym mat which, until you squash it down with sufficient seated poses, puffs up your mat and makes it tough to get the feet clear. Nonetheless, I stayed RIGOROUSLY on breath pace for each vinyasa, and they got easier. Those which most obviously pull in mula bandha (Janu B, Baddha Konasana and after) were some of the smoothest vinyasas.

Janu C: to intensify the hip/glutes work in this pose, first fold forward, and then think about moving the heel MORE vertical. This can only come from hip rotation. Press the toes into the mat, almost "grab it" with the toes.

Marichyasana B: shocking ease here, even with the right foot half-lotused. I could breathe nice and fully with the left foot up, and concentrated (both sides) on gently pressing the upper arm against the thigh, inviting the low back to get longer.

Marichyasana C: the return of the wrist-bind! My twists have returned! I liked pushing the bent-leg foot DOWN, and feeling the knee press FORWARD toward the straight-leg foot. This REALLY cranked up the twist. I held both sides for 10 breaths each.

Marichyasana D: shocking ease! Often I fight for five breaths with the right foot half-lotused, but today I practically bound the wrist and breathed easily, with left foot in half-lotus, and had no trouble holding the bind, with the right foot half-lotused, for ten breaths! No popping out of the pose, no cranking the thigh back with the trapezius and pecs (which get sore doing that) either. Wonders!

Navasana: still had to bring the thighs to the ground after the third and fourth round, and the vinyasa was a mess, but I wasn't as out-of-breath, by a long stretch, as I often am (and breathing MAKES or BREAKS Bhujapidasana, I find).

Bhuja: it feels like my right thigh likes to rotate externally, which leads to it slipping down the arm. I'm going to start thinking about internal rotation of the femur when I do this next. I still don't jump into it, but who cares? I was able to hit the fancy exit (Titti/Bakasana), again, by exhaling the feet out and straight, and then inhaling, swinging them back, and exhaling, jumping back.

Kurmasanas: I do these with my feet well forward of the rug (because they drag it otherwise and the pose is a mess), and so today I was face-in-grass, which made breathing difficult, but the poses were very nice. Bind the hands HIGH as possible in Supta K. My right thigh, once I lock the ankles, is trying to cross over my head. That's nice to see.

Urdhva Mukha Paschimottansana: I came as close today as I EVER HAVE to rolling into this with straight legs. Roll, POINT THE FEET and LOOK UP. Engage the bandhas like no tomorrow and bring the shoulders down toward the waist, locking gaze on the toes.

Pasasana: better than ever, which was an UTTER suprise! I go right first, and I can usually keep my feet flat on that side, but today was totally easy, no fatigue in the outer hip, no panting, no straining in the pec to reach the left arm down and bind behind the back. I actually deepened both the forward bend AND the twist, and got a great big fat look over my right shoulder. It wasn't as beautiful, probably, as Cranky's pasasana, but man was it nice! And on the left side, a feet-flat bind! That hasn't happened since LAST SUMMER! Not as deep as going right, but so welcome.

I was still rather peacefully breathing at this point in the practice, and it chilled out my backbend anxiety completely. I took about three breaths between poses in the Intermediate section.

Krounchasana: chin to shin, wrists bound. As big as it's ever been.

Bhekasana: usually I take the right foot first, and then the left and do the pose, but today I brought up both feet, set up the hands, and pushed down/arched up (it's not a very big arch) and it worked--seems like the whole right side of me is finally giving in, which I think is from my backbend work (about which more in a sec).

Laghuvajrasana: this pose was downright COZY today, which sounds impossible, but really, it was! I set up the back arch with hands on hips, checked that my ribs were coming up away from the navel, then reached back, took the ankles, arched back and put my head JUST in contact with the ground. The thigh engagement to come up was like a wish to a genie: no sooner did I WILL myself to rise, than I did. Flying freakin' carpet.

Kapo: this pose and I still do not see hands-to-feet, if you will. I arched back and reached over (I think my pecs/intercostals need to give a bit more), and went back cat-paw soft, but I can only, STILL, walk in one time, and I just can NOT get the feet doing that. I did, however, get some more arch out of the front thighs and lower back, I know that's growing, and that bodes well for being able to arch back further, while the thighs are still vertical.

Backbends: I took a bridge and a single backbend, then down and re-set myself and did three more. My current formula is this: feet a LITTLE outside the hips. Calves virtually pressed to thighs; VERY close. Hands as tucked under shoulders as they can get. Press down with feet. Push with hands. Come, maybe, to top of head. Check in: tailbone tucking, inner thighs thinking themselves together, ribs up and away from navel, breathing (which, today, was big and comfortable), elbows close. Press chest over hands. Breathe. Press weight over feet. Pick hands up, walk in. Repeat.

Today a walk-in REALLY lit up the quads: from just above the kneecaps, up the big muscles of the front thigh, bright, hot effort, which DEMANDED that I "breathe into it" so as not to collapse. It was quite intense, and I liked it. Three days ago, a walk-in of the hands lit up the spinal flexors, in the low and mid back. I like that each round of backbends seems to do something different, while the formula remains the same. I look forward to these experiments now.

Sarvangasana: 20 breaths. That pose is HARD on the endurance, man, but it's fun.

Urdhva Mukha Padmasana: three days ago, my right foot (which usually comes down about mid-thigh) slipped, with sweat, about four inches further "up" my thigh, which made it SO MUCH EASIER to get the more-willing left foot into lotus. I ask this to happen, every practice now. Today I had to pull the left foot in, but every time I do this pose, I think about it as practice for Karandavasana.

Sirsasana: I've settled into 25 breaths every practice now. Currently I'm abandoning the press-up version until I can hold 25 like stone and not feel the shoulders burn after the pike variation.

Baddha Padmasana: it's getting easier for me to reach the opposite toes, behind my back, while seated now (I used to need to fold forward). This bodes well, later, for Supta Vajrasana.

Great practice, very enjoyable, downright comfortable, even with spots of intense effort. I chalk this up to breathing and regularity of practice. Good, good stuff.

I am at home, 30 feet in the air. Uh-huh.

Bloomington today, for a quick dissertation-group meeting (yes, I still attend, though I'm done; my advisor has me prep conference papers and work for publication), which means that there was a follow-up route setting adventure in the climbing gym, and a stop by the brewpub for a growler (half-gallon) of the tastiest India Pale Ale in the region. This is habitual behavior for me; that town I spent a decade living in, writing in, getting both married and divorced in, is now a twice-monthly climbing vacation post-diss-group.

The newer routesetters are either on vacation or recovering from cracked vertebrae (the one guy who fell, see the post two issues back). This means that I, as before, as long before, for years, am second on the totem pole, behind Rich, the master route setter in that place. I got a WHOLE corner to myself, and put up four routes. Heat, as we know from physics, rises, and so while the room was in the maybe low seventies at floor level, it was DEFINITELY in the upper eighties at 34 feet. Even thirty feet up was notably cooler; anyway, I went up there four times, working hard, screwing pieces of plastic down with metal bolts, and worked up a shirt-soaking sweat. In a way, it's quite like ashtanga practice.

Route naming is an important thing with me: it's totally part of the game. The names today are these: "stick it!", "you're not alone in the disco baby" (saavy ashtangis will recognize that one), "dance of the witch doctor," and "i am iron man." The respective ratings are 5.11, 5.10a, 5.11, 5.10c. Hard stuff. Fun stuff.

I realized that I am at home, 30 feet up, tied to the ceiling, with 40 pounds of plastic hanging from my harness, sweat pouring, hair loose, getting tangled in the Gri-Gri rope system. That feels totally natural to me, welcome, complete. Ahhh.

I took three backbends after setting, and they were big and painless and intense and I liked them. Tomorrow, more practice. Yum.

Bending Backwards.

Recently I have made decisions and discoveries:

1) I'm laying off the "pop off the wall with both hands" dropback practice. It was that, and not Intermediate in toto, which was slowly taking my twists.

2) I'm going back to the wheel as the Ur-backwards-bend, and working it until dropbacks and standups grow out of it, like pretty flowers given sufficient sun and water.

3) This kind of work is really giving me a lesson in the difference between intense sensation and pain. I don't feel like I can differentiate here (because you're not in my body and I'm not in yours, and our backbends differ, so really, in a way, conversation about this would be silly, and categorization impossible), but I'm going to define "pain" as sharp in-joint sensation. Clearly unpleasant, warnings and "stop nows." Intense sensation, I'm going to define as variously and either fatigue, effort, squeezing out, pressing up, and other prepositional gerundives (at least I think they're gerundives). Intense sensation comes with a dialogue like this: "Must let go...no wait, don't...breathe...want to stop exerting...no, breathe...keep breathing...FIVE!"

For example: today's wheels involved pressing up and attending to full breathing (it took a few rounds before I could REALLY breathe in the pose). Then, I moved the thighs toward each other and felt THAT SPOT, which I often refer to as the gluteus medius, open up in the right outer hip. It's the famous tight spot, the fatigue center, the electric system-shorter. I pressed up twice, moved the thighs together, and felt that sucker give it up. Ahhhhhh. I don't THINK that my thighs move especially outward when I press up (I'd need a photo), but moving them even slightly together did marvelous things for making the sacrum more pleased and the outer hips SO much more willing to release.

Next, I pressed weight into the hands, and then the feet, and moved my hands in. I moved them in probably a total of 10 inches, definitely most of a foot (in three rounds of the wheel, that is), and I got this completely AMAZING sponge-squeezing sensation in the spinal flexors of the lumbar and thoracic spine. Completely incredible. It was, on a certain level, kind of paralyzing, but I knew instantly that this sensation was from squeezing out muscles that THINK their main job is to hold me steady and firm in arm balances, chaturanga and vinyasa. My arms were straight-up next to my ears. I did seven wheels total, each one bigger than the one that preceded it.

4) I'm concluding, from this practice, that backwards bending will happen where it NEEDS to. That might be in what some call the "postural muscles," the spinal flexors, in the back body. That might be in the hip flexors, or the psoas, or between the ribs, or somewhere else, on the front body. I don't feel that I can clearly categorize either "that sensation is bad, this one is good" for people, nor do I feel that I can say, "only the front body should feel anything." I'm learning to finesse the description of the backwards bend, letting it tell ME what's what. I like this.

For practice, by the way, I'm doing Primary and Intermediate up to Kapotasana. I've given up on the idea that one can "over-backwards-bend." With care and attention, the wheel is really quite nice after the seven backbends of Intermediate.

Meme, end of Work, Backbends.

You know you're busy when you don't write a word in the blog for ten days, eh?

First, a meme I'm getting to quite late:

The Rules:
1. Post the rules of the game at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?

June 2003? I was living with a woman who is now heading something like Health Services at Smith College. I was still in grad school, barely dissertating. I was two months away from meeting the woman I now live with. I was about seven months post-divorce and climbing a lot. My yoga practice was not to begin for another year.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?
1 - check email for student panic re: test due Thursday
2 - teach yoga class at 7 pm
3 - return to "life in the house" (after working 8 hrs/day for the last month)
4 - do some extracurricular backbend research
5 - use the rest of a block of tofu

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1 - raw nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, in that order)
2 - cheese, of virtually any kind
3 - i will munch on chips (potato, veggie, or other) if available
4 - raw carrots (these, not suprisingly, are brilliant with walnuts)
5 - to be announced

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?
1 - I'd pay off my student loan debt, and I'd never, EVER get into debt again, of any kind, for any reason, not even if I lived to be three hundred TRILLION years old.
2 - I'd set my parents up. Whatever they need.
3 - I'd set up some kind of fund for an organization, the explicit mission of which would be to enlighten the ignorant (every kind of ignorance).
4 - the last two would probably be related to #3. I care about #3 a LOT.
5 -

What are five of your bad habits?
1 - it's very hard for me to get myself to do things I'm not interested in.
2 - beer, probably, but I don't count it as a bad habit.
3 - i leave EVERYTHING to the last minute.
4 - last two, to be announced.
5 -

What are five places where you have lived?
1 - Medfield, Massachusetts.
2 - Hartford, Connecticut.
3 - Bloomington, Indiana.
4 - Indianapolis, Indiana.
5 - San Francisco, California (for one month).

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1 - Assembly guy at a medical products plant.
2 - Seller of Xmas trees.
3 - Temp worker, scorer of student tests.
4 - Teacher of film, art history, English composition, pop culture, gender studies, you name it, yoga, etc.
5 - Video store guy.

Tagging...
1 - (as soon as I find five people who have NOT done this)
2 -
3 -
4 -
5 -


In other news, work ended today, with a pretty relaxed little half day. This means that I can FINALLY prep my class like a REAL PERSON, on Thursday and next Tuesday, and then THAT also is over, and we begin to look forward, in earnest, to Matthew Sweeney in Minnesota in the middle of July.

Backbends: quickly, I'm interested in the emotional release I'm getting these days from those poses. Today it was all about fear, expressed in the body, felt as the emotion, again nearly visible in the room. Tangible fear. But then, as before, it all turned with some transformative laughter (and a few more backbends) into a nice and pleasant endorphin rush and it was fine.