On Day 32 (truly 29) of my 50 day challenge, and it has brought great joys. I pushed myself harder. than. ever. ever. before today and I have a mandatory bath with epsom salts in my very near future!
I have been a lazybones in Half Moon. It's official. I am not sure why. I have it buried deep in my subconscious that Pranayama Breathing, Half Moon with Hands to Feet, and Awkward (the first breathing exercise - actually a posture in my opinion! - and the first two postures) are the hardest part of the class and if I push myself too hard, I could use up all my energy and not go strong for the rest of the class. In fact we are reassured that the opposite is true. In any case, today I really went for it in Half Moon and it was quite scary, but I felt a bit sheepish afterwards because I realized how much deeper I can stretch my spine to the sides than I usually do.
With my lower back injury or issue or whatever the hell is up with my back I have been strictly pushing myself further than I want to in all of the backbends. God, I used to be lazy. Locked in my comfort zone. Not anymore. (By the way, please don't ever lie to yourself into believing the oft stated untruth that you can't make progress or do as well as you could before because of your age. If you took the 20 year old me and compared it to the 34 year old me, man oh man. You'd know that you really can turn back the clock. You can build a whole new you. I understand that I'm relatively young still. But all the same, I hear people my age and younger complaining about the ill effects of age and time on their bodies on a daily basis. I'm living proof it doesn't have to be that way!)
Anyway back to backbending, I especially love it when I am face to face with the floor during the first backbend and I hear at least three cracks. That happened today and I thought I was gonna die. In a good way. Sometimes, especially in the morning, my spine is like: UH ... NO. Sometimes I look back and that is all I can do: my spine stays stationary. I used to get mad at myself when that happened, as though I'd failed. Now I feel like a scientist doing a study on my own body. It is a fantastic thing to get to know your body as well as you can being a yogi. Before it was like living in a house where you never turned the lights on.
Hands to Feet had been borderline impossible earlier this challenge due to my back pain, especially on the right side. Sciatica, some have said it is. Seriously, after doing yoga for 10 years I found myself unable to touch my toes. Disappointing to say the least, extremely painful at its worst. Anyway, I am really happy to say that I am almost back to normal flexibility after about a month and a half of concentrated effort. One stretch that I have found to be particularly helpful is called "stacking the logs" (google it, obviously) - my cousin, who is a dancer and had also suffered with lower back pain, was recommended this stretch for at least 60 seconds on several each side, times a day. She told me she was very consistent and it made a difference. I do it at least once a day (usually post-final savasana, in the hot room) and like I said, I do have much less pain in my body than I did, say, last January, but that could be due to a number of factors. I do stretch in the evenings as well, a lot of hip openers like pigeon pose and the type of stretching for the splits and to ease pressure on the lower back. But I must say, when I didn't do my "stack the logs" for a few days there and then I attempted to do the stretch one day when my body was totally cold, my lower back started twitching and I couldn't believe how tight I was, and what a relief it was to stretch that way. So yes, it's a good one. Stretching is just so vital to a good feeling in the body, isn't it?
There is a girl at my school in a wheelchair, and I was looking at her one day and thinking about all the stretches I would do if I ever had to be in a wheelchair. I got pretty deep into this fantasy. I don't anticipate that being the case for me, of course! Heaven forbid. But goes to show how "into" stretching I am!
My most challenging pose when it comes right down to it continues to be Standing Head to knee, or in my case, Standing. Problem number one, of course, is that I cannot fully kick either of my legs out, let alone get my head to my knee, and it's not due to not being able to lock my knee. I can lock my knee for the full sixty seconds. I just can't stretch my leg out. Also, for the past seven years I have been duckfeeting it, (and I know that I do it, it's just that I feel wildly out of alignment when I don't tilt my standing leg's foot out to the side) and I was finally properly called out on this, by one of the teachers whose class I take regularly, and who is a medical doctor. She told me to talk to her after class, and explained to me that I have a lot of flexibility in my knee (I didn't even know that one's knee could be flexible or inflexible) and have not developed the necessary muscles in my inner thigh and buttocks, that my flexible knee is taking all the weight of the posture, and feeling the need to spread my feet was actually compensation. She went on to say that 'lock the knee' actually means lock the inner and outer thigh, the buttock, and the hip - it's all got to lock solid. Well, I didn't know that, did I? She said it could take another 20 or 25 classes, but that I had to re-align in that posture and build up strength in other areas. And, of course, be sure that my standing foot is pointing straight towards the mirror. Then I can start thinking about kicking out. Seven years, people, and this is where I am. My friend Genieve could lock her knee and kick out straight on her very first Bikram yoga class, which was also her very first yoga class. I couldn't believe it. Mind you, I've seen some people there for years and they're still kicking out on a bent knee, which is probably the worst thing you could do (and I never did that, thankfully). Don't do that! Be patient. I'm glad I know exactly what I have to do now. If you're not where you want to be in a posture, there is nothing you can do to force that. You just have to keep trucking, day by day, and do the posture the right way. I can tell you that a tiny bit of progress is actually very significant. If there's one thing I can say after having gained the amount of experience that I now have with this yoga practice, it's that there really are no shortcuts. Doing the posture the wrong way in order to go deeper (or appear to be going deeper) is absolutely the essence of counter-productivity in terms of building a yoga practice. It's an illusion. I've done it. Don't.
Well, that's my update for now. I had a very weak week back there somewhere, I think two weeks back, and it didn't help matters that I was trying to diet for the first thirty days of this challenge! I am eating well, hydrating, taking vitamin C and chlorella, green smoothies, lots of fruit, big bowls of oatmeal, and as much sleep as I can squeeze in. I'm going for it! Day 32 and feeling very strong.
No comments:
Post a Comment