Furry Wombat

Well, it’s been a while since I posted here, and my last post still makes me sad.

Just a Sunday today: practice, blueberry coffee cake, laundry, produce shopping in chinatown, a few errands, big salad at 4pm that I suppose will count for lunch and dinner (esp with the two helpings of coffee cake…).

I practiced this morning through dwi padi shirshasana, although on Friday, CL threatened that the yoganidrasana and titibasana would be forthcoming this week.  Just when I was getting the hang of things!  Some interesting goings-on in the body, though.  I’ve found the lift in kapo, so that I can get half-way up my feet without assistance now.  And finding that lift (from hollowing the belly, rotating the thighs inward — perhaps this is the elusive nutation of the sacrum?) also changes the preceding backbends.  In other backbend changes, CL went around a couple weeks ago tucking in chins in backbends: my! what a great idea!  With all these interesting changes, my practice is full of effort right now.  From danurasana through the LBHs, it’s focused and a bit fierce; I’ll need to find some softness in there if I’m going to make it through the titibasanas.  Kapo is getting less exhausting and scary, but bakasana B?  Still catching my breath after the two twists.

On Friday, I participated in a benefit event (A Prayer for Japan), which was my first experience with large numbers of sun salutations – an order of magnitude more than usual.  One of the neat things was that we were accompanied by Kenny Endo, an improvisational taiko drummer (and he and an amazing ukulele player, Jake Shimabukuro, performed a concert afterwards).  I have mixed feelings about events like this, but the experience of doing 108 sun salutations was very interesting.  I don’t think my spine has every felt so fluid.  I was surprised that I didn’t get tired.  I worried that my form would deteriorate and that I might tweak my shoulders, but that didn’t happen.  Perhaps to help prevent this, the style of sun salute was varied for each set of 27 as the count switched among 4 teachers from the sponsoring studios: only the first set by CL was the traditional ashtanga suryanamaskara A.  I don’t participate in the “yoga community” much, aside from chatting after class with a few shala-mates, so this was a nice experience in that way, too.  As for my mixed feelings about these kinds of events, I suppose there are many.  First, there is a monetary part:  this is the tiniest token, and I’m not even sure that these kinds of donations are appropriate for a first-world disaster.  Certainly, inter-governmental assistance providing helicopters, search and rescue teams, generators, etc is all totally appropriate and critical.  But $10-20k to a wealthy country?  This simply can’t go very far — $15k doesn’t buy in Japan what it does in Haiti.  But putting money aside, we are sending our prayers to Japan.  Thus, the 108 sun salutations. And here’s where my skepticism kicks in: I enjoyed doing the 108 sun salutations and I did them with a sincere heart, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t do a thing for folks in Japan.  This leads me to the conclusion that this event really isn’t for the Japanese tsunami victims, it’s for us, the participants.  It’s to assuage our sense of powerlessness, to reinforce our own community, and to do something fun in the name of meaningfulness.  And it was fun: the performances were great, the donated food was great, the community showing was great.  But there is also something a bit voyeuristic about it.  I certainly acknowledge the special relationship between Hawaii and Japan, but this is a tragedy thousands of miles away and, somehow, we want to participate in it.  This strikes me as both compassionate and voyeuristic.

Well, there are many more things to say — H was here for the month of March, and we had several adventures!  A ride up and down Haleakala, a hike over the Ko’olau range, and backpacking on Mauna Loa.  All great!  For now, though, I’ll just post a few photos.

I have been listening to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God for the past several days. There are a few themes running through the book that have resonated, but here is one for now: “belief” in god has historically not been about belief in the way we mean today, but about practice. The shift to intellectualizing (and, then, anti-intellectualizing) belief is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the context of several traditions, she discusses how practice precedes belief, rather than the other way around. Do your practice and all is coming, eh? While much of the book is on the three main monotheistic traditions, the first couple chapters have really interesting thoughts on prehistoric (think cave paintings in France 30,000 ybp) and animistic practices and on early aescetic yoga practices.

Speaking of practice, I don’t do it much when I am traveling, which makes it painful upon return. Ugh.

Feynman is hanging in there. He has responded well to his hospice care and to H’s close and kind attentions. We laid low over the holidays to hang with kitty, and he came with us to LA for a week. I hope he will still be there with some purrs when I return to CA in Feb.

Should I admit that I haven’t added an entry lately because I accidentally took the admin link off my page and couldn’t remember how to get in? Silly Wombat. Plus the Wombat has a new toy – an iPad – and is adapting to this new technology. Perhaps this new toy will ultimately result in more posts. Oooo, just started editing this on the iPad with the WordPress app. Very nice.

I did gymnastics as a kid.  My mom put me in a tumbling class at 3.  She didn’t know what an expensive habit that would turn into for the next 10 years.  I had joined a more formal gymnastics team by the time I was in first grade and competed until junior high, when puberty made clear that which had been evident before — I would never be particularly good at gymnastics. I broke my foot in seventh grade and decided not to return to my 4-day-a-week practice routine.   In the end, I think it served me well.  I wasn’t good enough to really hurt myself, but it trained into me a sense of physicality that I never lost and comes in handy.

So, I learned to handstand when I was young and fearless and that has stayed with me.  I do handstands in random open spaces with some regularity.  But it has not (until now) been part of my yoga routine.  And, oh!, the hopping.  Former not-very good gymnasts, like me, kick up to handstand.  Badass gymnasts, like this cute one, press to handstand.  The hopping makes it difficult.  CL has me practicing hopping to balance with bent knees.  It’s fun, but slightly less satisfying than to kicking up into handstand right away.  Maybe I’ll start working on my press to handstand, too.

Oh dear.  It seems that I lack any serratus muscles.  I’m not even sure how to find them, exactly.

When I ask Glen, CL’s husband and co-owner of the studio, how I could get through life with such underdeveloped serratus relative to my shoulders/arms, he tells me, you probably just do things (gesturing like he’s grabbing at something), without thinking about the most intelligent way to do it first.

So true.  I can be a bit of a brute.

I started practicing yoga as a long relationship slowly dissolved. I lucked into a mellow ashtanga-based studio in White River Junction, VT. I moved back to LA, figured out that I had been doing ashtanga, found a great teacher who left on his annual migration to Thailand, and then mustered my courage and went to a mysore-style studio in Silverlake. In those last three months in LA before moving to the northern reaches of CA, I was practicing up to kapotasana. Four years, three moves, two jobs, half an ocean, a shoulder tweak, two hiatuses from practice, and the best fella a girl could want later, I just got to kapotasana again today.

And it wasn’t so bad!

The first time around, I remember feeling panicky. This time, nope. It wasn’t scary at all.  Without assistance, I managed to walk my hands past my toes on the outside of my feet.  The shoulders are tighter than last time, but I know so much more about them now!

I am not very good about keeping up with friends. The ones I keep are the ones with whom occasional but frank and honest contact can be maintained. The friend I mentioned a couple posts ago who is getting divorced (and who I have known for fifteen years)? We hadn’t talked in almost a year.  But I called two friends today that I hadn’t spoken to in months.  It was wonderful to catch up.
Why call now? Or, why not call before? It’s not very sensible, but I think I avoid calling when I feel unsettled or unsure of myself.  I won’t pull any punches if a friend asks me how things are going.  But I am a bit embarrassed when I don’t have things together, and embarrassment is a potent emotion for me.  (That would be 2: intersubjectivity.)

Anyway, it’s not very sensible.

Regular practice today: primary through baddha konasana, second through laghuvajrasana.  Distraction level: 3/5.  As I left, CL and her assistant were deep in conversation (with sketched diagrams!) of the differences in mula bandha between sexes.  Love the yoga nerdiness.

I did not avoid practice. I did primary today. I requested an adjustment in janu sirsanana A. I’m not sure what muscle gets released in that adjustment — lower back between sacrum and spine — but it needs it; it gets all bound up on the right side. I forsook any drama in backbends, and they were fine.  But the mind was scattered today.  I gave up rather quickly after a couple rounds of pranayama, as my brain raced on toward work and other thoughts.  It dawns on me that, perhaps, this is the time to persist (insist?), rather than bail.

No, today I avoided work. I found colleagues to chat with, I found email to respond to, I found websites that must be read. I read a page of a paper and went back to a website. I read a few more paragraphs and decided I really needed to do some online shopping.   I made it through one Nature paper.   I only point out its provenance because that means it was just 3 pages.  I have two impending deadlines, and I think this is my unconscious attempt to bail on one of them.  This is my conscious attempt to make that conscious.

“Tomorrow is another day,” the wombat declares hopefully.  “I will make a list!”

1. Write NSF proposal.
2. Write NASA proposal.

“Yes, that should do it!”  [Dusts off paws.]

Lastly, for the strigiforme reader, you might find that the Tour is more exciting than the Cup given your recent activities.

I arrived at the studio about 6:30.  Tight again, after diving on Friday and riding on Sat.  I really should have practiced on Sun, but could only drag myself from bed to couch and wish my dad a happy father’s day.  (My dad is awesome.)  Also, I talked to my brother, who I’ve been playing phone tag with since I returned from the NWHI.  He sounded good, which is really excellent, because he didn’t for a while there.  Anyway, my hamstrings were a little tight, but it’s really my ACLs — I think that’s from the cycling.

It felt like a normal practice:  a little too much effort and too much wandering mind, but that’s (sadly) normal for me.  After doing a couple dropbacks/ups that felt ugly, I asked CL for an assist to try to get me to lift up more before going back.  It helped, but it will take some time for the backbends to feel fluid again.  Part of what drove me away from practice last year was shoulder issues, and they have only gotten tighter in the time away.   And my hip flexors got tighter with all the cycling.  And my quads just burn through the backbends.  So, yes, it will be a while before this all feels good again.  There was a time that I surprised myself and touched my heels in a backbend.  It will be a while before that happens again!

As for shoulder issues, that’s been pretty good.  I still have some pinching in my left AC joint and some crunching in my right shoulder, but eh.  I’ve been sitting in front of the computer all day, periodically flexing my rhomboids (pulling my scapulae into my back).  When I did PT last year, it turns out that that weakness in my rhomboids was a potential cause of my shoulder issues (letting the scapula pull away from the back when I raise my arm, thereby crunching the top of the shoulder joint).  Needless to say, I have been keeping that in mind during practice.  The trick is to pull in the scapulae without sticking the chest out.  It’s pretty subtle — at least for me with my underdeveloped rhomboids.

I did a brief (50 breath) sit at the end of practice after uth pluthi.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to start earlier to be sure I make my 9am meeting.

Ladies holiday, such as it is.  I’ll take it.

Already my hamstrings are more open than yesterday. I stayed with the breath until the janu sirsasanas, when I dove into a pretty negative head space.  This often happens somewhere in forward bends.  I worry about something, and I can feel the worry make me weak.  (You know how that happens in movies — fight scene, clutch moment, the antagonist identifies the central weakness in the protagonist, the protagonist has a moment of self-doubt, weakens,  and loses the fight).  So, I try to observe it as a bodily experience rather than fight it or identify with it and breathe on.  Today that worked pretty well.  And the desperation had mostly passed by the end of the marichyasanas.  I was also starting to get tired by the end of forward bends — it will take me a couple weeks for my endurance to return — and I had to be more conscious about bhandas for jump backs and jump throughs.  When I get tired, I take all the hits in my upper body, which isn’t good for the touchy shoulders.

At kurmasana, CL told me to wait for the adjustment for supta kurmasana.  The waiting was good.  I noticed how tense and shaky my legs were and relaxed (as I typed that, I noticed how tense my shoulder were and relaxed them, too).  They would tense up again, and I would relax them again.  I tried to keep that in mind for the next few poses and get to that easy place before the end of my five breaths.  Geez, just like everything else in life.  Expansion/contraction.

Thoughts of adventure.  I read a friend’s blog tonight — I haven’t seen him in years (they moved east, I moved west), but he’s a favorite person.  And I thought how nice it would be to see him and his wife.  Then remembered that I will be going to a conference in Knoxville at the end of next month.  And they aren’t that far away… and it’s near the Blue Ridge Mountains… and H just got me a folding bike frame to travel with… and…and now I’m trying to convince H to meet me in Tennessee and ride to see our friends in Blacksburg.  I think it sounds fabulous, but H might take some convincing.  I’m gonna go.