This Sunday was one of those lucky Sundays when I manage to become alert enough at 7:50 to make the mad dash over to Uschi’s 8:00 class. There were only 3 students so I got lots of attention and fantastic adjustments. Mmm.
Uschi gave us one of her unique, funky sequences again. Does she make this stuff up, I wonder? I often come away from her classes with some new trick worthy of showing off. Today I learned to go from lunging twist directly to side plank in one movement.
I also learned side crow. I can’t balance for very long, but more importantly I learned to enjoy the effort. I learned that to find the balance point, I have to let myself tip past it and even fall. Only then can I come back and find the center. I found that falling is really safe in both side and normal crow; you kind of land softly on your head and it’s actually fun. This is how I got the scissor legs eventually, by hanging out on my forehead, scissoring my legs out, then tipping back up and balancing on my forearms. And if you fall in normal crow, you end up in headstand!! Awesome. These are yoga poses worth showing off.
Sometimes I wonder why I do all these weird poses. Poses like warrior, triangle, and forward fold at least make sense because they stretch and soothe tight muscles. But why would anyone’s life be made better by balancing on their forearms? The nice thing about Uschi’s class was that I forgot about those questions and just felt like a kid playing around. She told us that, in Sanskrit, the words for play and bliss are etymologically related. Why do forearm balances? Because they’re fun!
1 comment:
way to break into march with the yoga blog action. this post is full of yoga geekiness and i love it. i often wonder about the benefits of poses like forearm balance. it def serves as good party tricks.
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