Despite another bad night’s sleep (our apartment is becoming so much like an oven that we’ve been driven to sleep outside on the rooftop!), this morning’s practice felt fantastic. Firstly, I managed to bind both feet and hands on my own in my primary series nemesis pose, supta kurmasana, and exit with the full vinyasa – a fairly rare (although increasingly common) occurrence. Secondly, drop-backs felt good again and then… drum roll… Sharath came to assist me afterwards and I managed to catch my ankles for the first time ever, WHOOOOOOOP!!
Ahem, please excuse the rather un-yogic reaction there. However, I do believe that, although it’s definitely good to cultivate an equinamous mind regarding the practice and not get hung up on achieving new postures, I still think we should allow ourselves to celebrate when we do achieve something new. After all, it’s through practice, courage and dedication that we come to that point, at which the boundaries of the world as we know it expand slightly. We have achieved something new, new neural pathways in the mind are being forged, muscle memory is building, we have challenged our concept of what is possible. And that, I feel, is something worth celebrating… 🙂
AND… just before he assisted me, Sharath said the magic words:
‘Tomorrow pasasana.’ 🙂
In the spirit of equanimity I will try and refrain from whooping in this case, as pasasana isn’t a new posture for me. However, I’m really happy to have the opportunity to try it out in the shala, as there’s definitely an ‘enabling’ magic in the air there. Pasasana is another nemesis posture for me as, so far, I’ve never been able to get my heels to the floor. However, the operative term there is ‘so far’ – I used to think ‘I’ll never get my heels to the floor because my achilles tendons are too short’ and I’d heard that tendons barely stretch at all. However, I learnt in the recent anatomy course that, actually tendons do stretch quite well, with concentrated effort, as the cells are completely renewed every so often (I want to say every nine months or so, but this might be wrong). Plus, I’m pretty sure my heels are slowly getting closer to the ground – again, I find myself challenging what I think is possible and finding my body and mind rising to the challenge. Masterji gave me some really good exercises for strengthening my ankle joints and stretching the achilles tendons, plus I’m widening my downward dog stance (thanks Marco!) and deepening utkatasana, which both contribute to strengthening and lengthening that area of the body, so hopefully one day there might be another WHOOOP in order – slowly, slowly… 😉
frond yoga with Rebecca May 