Acrobatics

Yesterday morning, Tuesday (day 3 of yoga, day 6 of my trip), I woke up very stiff again... I have been told to become accustomed to this. There are just more muscles every morning that are added to the list of muscles that are stiff. Yesterday I added the gluteus to the list.

In the yoga practice this morning, we went up to Navasana and we did not have to do any sequence twice or three times as in previous sessions, so it was not so bad.

After breakfast we sat at the pool and then we had a little handstand workshop with Gloria the trapeze artist from Spain. She also showed us a few other tricks like the one in the picture on the left... Gloria is the one I am holding up. That was a lot of fun.
Afterwards, I practiced a little more on the slackline. Alan (not my room-mate Alan), who is a massage therapist, provides massages at a cost of Rs 1,500 for an hour. He does three different types of massages one of them being structural integration. He has a slackline (like a very tight rope) tied up between two trees outside of his hut in which he does the massages. It requires a lot of balance... more so than balancing on a balancing beam in gymnastics, because the rope bounces up and down as well as jumps and shakes from side to side. The day before he had assisted me to get up and walked me along it by letting me hold onto his shoulder while walking on the floor next to me. (It is only about 60 or 70 cm high). I got up onto the slackline by myself now.

After lunch I sat with the two sisters from Norway, Eirin (ballet dancer) and Ingvild (doctor), and Sarah from London, who is Michael's assistant, and Sarah answered some questions on the nuances of the final sequence from Upavishtakonasana to Sethubandhasana. I had not reached that sequence yet in the mornings, but I just listened in... it can only help :-)

In the afternoon from 3 to 6 we had another little workshop and everyone was very excited about this one because it was on jump backs and jump through, the action performed when moving from one seated asana to the next and I think Michael said that it happens 52 times in the full primary series.... no wonder we are all so tired. We all want to look as graceful and as smooth as Michael when we jump back and jump through, but for some of us it looks more like a baby that has just started learning to crawl and has fallen and tries to pick itself up... very very clumsy. The session was really fantastic. He called the session "The secret of Bandhas" and we are not allowed to divulge it to anyone who has not attended the session. :-)
So now I will publish it here on the web ... no, not really, but the very first thing he made us do was hold our knees into our chest and lift the feet off the floor, then let go of the hands and keep the knees up against the chest... that really meant using the core muscles and I can use this in my pilates classes in future as well.

The second point he made is that we must place the hands forward when placing the hands on the floor, which will allow the pelvis to be picked up easier with less brute force.

The next thing he did was dispel the myth that peoples arms are too short by showing us the shoulder position, which should be the same in downward dog stretch and is the same that we teach in pilates. My biggest problem is not flexing the feet enough, so the toes always catch on my wrists when moving the torso back.
The next point Michael made was that people give up, ie: they stop using the bandhas to hold everything up and sit on the floor as soon as their feet touch the floor. He suggested that even when the feet touch the floor, you continue holding everything up and sliding it along on the floor as best you can. Then we all practiced a little. We finished with Pranayama (practicing breath control) outside of the shala.

Today I woke up with a very sore uddiyana bandha (transverse abdominus) muscle from the afternoon session yesterday. In the morning session I progressed up to baddhakonasana and started the finishing sequence with urdhya danurasana (the first back bend). The I left SA, I had visited my chiropractor, because I had prolapsed one of my disks between L4 and 5. But I had completely forgotton about that and went into it without thinking. I was more worried about doing it right so that Michael would let me continue with other back bends... This was however not to be, as my heels were always sliding in and creating duck feet. Michael insisted that I get it right and so I could not move on, which was a good thing because I realised later that the muscles around my spine had stiffened up. The other students said that they had experienced similar stiffness the first few mornings they got into that position. I have done this particular asana before, but I think the environment is just causing me to push that much harder. I actually got my head on the floor and heels off the floor in Kurmasana this morning, which was an awesome improvement for me.

After supper we had movie night and Robert actually had made some popcorn. The movie was a DVD that Alan my room mate had brought from home, which was a copy of "The secret". I have put a link on the right hand side for anyone interested. It was very good and is more of a documentary about how you can attract the things you want in life by visualizing the things you want.

I was last out of the Shala other than Michael and Sarah who start their practice after all of us students have gone through to the finishing sequence. I then joined Iman, Gloria and Leenah who went to the market to finish buying gifts as they were going back home this weekend. Iman was showing off her bargaining skills while buying bangles and spices. She was very good, but in my opinion sometimes pushed a little too hard, so that eventually the vendor refused to sell. Leenah and I bought a white sheet embroidered with silk that can be used as a bed spread or table cloth. Leenah is Indian and speaks Tamil and Hindi, so I let her do the bargaining but Iman and I helped. We eventually got them for Rs 250 each (asking price 800).
Then we rushed back to get some lunch and after lunch we headed to Villa Blanche, which is a little coffee shop run by a german lady. She had german bretzels, cake, cookies like the ones my mom makes for christmas so I was really in my element :-). Alan introduced me to the Lemon Lassi, which tastes like liquid cheese cake!!! WOW.

After that I finally was able to rent my own scooter and I drove to a "hair salon". (Before I left for India, I had my hair cut to 2 mm length.) I paid Rs 50 to have my hair shorn down to zero millimetres (but that is not as close as a shave). In Mysuru I will have it shaved off completely, but I will transition slowly I thought as the sun is very strong here.

After supper, Iman, Leenah and I went to Baga to the spiritual Music Festival. Heeyam was the band playing tonight. The band consisted of 2 Indian men and 2 Israeli men. They sang songs in arabic, hindi and hebrew and I enjoyed it very much.