All These Places

So there are quite a few yoga poses.  And here at yoga school, I am slowly learning the alignment points of each, the anatomically correct terminology for the muscles being stretched, and the assists that I can provide my students in each pose.  There are gentle poses in yoga—mountain pose looks like “just standing there” to your average non-yogi and there’s a pose called Corpse Pose in which you just lay there.  On tough days, it’s my most favorite pose.

                There are poses in which you are a warrior…or a dancer…or, god forbid, a pigeon.  There are poses that challenge your quads, engage your core or require you to be all bendy in your shoulders.  Some require balance, some require strength and all of them require that you keep breathing.  When you start doing yoga, there are some poses which quickly become your favorite and others that you tend to dread when they are called out in a sequence.

                And then there’s a final category of poses that just look super cool.  These are the arm balances and inversions.  They are the poses that you watch other people do in your intermediate level class and wonder if you’ll ever have the yoga coolness capacity to perform them.   And then the first time you do them—-well, it’s just a feeling of awesomeness.

                I had been attempting Side Crow for a while.  Instructors walked me through it during a couple different classes.  Basically, it’s a pose in which one balances the entire weight of their body on their two bent arms.  Then, if you are super duper cool, you shoot your legs out to the side.  In all attempts I would either do a crash landing, or worse, never achieve takeoff.

                During our first day off here at yoga school, a group of us went to the beach.   Being the dorks that we are, we used our day off to do yoga on the beach.  “Side crow is easy, really,” said one of my classmates.  “You just do this.”  And with that she just flipped herself in the air.  I watched, I put myself into position and then tried to hoist my sunscreen-oiled legs onto equally slippery arms.  No luck—I ended up sprawled in the sand.

                A few days later, we were assigned to our teaching groups.  Our first attempt at being a yoga instructor would be with three other people, each of us teaching a twenty minute section.  While one person taught, two people would walk around giving assists and one person would demonstrate the poses at the front of the class.  My group began discussing our theme and which poses we wanted to hit.  We decided that the pose we would work up to in the sequence would be…drumroll please…side crow.  And with the order we determined, I would be the one doing the demonstration.

                So now I had a deadline.  I had to get my side crow in the next week and a half.  So I practiced during my free time.  And my yoga muscles are getting stronger —so I had that going for me.    But I still just couldn’t figure out quite how to lift my body in the air.  All of the sudden, I would feel like I weighed about 500 pounds and my arms were made of toothpicks. 

                And then, one day, I placed my hands on the floor and planted them strongly.  I bent my arms and felt the power in them.  I turned my bent knees to the side and slid one elbow just below my hip and the other one just above my knee.  And then I leaned forward, trusting my strength, trusting the earth beneath me.  And it happened.  My legs just floated up into the air.  And then, a few attempts later, I shot them out to the sky.  And that feeling of getting a new pose in yoga—-well, it’s a pretty cool feeling.

                I’ve always loved yoga for the fact that it mirrors life in a million little ways.  And perhaps these tricky poses, these challenging poses are the most perfect example.  Because you could hang out forever in the poses that make you feel safe and secure and be alright as long as you kept breathing.  But sometimes you have to test your strength to find out if it really exists.  And it might take some faceplants before you get to a place of complete balance.  But it’s all worth it—the frustrations and the failures—to get to that place where you can truly fly.