Yoga Update

I know many of you want to read more about yoga at the Shala, so here is your update...

Aeryk and I are greatly enjoying our practice here with Sharath and Saraswati. We have registered for our second month...how has the time gone so quickly?! We have had our time consistantly bumped up and are now sitting at the 5:45 time slot for Mysore class. We have been moved into the first group of led classes that begin at 4:30 am! I have enjoyed "sleeping in" for a while until 4:00am. Those lazy days are over now. We must arrive early to get a spot at that 4:30 class, and I still require a hot shower, jala and sutra neti, and a nice cup of hot coffee before practice, so I am getting out of bed EARLY, even by my standards. Not that I am complaining, I've been hoping to get an early slot since I arrived here.

Sharath has graced our practices with additional postures, which is also something I like, but added asana come like many gifts, with some price. For now our practices are still stacked, meaning longer. Also, any posture added one becomes responsible to practice every day for a scrutinizing audience of two very busy master teachers with eyes at the back of their heads. One cannot decide that today is a good day to take things "easy".

Amidst the power and beauty of the practice at the Shala, there is also a final exam sort of energy present most days. Some of the newer students here are struggling to stand up out of their backbends, a requirement to begin second series practice, and I think this can be a high pressure place to learn that "trick". More advanced students are performing their personal final posture before backbends often as if it were a test to be passed. Yesterday a man in front of me practiced kapotasana with such beauty and depth I couldn't help noticing him off the edge of my drishti. He came out of it, I think hoping he would receive the next pose. Sharath did not see him...so he did it again. The reality is that achieving the posture is only part of the advancement process. Sharath does not like to see too much ambition or grasping at postures. Students are forced to develop patience like any other asana...a little more gracefully over time.

Sharath is treating Aeryk and I like a matched set. He adds our postures often on different days, but he is keeping us even with each other. He helps both of us hold our ankles in our backbends daily, but with different instruction. For me now he tells me not to straighten my arms, but to leave the elbows bent and to relax my hands so he can move them higher. This is mostly just preparation and just once a small lift. It is counter to what I am accustomed to doing, which is straightening everything so I can attempt to balance on my own. I have done that only once since I have been here, with Saraswati's guidance. I had a really different feeling with the elbows bent, and I know that is helpful. Backbends only improve I think with new sensation. If one gets stuck in a groove, even a flexible groove, the spine looses the alive quality necessary for deeper bending.

Somewhere in the Shala, and in India, pure contentment, happiness and peace are coming to me and to my practice. When I stand at the front of my mat at the beginning of the day I feel my body breathing the prayer to the sun. I can feel myself emptying out - all the inner complications of my mind and emotions giving way so that a more pure unobstructed energy can move through. When I finish, as we do in the cool darkness of the ladies bathroom, I feel so soft and complete. I practice a long shoulderstand sequence, and one hundred breaths of Sirsasana daily. I don't lift up for long at the end. Sharath will keep us suspended long enough on Friday.

Vivian