TESTING, TESTING....

Uggh. I'm not good at this "code" stuff. Blogger code. Html code. They all suck. For some reason, my comments and my archives disappeared from my blog. I wasted the requisite amount of time looking thru Blogger's "help" section. It was loaded with reports from others having similar blog symptoms. Unfortunately, nothing that i could find helped me figure out what had happened. Since blogger has recently gone thru some kind of update, i tried switching my layout to a new version. When i previewed the page, i could see my archives again and there was a comments section. "Cool", I figured, "It's all fixed." I clicked to switch over to the new layout. I was able to again access my archives but it looks like the old comments have been lost, gone into the purgatory of the ether. That is less troublesome to me than if i had lost the first two years of my posts. That would have pissed me off. Even when i was posting, I didn't usually get many people adding comments. Certainly not like the more modern day ashtanga bloggers, like boodiba and samasthiti, where the comments sections can have as much content, and sometimes more, than the actual blog entry. I enjoyed the comments that i did get, who doesn't like attention? But, it wasn't such an important part of the blog that losing it would make the blog lose it's character.

I also lost the extraneous sidebar stuff that i had cobbled together the first year or so when i bothered to try and play with the layout. Now, no picture of me in the header, no links to old, expired blogs or the links to me doing a couple of asana, no pithy sanskit aphorisms, no out of synch moon phase thingie. Just plain old blog entry text. It'll have to do for now. I'm at work and can't get to any of the photos and I don't feel like playing codergeek anymore. God, imagine if i had to do that all day for a living. Give me a scalpel anytime. I'm glad that there are people who live and breathe that stuff. It makes using the web and doing stuff like blogging possible (with the exception of Blogger, of course). But, all day, every day? I'd rather work at Hotdog on a Stick.

With the new layout, my archives show an interesting pattern documenting progressive sloth: year one - buncha posts; year two - half as many posts as year one; year three - a fourth as many as in year two; year four - one post.

Okay, enough about blogs. What about yoga? Well, I've managed to keep up at the two to three classes a week pace. That's a waay good thing, btw. When I wasn't going and was having various dings and pains, I wasn't enjoying things. The loss of practice, the ground to be made up, it made it unfun. Now, that I've made up a good portion of that ground, and lost a few of those extra lbs., it is again enjoyable to practice. I was frequently looking for reasons to quit practice early: am I sore? am i tired? do i have a bad attitude? is it Tuesday? Now, I'm trying to get in more and more each time. I'm still not ready to go back to doing what I had been. I used to mainly do my second series poses. Now, I do my first series poses and up thru ardha matsyendrasana. I'm going to begin doing eka pada and maybe dwipada sirsasana again, though i think I'm too heavy still to be able to do dwi pada. we'll see. I know i won't be able to bind yet in Tittibhasana B, so that will be my stopping point until I can. Then hopefully i can again begin to work on Karandavasana. I have been given the two poses after that, but they were mercy poses. Even when I was at my peak, I struggled to land Karandavasana on my own. I never, ever had a hint of any lift back up. So, I still have room to improve and roads to re-travel. Maybe I'll learn and be less Sisyphus-ean about the whole process. I could actually work at improving instead of just trying to do it. The "just do it until you can do it" way probably works, but the glaciers are melting faster.

We're back from New York, of course. We missed the torrential weather by a day. I did one more practice before we left, a Saturday led class at Shiva Shala. I was intrigued because I'd never done a led class that did all of first and also the first half of second series. We did up thru Kapotasana. It was a fun practice. There were a lot more people present than from the day before. My back didn't hurt at all. That really surprised me. Every other time I've had that sensation, my low back would be hurt for about three to four weeks. I think the hour long hot bath I took in the extra big tub in our rental condo may have done the trick. I had the same teacher as the day before. I guess she didn't want any part of me since she touched me twice, once in down dog and once in balasana. I don't blame her. It makes sense not to do much in the way of adjusting if someone says they hurt themselves the day before. This class had a good number of skilled practitioners. Nobody that I saw was new or fairly stiff. There were a number of people that I thought had really nice practices. Most people stopped after we got to the second series though. There were only about five or six of us who went on. I din't look around too much, so I didn't get a feel for how people did. Didn't matter. I just wanted to do it myself. I don't remember too many differences from how we do things in my studio. They did do a short handstand session before closing: go up into an handstand and hold for ten breaths. Or not. They also did three drop back/standups after the three backbends. Oh yeah, they did all four paschimottanasanas and three baddha konasanas (we usually only do two versions of pashimottanasana, A & C I think, and the first two baddha konasanas).

My first practice back home was a mysore class. The teacher in the class before had turned the thermostat up to 84, so the room was pleasantly warm when we got going. I finally got a real sweat going. I got my arms thru in Garbha Pindasana with no problems. Only problem with that is that when i then rolled up into Kukkutasana, my legs slipped right back down below my elbows. So, being incapable of getting my hands thru into GArbha leads to me doing a better Kukkutasana. But, it also leads to these great big bruises on my arms. I had thought when I first saw them in NY that they were from me making so many attempts at Bakasana B. After one particularly painful episode balancing in Kukkutasana, however, it became clear what the actual culprit was. In recent mysore classes, I don't feel like I'm going slow, but compared to back when i was regularly doing all of first and some of second, I'm moving pretty slow. I used to get all of that in in less than an hour and a half. Thursday, I ran out of time and didn't get to try Viparita Chakrasana. In fact, to have enough time for a decent Savasana, I had to skip closing and just do the padmasana poses.

I was getting ready to do my Uth Pluthihi when i noticed a friend, Jason, do his. he just had arthroscopic surgery to work on a damaged knee meniscus about nine days before. the stitches were still in his skin. and he was in there practicing. Since he couldn't really do padmasana at all, he did his Uth Pluthihi with his legs held straight out in front of him. And he held it up, steadily, for a long time. A guruji type long time. Try it some time. Amazing. The guy is just an inspiration. He weds in about a week, so no doubt, like me, he'll soon get all overweight and lose all his bandhas too.

Well, this was going to just be a test post to see if the "new" layout, "new" blogger worked. It's time to get to bed. I'm at work. After three o'clock, I'm first call to take care of whatever comes up, so I have to go down now if I want to get any rest. Should be able to practice tomorrow morning. I've got a couple of people I have to see in the morning, including one patient in the unit--she tried pretty hard to die on us the other night--so I'll have to get my rounding done early if I want to get out of here in time to make it to practice. Hopefully, I'll have a chance later tomorrow to fancify the blog a little bit.

End of the Trip

I couldn't live here in New York. It's too easy to eat. And I don't even mean all the restaraunts. We've only been in one real restraunt so far, a Mexican place over in the West Village or some such neighborhood. Man, that was really good food. After reading the menu, I told our host that I hated places like that because I wanted to try almost everything I saw on the menu. You can get hurt just by the little neighborhood convenience stores and grocery stores. They all seem to have these amazing hot food deli sections with piles and piles of really inviting food. Take the Amish grocery store down the street from us. I thought the Amish were supposed to be non-violent, but they did some serious harm to my wallet every day. And that was just the pastry section. Everything looked good, the produce, the meat section, the hot line. I couldn't go in there after a while. There are two Italian restraunts within twenty feet of our front door. Fortunately, budget-wise, we were never able to try them, as the kids only seemed to want pizza from one of the many by-the-slice places or pretzels and hot dogs from the street vendors.

It didn't take us too much walking around the city to figure out which eating establishment is the most ubiquitous in NYC, the kind of place found in any two block area. Yes, it's Dunkin' Donuts. They are everywhere. Near our place there were even two within a block of each other. My wife really likes their coffee though.

Walking around the neighborhoods, there's a bunch a stuff I didn't quite get. Like what's up with the papaya and hot dog places. There's Gray's Papaya, Papaya Dog, Papaya King, Mike's Papaya (and dogs), etc. I don't get it. Can you think of two more incongruous food groups?

Once we get back home, I'll never be able to eat at what we call a "food court" again. Not after the concourses at Grand Central and some of the other places. Guiliani's efforts have been in vain, New York City remains a very dangerous place. The only thing that saved me was my kids idiotic food preferences. We're in the one of the world's gastronomic cornucopias and so, where do we eat today? T.G.I. Fridays near Rockefeller Center. Disgusting. I only ate two and a half mozzarella sticks. But my dietary good intentions were undone by the witchery at Auntie Anne's Pretzels In the Rockefeller basement concourse. I went to get tickets to the observation deck while they went to get my son his first pretzel fix of the day. As we walked to the security line to get on the elevators, my wife said, "Here try these cinnamon and sugar stick things. They're really good." I downed the entire bag by the time we got to the security guy who checks the bags and cameras for possible purse sized nuclear weapons. I then tried a little of my son's pretzel. This was not one of those disgusting things the umbrella boyz foist on unwitting Times Square oglers. This was delictitude. Salt, greasy crispness, dough with just the right degree of slight sweetness. Unfortunately, when I turned back to him to steal whatever pretzel he had left, he downed the last of it and smiled at me. So, after the female contingent went over to Saks for a quick look, I took Jake next door for a tour of St. Patricks Cathedral. Once I had him bored into stupification by explaining the stations of the cross and what the whole candle lighting for the saint thing was all about, I steered him back over to the Plaza and down to Anne's for another pretzel go-round. We went up to the skating ring and ate while watching for people doing face plants.

New York also has some of the nicest studios I've ever been in. Yoga Sutra, on Fifth Avenue, was very refined. It has a very nice, open lobby with marble floors, very clean bathrooms with showers, and multiple practice rooms, one for every genre: Ashtanga, Iyengar, Vinyasa/Other. The prtcie room has big pillars in in that pretty much prevent people like me from doing much looking around. You can really only see the three or four mats around you. The view of everybody else is blocked. But, while in Virabhadrasana, you can look out the window and watch the people on the street below scurrying in and out of traffic, trying to avoid getting wet from the rain or hit by the taxis. Guy's was a more introverted kind of place. It has a darker wooden floor. That, combined with the below street level location and the quiet, serious practice going on, gave the practice room an almost womb like feel. Very good for helping draw the attention inward. Today, we went to Shiva Shala. Although having to use a buzzer to gain entry was a little disconcerting, the studio was gorgeous. It has lustrous, dark red flooring made from timber bamboo. There are a bunch of windows to let in light and two balconies overhead, one running abve each side of the rom. "Hmm," I thought, "I wonder if we go up there to do our finishing?". The ceiling has all this ornate molding, or whatever it's called. I kept my eyes open during Savasana and just looked at it. I kept thinking, "You know, if there's a big earthquake, who ever has their mat below that pretty chandelier is going to be swiss cheese.

I tweaked my back today. I was expecting to get some kind of injury or something before this. I've been doing o little for so long now, that jumping into daily full (or near full) practice was just an inury waiting to happen. This one may not be too bad. I'll kno more tomorrow after we get off of the plane. I was doing Marichyasana A. The teacher had already adjusted me on the first side. She had me get a more legitimte hip and leg position witht the straight leg than I usually get on my own. I did the second side on my own as she was busy helping someone else. I was just coming out of it when she came back to help me. I went back down. I ws expecting the adjustment she gve me on the first side. So, instead of backing off of the forward bend a bit to see what she was trying to do, I kept the forward bend going while she adjusted my hip. As I extended into it, I felt that "proing" broken guitar string feeling in my right low back. I immediately came up. I've hurt that area, on both sides, a number of times, so I knew what that sensation meant. I was expecting to get some immediate stiffness and discomfort but I didn't really feel any discomfort when I came up, so i tentatively did the rest of the Marichy's. No further problems. So I pressed on and did the first series and closed. I did do stand ups and drop backs but blew off trying Viparita Chakrasana.

I probably made the teacher feel bad. When I hurt myself, I gave an audible "Uh oh" kind of thing and then announced in a not quiet enough voice that I had tweaked my quadratus. Then, when i was doing Supta Kurmasana, she was trying to get my feet crossed. I tried to tell her she could go ahead and put my feet behind my head. She moved them up a bit but really only to the top of my head. I'm sure given that my face was flat on the floor that she couldn't understand me and if she could, she probably didn't want to go too far knowing that i had already complained out loud about hurting myself. Then, when I was trying to do my first stand up after dropping back, she came over and helped me up. As she put her hands on my hips, I told her, "I can do it. I can do it." But she went ahead and brought me up. She told me she couldn't hear what I was saying. She said, since I had been up on my toes, she wanted to help me ground my feet as I came up. So, I told her that I knew my feet were up, I was going to try and get them down before i came up and that I wanted to try it once or twice on my own to see if I could get it. "Okay," she said, "I'll leave you alone for the rest of the way" No! No! that's not what I meant. I wasn't trying to tell her to leave me alone. I just wanted to give it a try or two on my own. I could see what's probably going thru her head: "Try to help people and what do you get? Some uppity, snot nosed tourist telling me to leave him alone. Fine. Do it however you want." After I came up the next time, I stopped and went over to tell her that I really wasn't trying to brush her off. I hope she doesn't hate my guts. She was very nice.

We did meet Boodiba today. She was almost finished by the time we came in. As she was leaving, my wife got up and talked to her a bit, to say hi and what not before she left. When we later walked onto our subway train to go home, Boodiba was getting on too, to go to work or home or wherever. I didn't get to say much, just a hello, before our subway stop came. Sometimes, that's enough. Just to put a real face on the persona that one has imagined from reading their writing, that makes the person more tangible or something.

It's been hard trying to keep track of all the little scenes and vignettes from this trip that, at the time of their occurance, I thought would be interesting or maybe entertaining to write about. The kids have been hogging this computer, something about it being theirs, so that when i do get a chance to write, I can't remember a lot of the funny little experiences, like the time my daughter tried to pull her gloves off in the store and it got stuck on her braces, leaving her with this black glove hanging from her mouth for the five minutes that it took us to stop laughing and get it untangled from the wires on her teeth. It's been a great trip, the weather not withstanding. The kids were tired of running around yesterday, so they opted to stay home while my wife went out and did some more shopping and saw a movie. So we, the kids and I spent the day watching about 13 consecutive episodes of America's Top Model, while I made about four trips to that evil Amish grocery for sustanence. I still can't believe Jade didn't win. She seemed like such a lock to me. Further proof that I know diddly about the world of fashion.

Still haven't proofed the last post, despite reading it over and seeing tons of typo's. Use your imagination. I can't do this one yet either. I have to take this thing in the other room to plug it back into the charger and once I do, the kids will slap me around and take it away. Tomorrow, I might get in one more practice, depending on how sketchy the pre-departure preparations are and depending on how my back is functioning tomorrow morning.

NYC

Well, We're in New York. We had a fairly uneventful flight. The airlines are quickly changing how they "manage" their customers. Once upon a time, they gave you full-on hot meals. They usually sucked but they were free and therefore were desirable. After a wave of corporate efficiency nazis being hired to run companies, the airlines cut costs by eliminating the hot meals and instead handed out bags of sandwiches, pretzels and some kind of cake or cookie or something. The cake was usually all tightly wrapped up so that the frosting stuck to the plastic and you didn't really get any unless you licked the saran wrap covering, much to the distaste of your seatmates. Then, in another cost cutting purge, the bistro lunches, as they were pretentiously called were also gone. We had returned to the way they did it back in the dawn of commercial flight, when they would give you a bag-o-peanuts and a cup of gingerale. And now? Now they give you nothing. Instead, some genius figured out that the captive, hungry customers, trained over the years to handle sitting idlely for hours at a time by consuming food and drink(s), would willingly pay money (i think it was $6, i dunno, i didn't pay attention, i had my candy all picked out pre-flight) for the right to eat a stale turkey and cheese product sandwich on a mega bun with a scraping of mayo-like stuff to serve as a gastronomic lubricant, enabling the actual ingestion of an otherwise inedible sandwich. And, for an additional cost, (only $3) the customer could also buy a bag of chips or a cookie. At least the drinks are still free. For now.

So, it's springtime in New York. I thought that was supposed to be a good thing. We got the winter version. It's been in the 30's most of these days, with temps ten to fifteen degrees below norms. We're going thru the lip balm like it was free Crystal. The weather hasn't been awful, really, it's been sunny so far, but it's hard to get motivated, or more importantly get the kids motivated to go wandering around exploring the neighborhoods when it windy and cold. It all goes down hill later today aparently. Some kind of rain thing called a noreaster is supposed to move thru. I thought easter was last week.

My wife had planned to practice at Guy's studio for most of the week. I kind of wanted to try more than one place, while i had the chance. I've read or heard about the various studios and teachers, so I wanted to flesh them out. Guy's, Shiva Shala, Yoga Sutra, i figured I'd try everyplace i could, except Eddie's. I know he's not a big fan of drop in, short term students -- yoga tourists like me, so I figured I'd save us both the trouble. On Sunday, Guy's was closed. Easter. He was't the only one to close up that day. I guess the City That Never Sleeps has to get home for Easter dinner. We couldn't find anywhere to eat that evening, everybody had rolled the metal cages down over the store fronts and was gone. Thankfuly, there was a Bengali place a near our place that was open till 11pm. My wife wasn't practicing Sunday. S he took the kids out to Central Park. I was supposed to link up with them after practice. I decided to go to Yoga Sutra. I did okay, other than making a lot of noise when I first settled in. I got there a bit on the late side so I was in the back row by the windows. It never really got fully warm back there. I got some sweat going but not enough to get into Garbha Pindasana. I wasn't sure how Supta K would go but fortunately, I didn't have to find out. I was able to bind my fingertips. As i started to wiggle my legs around to try and get the ankles crossed, the teacher came up and put my feet up on my head. I can be put into it pretty easily, I can't do it on my own though. I decided to go ahead and see how much of Second that I could get through. First time I'd tried second in a long time. Pasasana was surprisingly do-able on the first side but I couldn't get bound on the second side. Kapotasana was only a toe tipper. I gave Bakasana B a bunch of tries. After six or seven tries, I landed but couldn't hold it. It took a few more tries to be abe to land and hold. I decided to quit while I was ahead and moved on to back bends. I was able to do my three dropbacks and stand ups too. All in all, a pretty good day given how long it's been since I tried some of those poses. I joined the family in the Park. We were pretty easy to pick out. We were the fool tourists who rented bikes to ride around the park in the snow flurries. God, that was cold. The only reason we kept ging was to get back as soon as we could to get out of the cold. One loop around the drive and we were out of there. Fun to see all the places you've seen on TV and in movies: the reservoir, The Tavern, Balto, etc. More fun to go across the street and warm up in Whole Foods. I found my daughter warming her hands up inside the heated case for the rotisserie chickens. She said it worked better than trying to use the vats of warm soup over in the deli section. Gotta love spring in New York.

The next day we got up and took a cab to Guy's studio. Guy is very welcoming and has good, firm adjustments. I did most of the same stuff but blew off the drop back stuff. I set up my mat near the back of the room. Guy came up after a few minutes and asked me to shift my mat further up in the room. He keeps the back of the room open so that people can move there and do their closing poses. I've seen that done at a few other studios too, but I've never understood that approach. I can understand guruji doing it in his original 12 person studio when he had 100 students looking for m, or even now when there's still many more students than can practice in the available floor space. In most studios, however, there is not a comparable supply-demand imbalance. Why not just let people practice and rest in the same place? When I was finishing, there were three people left in the room. And one of them picked up his mat to go to the back of the room to finish. I liked Guy though so I don't want be too critical about such a minor quirk. He had some nice adjustments and the students seemed pretty serious.

We've gone to Sutra for the last two days. On Sunday, I practiced with Bay, who was subbing for Christopher. I wanted to practice with both Christopher and with Gregg at Sutra. I continued to do the same practice on both days: first and the first half of second. Yesterday, in Kapotsana he pulled me into the level of the bone near the little toe. Today, he clearly wanted me to do more. He pulled fairly firmly and I panicked a bit and bailed out on the pose. I apologized for wimping out and used my old, "I got dizzy" excuse. I asked him to give me another try at it. This time, I was much looser and he got me in deep enough to get one finger over my heel.e then helped me do SUpta Vajrasana. I can't hold the bind of the toes on my own and traditionally rely on either someone else helping me hold my hands to my toes or I grab a towel that I have looped around my ankles and back behind me. I was doing the towel thing when Christopher came up. He gave me a questioning look, not unlike one of Tim's looks, and said, "I don't think I've ever seen that set up before." He let me kep the towel in place and just helped me keep my feet in place. I couldn't land Bakasana B yesterday, so I cut it off there and did backbends. Today I was able to land B, again after about ten tries, so I finished the last couple of poses in the first half. I did my drop backs and then figured, "what the hey, gotta try viparita chakrasana sometime". I was pretty nervous about doig it because I hadn't been doing a whole lot of backbending recently. I was able to drop over with reasonable control--not too much noise. Not a chance of coming back over though. I didn't really try. Maybe I'll look at it tomorrow. After my last drop over and stand up, I gave Vrshikasana a go. I balanced but wasn't really able to scoop my upper body through to well. I asked Christopher to give me a hand with it. He told me that it's really called Adha Mukha Vrkshasana. I didn't want to come across like, "well, at my studio..." so I just nodded my head. He sood on the opposite side of me than I'm used to. He was on the side that I'm coming over to. I'm used to people standing on the other side, my chest side. I got much deeper with his help. I totally screwed up the exit though. I don't think he was expecting me to come down and wasn't in a position to stop my movement. My arms gave out a bit and I almost landed on my back. Kind of embarrassing, but as those things go, I've done much worse in the self-mortification dept.

Tomorrow we're going to try and make it to Gregg's class at Sutra. He has a great rep amongst friends tha twe have in NY and also in some of the ashtanga blogs. gotta see for myself, presuming doing stuff with the kids doesn't interfer.

I won't subject anyone reading to a "when I was in NYC with the family, we did the following things..." kind of trip summary. We did go see a show last night. I didn't know what would be good but we ended up trying The Pirate Queen. If anyone else is going to NY soon, let me do you a favor and save you a few hundred bucks: see something else. I had read that the critics had ripped the show for being a lot of fluff, no substance. Le Miz-lite they called it. I should have listened. They were right. Tonight, we're going to see Legally Blonde. It can't be much worse. At least it's suposed to be a comedy.

Time to call it quits. I'm having trouble typing on this keyboard. We gave my youngest a laptop, which had been promised to her last Fall. It is just a weird coincidence that we finally got it in time to bring along on a trip to NYC. It's been a pretty handy coincidence though. I keep mis-hitting key sthough. the "feel" is very different than I'm used to. I'll try and proof this but there's probbly a ton of things I'll iss. I suck at proofreading

I got in one more practice before we head east this weekend. I doubt I'll get done with work in time to go an evening class tomorrow. I'm in the OR but I'm assisting others in their cases. That always tends to take a bit longer. I'll have to be done pretty early to get up north in time for a 5:30 class. With Friday afternoon pre-spring break traffic to deal with, if I'm not out the door by 4:30, I'm not even going to try to get to the studio.

I worked last night so I was able to go to the 9:00 mysore class today. My wife showed up with my son's lacrosse coach. She had talked him into trying her Intro class last night and he liked it, so he came this morning for the real deal. I think he's had some previous yoga experience but not in Ashtanga. She asked me to do 1st series along with him so he'd know which poses to do when. As might be expected with a history of playing Division I college lacrosse, he had some knee issues, but other than that, he did really well. He seemed familiar with most of the poses, other than the ones in the last third of the sequence. He tried them all, though, except for the one I forgot to do, Tirianga Mukha. I couldn't have done the whole first series in my first go like he did. And, he could jump back!! I've been trying for seven years and he does it in his first class? I almost walked out right there. My wife paid for his first month's shala fees in return for some private lacrosse lessons for Jake. Win-win. I hope he can stay with it. He has real potential. As we were rolling up our mats, I offered to get him some tea or something at the coffee place downstairs and he said, yeah, he was heading there anyway. When he didn't show up, I figured he was talking to Tim and people out at the sign-in desk.. My wife came by about fifteen minutes later. "Oh, yeah," she said, "He's with Maura. They got to talking and I think they went out to get something to eat." That didn't take long. I told you Tiff, check with Kiran. She's got the handle on the hottie jock boyz.

This was the first class in a while that I sweated like I used to do in the good old days. I slid thru into Garbha Pindasana with no probs today, where just a few days ago I was having to put all my weight behind the corkscrewing of my arm to get it thru. I was also able to bind in Supta K, but still couldn't quite get the feet crossed. Five pounds and it's mine.

We're coming up on the last minute packing and planning phase of the trip to NYC. I don't know what my wife has planned for us each day, so I'm not sure how practices will fit in, or even if they'll fit in. Surely there will be a couple of days that we can be yoga tourists. I'll leave the 'where' decisions up to her. Last time she went to New York, she did the whole gamut: jivamukhti, Dharma Mitra's place, Guy's studio, I think one other place too. She may just want to stick with one place this year. We'll see. When she went last time, she walked to the different studios. It was a couple of miles to most of them. That ain't happening this time. Instead, we'll have the studio send their courtesy car to pick us up. What's the tip for that kind of thing?

I don't know if I should study with Guy. He may still be mad at me. Once, long, long ago, in a different time-ether continuum, he posted a response to someone's question about diet and yoga. I, having all of four months experience under my belt, felt obliged to use his helpful response as a source of cheap humor and ridicule. It's what I do best. Right after that, he quit posting general discussion comments completely. I don't think he likes smart ass ignoramuses. In going back over those old posts, I think I figured out who BadLady could be: Blondeismorefun. Who? You had to have been there. They're not the same, of course, but they're both inspiringly irreverent.

My wife informed us we'll be getting off of the plane to snow flurries. God, I hate global warming. She's been out trying to find some warm coats for everyone. My son has some warm stuff because he went snowboarding this year. But for everyone else, she's having to call her friends and beg for loaners. Nothing yet in all those boxes in the garage, just Christmas decorations, old camping gear and stuff left over from cleaning out my mom's house. I hope they heat studios in New York, since they don't out here. It's going to suck trying to get into Garbha wearing long johns.

Still don't know if I can handle doing the Sex in the City bus tour. Maybe if I drink.

I picked up an extra call tonight at the last minute, so I'm back at my desk, trolling about, trying to keep my mind occupied. God forbid it should be allowed to go still. God forbid I should use the time to go practice while it's still relatively slow.

At one of my practices this week, a guy who I thought I recognized but if so it was from a long time ago, began setting up his mat. He went up to talk with Tim at the start of class, so I was pretty sure he was either new, had an injury or was visiting from somewhere else. When I heard Tim comment that the class was a mysore style class and that the expectation was that the student would go through the practice on their own, with assistance from the teachers, I figured he was a new student. He then set up his mat and watched most of the rest of the students get going with their practices. After about ten minutes, he got up and started doing a couple of sun salutations but not quite ashtanga sun salutations. After doing just a couple of A's, he then went to the back of his mat and started to look down at one of those posture cheat sheets. I knew then that he didn't have a good idea of what to do or how to do it. The class was a little full, so I knew the two teachers wouldn't have enough time to walk him through first series. I went over and asked if he wanted me to parallel him so he'd know what to do. He readily agreed. We practiced together through Navasana. He was starting to get fatigued I think. He got up to get a bottle of water near the end. I told him we'd stop there and do closing. When I started to show him the closing poses, Tim told me to keep practicing and had the guy just take rest. Walking into a class like that can be awkward for people that are really new to ashtanga. It is fairly easy for the wrong message to be received and for people to get turned off and decide that it's not what they want. I actually enjoyed the practice. I got sweatier than I did on either of my other two practices that week. The guy was holding poses a bit longer than I normally do on my own. Plus, either Tim or his assistant were regularly coming over and adjusting the guy, so I ended doing a reasonable amount work with the longer holds. That was actually the class that I first felt that my 'bad' hamstring was starting to feel the same as the other 'better' hamstring.

After class, I saw Tim while waiting in line at the coffee shop downstairs. He thanked me for practicing with the guy. Turns out he had practiced with Tim before but quite a while back. He'd been out with some kind of health issues and I guess was now looking to try ashtanga again. The guy was surprisingly good. He was at least as old as I am, maybe five or ten years older. He folded forward okay. Tim helped him with the leg raise at the end of utthita hasta padangustasana. His leg was one hell of a lot higher than mine gets. I gotta give the guy credit. He stayed with me the whole way. We did a lot more than is usually done in the typical gym ashtanga prep or vinyasa flow class. Doing all the way thru navasana when you haven't done any yoga in years is more than I would have wanted to do if I were in his shoes. I quit well before that plenty of times when I had just missed class for a few weeks. I don't know if I helped though, because I haven't seen him back since. Maybe I shouldn't have made him do janusirsasana C.

It has been interesting, in this recovery year (for want of a better term), to see what I lost and what didn't seem to go bad as I missed time. As I mentioned in my last post, I've had almost a full year of hamstring dysfunction. Forward bends, I regressed to levels comparable to early in my first year of practicing. Bandhas? Never a strength of mine and what little I had was quickly gone when I decreased my second series work. It was like I had never done bakasana B. Jump back from tittibhasana, or even get into bakasana from bhujapidasana? So much easier to just let those heavy old feet just sink to the floor and walk back. But back bending? There is some shoulder range of motion that I have to get back but I can still do pretty close to what I used to do, at least with urdhva dhanurasana. I haven't tried the second series stuff to really test this. I know kapotasana will be more of a toenail touch than really doing the pose. But, after I get a few shots at doing my prep work, I just get the sense that I'll be right back where I was. Hard to believe that, in a relative sense, backbending is now my best area. It says much more about the degradation of everything else than about my backbending, but it's still surprising to me. Why wouldn't I regress in my back as much as I seem to do everywhere else when I lay off for a few weeks?

Tim even commented after my last practice that I seemed to be finding my old stuff. That class was the first time in forever that I did dropbacks and standups after finishing my back bends. Tim's not one to give compliments and this wasn't one, but it was nice for him to let me know that he noticed I was progressing. I told him it was too bad, because it was going to be another week before I could practice again.

We had a yoga social event a couple of weekends ago. A couple of Tim's long time students got married on the beach in Del Mar. They had Tim officiate the wedding for them. The bride was the teacher I've written about so many times who teaches the Saturday morning improv class. The groom has been studying with Tim about as long as I have. I think they've been a couple now for three or four years. It was a beautiful sunny day at the beach, though slightly windy and chilly day in the shade. It was a chance to see a lot of people who I've seen or known in the past but whom no longer come to the studio or who have moved away completely. I didn't get to go to the reception. That's where all the fun usually is, so of course, I worked that night. My wife and kids did go and stayed fairly late, dancing away. Good thing they don't take after me in that respect. I'm an inveterate wall flower.

Too bad tomorrow's a moon day. I could have used the practice. I'll just have to use visualization.

Slip Slidin' Away

Time/Life is just doing that. I was inspired today to write a new post (translation: slow day at work). It's been only fourteen months since my last entry. Sounds like going to confession. I am at work and this may be disjointed as I will be getting called away from my desk frequently (pager goes off). Trying to blog has always been one of the worst jinxes with respect to an easy day at work.

I've just had my most busy yoga week in a long time. I was able to practice three times. That's a three or four fold increase over what I've been doing since October. My wife quit paying for me on the monthly plan--waste of money, strictly a one-off guy now. Between a change in work responsibilities, need/want to be around the kids for their things, recovery from various injuries, and just being a lazy person, I've become something of a yoga dropout.

Lightning catch-up paragraph: We went to Hawaii last June for a great getaway. I hurt my shoulder trying to show the kids how to really do a backflip off of a rope swing at the fancy hotel swimming pool. I hurt my hamstring trying to do Hanumanasana, my better hamstring, the one that I usually had no fears about. I fiddled about for a while trying to practice through it, not getting better, then backed off a lot in my practicing. Then I re-hurt my hamstring doing...., Trikonasana! Spare me, please. Triangle pose? I can't do fricking triangle pose? So, I semi-practiced, meaning I would practice to the point where it started to hurt or when ever I'd lose motivation, then I'd quit and take rest. Then, I gained about 20 pounds over the next eight months. Then I hurt my hamstring again, doing Kurmasana/Supta Kurmasana, which I couldn't really do anymore because of my progressive adiposity. Then, I got gradually better. (Loki and all other jinx gods, look over there! Go see what's happening!) Okay, now, I haven't felt any weakness or discomfort in the shoulder in quite a while ( I was having problems with pain for a while then I just struggled with weakness, especially when trying transitions out of tittibhasana) and my right hamstring has reached the point that it's no worse than my left. At my ashtanga nadir, I was no longer able to do Trikonasana, Marichasana D, Kurmasana, Supta Kurmasana, Garbha Pindasana, Bakasana B and Tittibhasana and the transitions out of it. My first pull back was when I decided to stop at Bakasana B until I could land it. When I re-hurt my hammie, I decided to blow off second completely until I could get my first series back. Some of the inability was from the injuries. When they got better, I still didn't do well out of the fear those injuries spawned. But my biggest limiting factor has been my weight. I had to be cranked into Marichasana D, and both of us were working for me to get into it. Garbha? For the first time in a long, long, long time, maybe the first time ever, I had to get up and take the "walk of shame" over to the cabinet and get a spray bottle to artificially lubricate myself. The horror, the horror. I've gotten everything back now except Supta K. Makes sense in the ontogeny of things, since it was the last pose in the first series that I was able to do on my own. It's clearly gonna take a couple more kilos off of the waistline to get that back. I had hoped to be able to do my full practice by the time we go on a trip soon, but that's not looking possible now. I haven't done second in probably half a year, so I don't know if I should even try to do it, especially on a trip. If I can't do Supta K, I'll pass on the second stuff.

Looking back over my last posting, well, a lot has gone under the bridge. We have moved to our new permanent studio. It's in a local shopping mall type thing, on the second floor above a Borders Books. That's handy, because after class, we can go down and get coffee or tea and then sit down and read magazines for free. That's what I do anyway. All of the other yogis head over to Jimbo's, the "healthy" grocery store in the same mall, and buy whatever it is that they have at Jimbo's, organic brussell sprout smoothies or something. The studio is definitely an upgrade from all previous iterations. For one thing, it has heat, although it has not always been utilized to the satisfaction of the paying customers. It also looks interior designed. Unlike the old studio on E street in Encinitas, there's not much of the essence of good old India in this place. It has a boutique, much, I'm sure, to the mortification of Tim, who, at some workshop, once protested that such contrivances were foo-foofery and that if the time ever came that his studio had one, we could just take him out and shoot him. It is not exactly something that has any value for men. There's maybe two t-shirts for guys, but every other kind of clothing for women, including thongs and one size fits all undies with AYC logos and pictures of Hanuman. The mysore rugs are nice though. Of course, every piece of finery has a flaw, whether incidental or intentional. While previous AYC studios may have been plain, unadorned, stinky, sometimes insufferably hot in the summer and hard nippled cold in the winter, at least they had a bathroom. In keeping with the Japanese aesthetic of shibui, the concept of beauty brought to witness by imperfection, our studio has no bathroom. You have to walk out and use one of the mall's restrooms about twenty yards away. I thought it was an inspired, though probably underappreciated bit of design work.

My wife teaches at the AYC now. She has an Intro class each Wednesday evening. She also commonly subs the Mysore class to help the other teacher when Tim is out of town. She has continued to teach at a variety of other places in our area, but I've asked her to back that down some, as I think she's spread herself a bit too thin and was getting stressed about it. She's a good teacher though and gets a lot of positive feedback from her students, so it's hard to turn away from that.

We didn't go to Tulum this year and will likely not do the family trip to Shasta this summer. My son is thinking about doing Pop Warner football and that starts in August. My wife and my youngest may go up though. That's still undecided. I've always enjoyed the Shasta trip, but after three years, or maybe it's been four, I can miss out on doing the same hikes and side trips again. I was never that big into nude swimming in 33 degree glacial streams and ponds anyway. Yes, that's George Costanza you hear in the back of your mind. Maybe next year. Maybe there'll be snow on the mountain then.

My kids have now stratified themselves activity-wise. My oldest does swimming. She's in the water 2 1/2 hours every day. She's been reluctant to move up to a more competitive practice group but made the switch recently. She didn't think she'd be able to hang with the work out level of that group but has done fine so far. The mind, it works against you in so many ways. My son, I think, well certainly he thinks, was put on this earth to play lacrosse. He has dropped soccer like an unexpected handful of dog poop. Last summer he tried out for one of the local competitive lacrosse club teams. He made the B team, but a lot of his friends made the A team. Most of them have been playing for several years, He started last winter. He worked hard at his skills in the Fall and made the main team for the winter session. Their team has been undefeated in three years of play. He played well all season. He made the all star team this winter in a big west coast tournament. He's now playing for his school team. Unfortunately for him, there not many 7th and 8th graders playing at his school this year. The upper division 7th and 8th grade team decided to move some of the 6th graders like him up so that they could field a full team. As a result, he now doesn't start at his main position and is practicing at a variety of other positions in the week, even at goalie. I worry that this will set him back compared to the other kids, but then I realize I'm talking about 6th grade lacrosse. It's probably good that he's not starting. The last team they played had a kid, in the 8th grade, named "Tiny" who was at least 6'3" and weighed more than any dad out there, at least 230 lbs. Our first goalie took a shot to the knee cap and went out at the start of the second half. Jake, who weighs at best 80 lbs, was playing emergency goalie. Near the end of the game, this big guy was driving in to try and shoot. To his credit and to his doom, Jake came out to challenge him. Tiny ended up landing on top of Jake along with a pile of other kids who were all glommed onto him, like bees on an bear trying to steal honey, trying to stop him from getting to the goal. Jake hurt his leg, not badly but enough to have to leave the game for good. As is his nature with injuries, something I think he picked up in soccer, despite being too injured to play, he went to a wedding that afternoon and spent the evening dancing, so it wasn't that bad. But the potential for a real injury was easy to see. He can play with these older kids, he's got the ability. He's just having to learn how to play with them. My youngest has fallen out of swimming, much to my chagrin. I think she didn't like that her older sister, who originally had to be dragged into swimming after Zoe got going with it, was getting good, while Zoe was doing about the same. Swimming wasn't something that was "hers". As the youngest, I think she really wants that thing that is hers alone. She has since taken up volleyball and is playing with a local club's developmental squad. She is getting more agile and she has the softest hands on the team. She knows how to play and has a better court sense than most of the girls in her age group. I may push Jake some in his sports, but Zoe I'll leave to go or stay with it as she will. She's a different sort in that respect and needs to find her own way.

My mom passed away last summer. Despite all of her plans and efforts to avoid such possibilities, a long progression of health dominoes began falling in the wrong direction. Fortunately, she died in the most peaceful way possible and her battle with life's capricious unfairness was able to end. One of my greatest regrets about how I have turned out in life is that I don't have more of her in me. I think I am sort of her spiritual antithesis: self centered, underachieving, mostly intolerant of other people's foibles, horrible with the use of the English language, etc. I know her strengths though. I need to develop them in myself. Then maybe my kids can know them too.

We're going on another family trip soon. To the big city, New York City. This is our kids' Spring break. Since we knew a summer trip was not likely to happen this year, we opted to go somewhere in the spring. We at first thought of something like Costa Rica (yoga and nature), then maybe Europe (yoga and culture) then backed it down to London, then finally decided NYC (yoga and shopping) was a better approach. I guess they've all decided that I'm not a good enough traveler and would not stand up to the rigors of a bigger to-do. Pah! I can out travel all of them put together. I can be the paragon of organization and calm. I was born to travel. I just never do it. Only problem is there's nothing to do in New York. My oldest can't see what she's going to be able to do since, omg, she can't swim for a week. And what lacrosse is there in New York city? Wall ball off of the subway cars? gtfooh. My youngest, my wife and I will have fun though. Maybe we'll go see Hairspray or Legally Blonde or something. I was considering Wicked. The Broadway play sites list it as "kid-friendly", but that was a pretty aberrant book and I don't know how it will translate on the stage and to the kids. Anybody seen it and also read the book? Okay for 10 to 13 y/o's? At any rate, it's moot because I am not spending $200 per ticket to see anything. And it's sold out anyway.

So, in preparation for our expedition, I'm trying to get a pound or two shifted around and am trying to breath some life back into this tired old horse so that I can put in some respectable practices while in New York. I don't want to give the impression that Tim has posers for students.

Everybody's away this weekend, except me. I got tired of getting my butt kicked playing internet poker so I figured it was a good time for a blog entry. It was that or watch the "Super" Bowl. Even if I cared about the game, I would have had to figure out what was messed up with the TV to be able to watch, so screw that. This is the lesser evil. Blogging, it's a semi-annual kinda thing. Something like those holiday letters that your relatives send you each year, updating everyone on how all those nieces and nephews you don't remember are doing in school, sports, choir, their on-line gaming guilds, etc.

Family first. The wife is cured of her cancer and fully recovered from her treatment. The hair is a tad bit curlier, but that kind of thing is lost on me. Besides, it's supposed to become less curly over time. She's back to a full practice and is teaching again, even more than she had been before she was diagnosed. The kids are beginning to change their interests. The two girls are now swimmers. Soccer is dead to them. Well, not completely. My oldest still plays on her school team but its a rec level of play. She gets a lot more positive strokes out of it because she's skilled enough to control the ball and score. Plus, there's less griping and negativity at this level. She was starting to leave her competitive team practices in tears. She decided it wasn't fun enough to keep going and quit just before the season ended. Once the decision was made, she seemed to be quite content with it. I tried to get her to continue through the end of the season so as not to leave her teammates in the lurch but she shut me down cold. "They'll get over it." she said. I guess she takes after me more than I knew. She really likes swimming though, as does my youngest. When I was a kid, a couple of my friends were on a swim team and when we'd be at a pool in the summer, I'd be the only one who could just do the basic stuff. They'd be racing each other, doing medleys, and blowing my doors off whenever I tried to race with them. So, I really love to watch the girls do their different strokes, especially the fly, something I've always wished I could do but have never come close to being able to do. The boy has started to diversify. He's still on his old soccer team. That's where every one else is this weekend. They have their year ending State Cup tourney up in Orange county, about and hour or so away. They won this weekend (unfortunately) so they move on to the next level of tourney play which is waaaaay up in Lancaster, about 2 1/2 hours away and just this side of hell. It's in the middle of the desert, where it's freezing in the morning, hot in the day and with forty knot winds starting in the early afternoon. He hasn't decided if this is going to be his last year playing competitive soccer or not. He's talked about playing football next year, but he can't do that and do soccer too. He just finished his lacrosse season. He's pretty sure he's God's gift to lacrosse, but that's done for a while. I'd love to get him going on the swim team with the girls now that all of his ear surgery stuff is done. It might be one thing too many though. He's doing the worst of the three in his math homework and in school in general. Rather than giving him even more to do, he'd probably be better off with less than he has now. My mom had a couple more health things go on. She went into a potentially lethal heart rhythm in December that led to her having to have a pacemaker/defibrillator thing be placed. She also had her first of two carpal tunnel surgeries. This one was on her dominant hand, so she was pretty disabled for a week or so. There's nothing quite so fun as having to learn how to use you left hand for things that you have never thought you would need to use it for. I'll leave the more sordid details to your imagination. She is back to full speed now however. She has no where near the discomfort she had before the surgery, so I think she's happy she did it.

Yoga community second: We're now in our third temporary studio. They have actually signed a lease on the new permanent place and are in the process of building it out. For now, we in an essentially abandoned grey steel warehouse type building that will soon be razed to be developed into foo-foo shops and apartments. The owner is letting Tim use it as a temp space. It has just the right amount of Encinitas funk. The practice room has uneven, red painted plywood floors. It's right in the middle of old Encinitas, just a block from the old studio. It has plenty of parking. It doesn't have heat however. We're starting to get used to that however. The other temp space didn't have any central heat either. We use a couple of space heaters that really do little more than make a humming noise. It's weird practicing with no sweat. As tough as it is to practice in the morning when it's in the thirties, back in the day, when ashtanga first came to Encinitas, back when Tim was just a tyro, they practiced in an old abandoned church that had no heat of any kind. I don't think it had functioning bathrooms either. So, I shouldn't snivel too much. At least this place has bathrooms, and they have showers too! We've been told the new place, located above a Border's Books in a strip mall in Leucadia, should be ready in March. Given the wandering studio saga of the last year or so, nobody is holding their breath on that happening. On an up note, they plan on having expanded hours when the new place opens up, so I should be able to practice more. It will be even harder for me to make it to evening classes on time because the new place is about ten to fifteen minutes further from work than where we are now.

My bending: Same, same. I'm at Nakrasana. Tim gave me Mayurasana this summer, while we were at the Shasta retreat of all things. Then nothing until, I don't know, November maybe, when he gave me Mayurasana, again. I sat up, gave him a hurt look and said, "You already gave me that. Last summer." He paused and replied, "Well, then do the counter pose. Nakrasana." So, when and if I get Vatayanasana, I'm going to ask him what the counterpose is, just out of curiosity. In terms of capabilities/incapabilities, I'd say nothing much has changed. I may be a tad bit better, on average, at back bending, but it's a transitory thing. I'm worse at Karandavasana. I usually land on the floor instead of my arms. I need to stop with trying to go all the way down and work instead on flexing my hips and getting my knees close to my chest before doing any lowering, like Olaf does in the video link. But, I was saying the same thing last summer. I've made an infinitesimal progression in trying to jump back. I can sometimes now lift up, draw my feet thru and hover for a second in Lolasana. Still can't get my upper body to move forward to allow me to shoot my legs back but...., it's progress. I haven't been able to come back over again in Viparita Chakrasana. I came really close last week. I have no idea what I did that was better or different, but I ended up straight over my hands. Unfortunately, I was a millimeter or two shy of what I needed to be able to rotate thru and my weight started my legs back down to the floor. As soon as I realized that I was almost there but not going to make it, I let out this involuntary moan or something, kind of like the noise you'd make upon realizing that you were about to be hit by an oncoming car. Not words, just an surprised but disappointed utterance. I got a few laughs from the room out of that one, so I guess it was a loud whimper. I keep telling myself that once I can start practicing more frequently, some of these things will come. I'm gullible.

Year to come: Once again, we didn't get to go to the Tulum retreat because of conflicts with the year ending soccer tournament. Kiran has planned a trip back to Hawaii to make up for it. We're all looking forward to it, but she is the most as she hasn't been back home in many years. We'll probably go to Shasta again this summer. She was also considering trip up north in a while but I think that's still tentative. Mysore? Not likely to happen. Kiran isn't real keen on it so...

We've wrapped up our two week long Ashtanga workshop. Now I have to leave behind practicing everyday and return to my more usual approach of practicing as and when I can. I didn't set any new milestones in any tough poses in this two week stretch. I almost landed Karandavasana a couple of times but each time one leg would slip off of an arm at the last second. At least I had progressed to a point where I was actually lowering into a landing. Previously it had been more of a case of trying to fall into place. I didn't do a whole lot in Samakonasana either. I was close, maybe two or three inches off of the ground, but still a mile in terms of what it was going to take to get that last measure of opening and lowering. Once I realized that I wasn't going to get all the way down, I decided to too see how it felt to roll back into a sitting position. In the past, I had tried to never sit back. Tim had once said, "Once you are sitting on the ground, the work of the pose is over." Well, I sat back and found a whole new world of intensity, difficult to breath for a few seconds kind of stuff. The angle of my legs was pretty wide, certainly not Samakona, but wider than they had ever been before. Took me forever to get back out of it too. I couldn't get my legs to swing back toward the middle. I think going to ground did help more than just hanging out balanced on my heels, perineum a few inches off of the ground. We'll see. Tim also got me pretty close to my heels a couple of times in Kapotasana. I could touch them with my extended index finger. So, I progressed in a lot of poses, in a lot of ways, but have further to go.

The practices most days were very, very warm. The large number of people in the room from the teacher training group ramped up the heat, a lot. A couple of days I tried to do my first series poses, then followed with my usual second series routine of poses and research poses. That was more than I was up to. Both times I ended up abbreviating my closing poses because I was out of energy. One of those days, I blew off my stand ups and Viparita Chakrasana stuff too. For most of my Mysore practices, I just did my second series stuff. Although I was on vacation for this course, I opted to take call overnight a few times to keep some moola coming in. When I practiced after call, it was usually during the overflow session at 9:00. Tim and his assistant used that time for their practice too. So, those of us who used that time block to practice were pretty much doing self-practice. In the second half of the workshop, there were usually some of the workshop students there to assist and adjust, but for the most part, they didn't do adjustments for people working on second series poses. The other people doing second series would help each other in poses like Kapotasana, Supta Vajrasana and Karandavasana.

The people doing the workshop were all very nice and fun to work with. That is not always the case. In other courses I've been to, there was usually a person or two, or more, that was rough edged or had an ax to grind. There was no one in this group who seemed to feel the need to show the teacher how much they knew or how little they thought of what the teacher knew. It was a fairly diverse group in terms of experience. Some people had a long ashtanga background, had been teachers for some time and had studios of their own. Others had practiced a lot but weren't teaching much yet. Some, like me, were mainly looking to get better at their daily practice. I think every one came away with a large measure of respect for Tim. No matter who people normally train with, they usually come away from these workshops inspired by him. It's kind of hard not to. His obvious physical talents, his willingness to patiently answer every question, no matter how far afield it may lead, his ability to segue from a demonstration of a pose into stories of his experiences with Guruji in "the old days" and then onto stories from hindu mythology, his intuitive ability to see what someone needs to accomplish in a pose and then the experience to know how to best help them get there, and especially his breadth of knowledge of so much more than just asana: pranayama, chanting and singing of mantras and slokas, exploring the sutras and other important Sanskrit texts, the history of yoga in general. For me, he's kind of like the Michael Jordan of yoga. You find yourself thinking, "I wish I could be like that."

Even though we spent seven hours a day in close association with each other, I didn't get to know the other people as well as I would have liked. Beyond getting to practice a lot more and learning more detail about how to practice, the draw for me was to get to know the people who do Ashtanga. There were fascinating people from quite far away and from the local area as well. I wish we had more social time together. I missed out on any of the usual end-of-course mixing. I had previously committed to spending that afternoon and evening with my daughter who was back from a week at camp. I missed out on the social finale, a beach party that evening. Since I left class early that afternoon, I wasn't even able to say goodbye to most people. Instead, I'll say it here. Hope every one has a safe trip home. Vaya con Dios.

The annual Ashtanga Intensive, nee "Teacher Training" has begun. Each year around this time, we're joined in our daily classes by roughly 40-45 workshop students taking a two week workshop with Tim. This year I joined them in the workshop. I've been to the one week course he gives along the same lines in Tulum. We've actually made it a kind of annual winter vacation getaway, having gone three different times now. We didn't get to go this year because my wife was in mid-chemotherapy at that time. I like to meet the people who will go out and be teachers in various places around the country and around the world. I also learn new stuff every time I go, even though the areas being covered are essentially the same. At any rate, even with the newer larger studio we're using right now, with the increased number of students, it was jam packed. And it was hot, India hot. I was tooling along thinking things were going good, doing pretty okay in most of the stuff. Even without doing my full arsenal of research stuff, I felt like I was doing acceptable second series work. Right about my first attempt at Dwi Pada Sirsasana though, I hit the heat/sweat wall. I just felt out of energy, like I hadn't eaten or hadn't slept in a long while. I felt too hot, like I wasn't dissipating the heat. I haven't felt that way in a long while. I felt really puny when I was sitting there wasting time, "cooling down" a bit between poses and watched some of my fellow trainees follow doing the first series by also doing at least as much of the second series as I had done.

I've been very lucky this spring and early summer in that I've had a lot of chances to practice. I wanted to be as good as I could when I got to this workshop. I've been thinking back over the times that have come before. I can't think of a time when I've been able to practice every day, or at least six days a week, for two straight weeks. I wanted that kind of a stretch to be a chance to move ahead in something instead of being a catch up opportunity. I have fantasies of actually touching my groin to the ground in Samakonasana after my 13th day of grunting and groaning and suffering my way lower, or landing and holding a Karandavasana descent, or some other such dream. While I know a dream when I dream it, I am hoping for at least some realistic improvements in my practice. I just have to avoid getting hurt.

I hope to also get more facile at using the Sanskrit counts for the asanas. I have a friend who teaches a class at a nearby company during their lunch break twice a week. I have assisted her in the class a couple of times and have subbed for her twice as well. The times I led the class, I was distracted enough by trying to maintain a reasonable pace, not forgetting any poses, keeping to the very limited time frame available to me, keeping up a greater than normal amount of verbal direction ( because many of them are newer to the practice and needed some guidance but mainly because when people are in anxiety provoking situations, they often compensate by talking too much, and that's what I did), trying to assist where I could, there was just more going on than I was able to process smoothly. So, I started out using the Sanskrit counting but soon degenerated into skipping the counting altogether and just using the inhale/exhale verbal cues along with the descriptions of what I thought would be helpful. It works but it's less than elegant. When we break down into twos and threes in the workshop, I've paid more attention to getting the counting correct than I did in the Tulum workshops.

This workshop group is unusual in that a large number of the attendees are from our area. I think I came up with about fifteen out of the 45 students. Most of the rest are from the US and most of them seem to be from the western US. We do have a couple of people from Europe, one guy originally from Brazil, a guy who just made it out of the governmental changeover in Bolivia. It's a fairly diverse group. It was so crowded today, our first real day of practice together, that I didn't get to look around much and see how everybody did. I was too busy trying to keep my own head above the water anyway. I was so wasted by the end that, after coming up from my last standup, I walked over towards the bathroom to catch my breath before going back to face Viparita Chakrasana. I spotted on of our group doing what I thought was Supta Vajrasana. He was all the way down by himself with no one assisting him. "Aha!" I said to myself, "Here's a great chance to help out and also get a chance to cool down and catch my breath a bit." So I went over and put my legs down on his knees to give him the leverage to come back up when he was ready. He kind of gave me a curious look, like "Uh, okay. Thanks for helping, I guess." Then I noticed that his arms and hands were not crossed behind his back, like in Supta Vajrasana. They were coming straight down his sides, because he wasn't doing Supta Vajrasana, he was doing Matsyasana, part of his closing sequence. It's not really possible to do something more embarrassing than that, unless maybe if I had farted while sitting on him, I guess. I apologized and tried to stammer a quick but useless explanation for my mental deficiency and then slunk back to my mat. God I hate it when I do dufus stuff like that. I felt sorry for the guy later in the teacher training session. He volunteered to demo the first posture we worked on today, Surya Namaskara B, while Tim counted him though it and then used him to guide us in what to look for and how to correct things. He had to hold each step of the sequence for at least three or four minutes, listening to us ask questions and make critiques on the most minor of things. He was in it for probably at least 30 minutes. It was the first thing we did and he was drenched with sweat when he went back to his place. Then he had to do it all over again with his working partner. That was an impressive display, he was tough.

In our first day of class, we spent most of the time going over some of the Yoga Sutras. I had worked the night before and only got a few hours of sleep. I never nodded off in class, but I wasn't doing a very good job of learning. Despite having heard some of the same sutras reviewed by Tim many times before, I retain so little that each time is like the first time. Old Timer's Disease.

Unfortunately, tomorrow is a moon day. I'm in "I get to practice!!" overdrive, so having to pull back and not do so is a big let down. We still get to have class for the workshop though, so at least I'll get that in. Hopefully, I won't get beat up too bad tonight at work and will have all of my few mental faculties with me tomorrow.

Hah!! I just realized, just a second before trying to post this, that this is the computer that causes me to lose my post if I hit the Publish Post button. Maybe there's something in the corporate surveillance system (Websense) that prevents uploads. I'm going to e-mail it to myself and try to post it tomorrow when I get home.

I'm in the midst of that week of early and long days at work. I've gone to the early class at the nearby "other" Ashtanga studio most of the days that I could. Today I had an interesting and somewhat entertaining practice there. The last couple of times I went there, I got there right at 6:00 and the teacher was already there. I showed up at a quarter till today in hopes that he would be there so that I could start that much earlier. He wasn't there when I got there but showed up about five minutes later. I trundled right up to him as he opened up the studio and gave a happy, shiny, "Hey, Good morning. Howzit going?"" He looked back, face still swollen from sleep, with a look that seemed to say, "Jesus Christ, it's not even 6:00. I'm already opening up 30 minutes before the schedule says we start. So now you show up 15 minutes before that?" but pleasantly greeted me. I was worried I'd overstepped things but within five minutes, two other students showed up, so I just went ahead and practiced.

I was better at my efficiency today. I got through things by a quarter after 7:00. Still not enough time to do anything extra but enough to do my postures without being too rushed and to do all the closing poses as well and still have a Savasana that was long enough for the sweat to dry.

I struggled a bit for some reason in Pasasana on my left side. I usually use a T-shirt over my legs to minimize slipping from the sweat. Today it was the shirt that was making me slip. After a couple of tries, including a fairly strong adjustment by the teacher, I pulled the shirt off and tried it skin to skin. I had less slippage but was tired enough by then that I didn't do much better. Since I had a small window of time, I gave it up and moved on.

With no researching, Kapotasana was a bit shallower than usual but I got a pretty good adjustment in it, not so deep as to make me tighten up, but enough to put me at the edge. After holding my legs in Supta Vajrasana, this teacher has been helping me lift up into handstand. He essentially does all the lifting. I guess it's to give me an idea of what the body does when it's making that movement because it's light years from what I could do on my own. Today, he held back a bit, so I set up to try and do a lift up and jump back with my legs in lotus. I can do this sometimes, but not often. When he saw me getting ready to do that, he asked if I wanted him to help get me up the rest of the way. I gave him one of those, "Sure, yeah, I guess, why not?" shrugs. He stands right in front of me and takes hold of me near my hips to help me up. "Okay, whenever you're ready," he told me. I guess he expected me to do the appropriate move which is to press up but to also pivot forward so that the head dips down and the hips come up. Well, I did the lift up part, forcefully, but didn't manage any dippage forward. The top of my head whacked right into his vital nether regions. He took it like a real yogi though and still helped me up to handstand.

Revenge was to be had however. Later, when I was doing my attempt at lowering myself into Karandavasana, I asked aloud in that halting, squeaky voice that goes with complete exertion, "How...far...down...are...my...knees?" "Uh, about three inches," he laconically answered, "Sorry about that mate." I gave up and let him take me the rest of the way through the pose. Humble pie. I have no proprioceptive awareness whatsoever. At least everybody in the room had a good laugh at my version of reality.

This teacher definitely gives the deepest foot behind the head adjustments I've had. It feels great afterwards. Today, I had one of my feet in place and was trying to do the usually wiggle and squirm routine to get it better seated. He came up behind me and started to pull it in deeper. "Hold on a second here," he advised, "Let me just work this down here to your scapula." My eyes popped wide open on hearing that, but he got it down there with no problem.

Surprisingly, even after that deep of an adjustment, my Tittibhasana B was pretty weak. I barely got my fingers together. He was right there to help with that too. I have to say, for those that may feel that they don't get enough attention in a larger class, this studio would be ideal, because with seven or eight students, it seems like he's there whenever you need him.

I was able to practice both days this weekend. The Saturday Improv class was taught by a different teacher than usual. He is one of Tim's third series students and is very low key but gives a very good class that flows well. He does a good job of assembling poses to maximally prepare the group for the more challenging crux poses that he does at the end. On Saturday, we ended up at Viparita Dandasana. By the time we got there, I felt pretty open in the shoulders and back. It's a pose that I can clumsily drop into and can do but in less than good form. I have never come close to coming back over however. On Saturday, I worked on doing the comeback the way that I had seen that teacher doing it in Mysore class. He lifts the head well up, walks his feet in a good ways, then arches the head back through and lifts the feet up and over. The second time I tried it, I actually got close enough to the point of coming back over that I was afraid I might do it, which of course caused me to come right back down to where I started. I guess I was worried I'd get into a position of commitment that would end up hurting but it would be too late for me to prevent it from happening. Next time I get that close, hopefully, I'll be less surprised and will let it happen, if it can.

Sunday's second series class went better than most. I held up better anyway. I didn't run out of gas, I had enough energy to give the last few poses a good effort, which I rarely do. I did my best ever seven headstands. I was even stable in Mukhta Hasta Sirsasana C, the whole time! Little victories, that's all you can ask.

Tomorrow I go to the early class for another quick and dirty practice but I should be able to do a full Mysore class at my usual studio on Thursday.

On Sunday, I went to the local street fair with my wife and two daughters and one of their friends. It was a nice relaxing time. We ingested the usual gastronomic horrors: funnel cakes with powdered sugar, California Quivers (a gelato/fruit ice kind of thing), Kettle Korn, etc. They painted ceramic things (ducks, kittens, frogs) that they'll never touch again. They got toe rings. We also went to this place that had stylists who would do your hair up all crazy with spray paint, glitter, feathers, pipe cleaners, flowers, all kinds of gew gaw stuff. Words to the wise: Dads, if you're taking three girls to a place like this, expect to get your hair done too. That stuff took forever to get out too. There must have been about thirty blue and green feathers stuck in my head. I still had gold glitter two showers later. As I sat there having it done, I figured it couldn't be too bad, even though I was the only adult guy that had been through the place all afternoon. The lady who was doing me kept telling me, "Don't worry, I'm making you look like a warrior." Seeing all those feathers going in, I was thinking, "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna look like one of those Toltec warrior baddasses from ancient Mexico." Well, let me tell you something, those hairstyle ladies lie. Big time. I maybe looked like a warrior from the ancient Fey clan. Got lots of "love the cute hair" comments from all the folks walking by though. The kids wanted to keep their hair and wear it to school the next day. They figured I'd want to do the same. I should have done it just to see if they'd really fire me.

Yesterday we practiced at our new temporary space for the first time. This place is a major upgrade from what we've had before. Tim's old place was....., old. The walls leaked whenever it rained and the place would smell of mold when it was wet. The only bathroom was marginal. The walls in the practice room had been broken by falling yogis and then repaired so many times they were little more than tape, plaster and paint in some places. There was only one way in or out of the studio. But funky as it was, it was what we all knew. If it weren't for the moldiness, which was just too oppressive this year, it could have been okay for longer. But they were looking for a fresher, larger space, maybe with some room for retail sales. They wanted to have two bathrooms, better heating and ventilation, just reasonable amenities. They are in negotiations for a brand new space in a local shopping area. Until then, however, since the lease on the old place expired, they had to get some temporary place for us to practice. Not as easy a thing as you might think. Our first transitional space, a dungeon-like conference room at the end of the parking garage of the local Best Western hotel, was very similar to Tim's original space, except without the mold. It was dark and dingy and had only one bathroom with a leaky toilet (always a favorite thing to have to deal with: you're not supposed to wear shoes or slippers in the studio but the floor around the toilet is always wet) but it did have one amenity Tim's old place didn't: it was the world's capital of daddy long leg spiders. It was also constructed with a bit of M.C. Escher-like optical illusion, with the walls and carpet all appearing to come together at less than square angles, which could sometimes discombobulate you for a moment or two as you tried to figure out how to align yourself for a particular pose.

The new temporary space, however, is just plain nice. It's a yoga studio that the prior tenants were not going to be able to keep going. Tim was able to swing some kind of sublet/lease share for a few months. It has a carpet, which I like but I know some prefer wood floors. It is in the main area of old Encinitas, close to Tim's old studio site. It's a hundred yards from Starbuck's, for better or worse. It's a big space and it has no warts at all that I can see. Tim and his wife Carol have been working hard on getting a new lease for over a year. They ultimately decided it would be better to start with a brand new space, built out they way they wanted it, than to take over some older studio or to try and renovate some space that was being used for something else. So, when I announced to Tim all of five minutes into class that I really liked this place and that they should take it over permanently instead of going with the spot they are currently negotiating for, he gave me a dark look and quickly reeled off an impressive list of potential negatives, none of which registered with me. It was just so nice to finally have nice to practice in.

We do have to share the space with the previous yoga studio however. Tim's schedule, as I understand it, will be as he has always had it. The other tenants will have to schedule their classes around Tim's. All well and good. But when I was looking over the June schedule for the other studio's classes, I noticed that they had classes scheduled on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:15. Unfortunately, that is when Tim usually does his self-practice, and that is when I had been counting on being able to practice on the days when I couldn't get to Mysore at 7:00. Tim also has a big workshop coming up in June in which he will be using the space from noon to five each day for two weeks. The other folks have classes in that time frame too. Hopefully, the conflicts can be worked out without conflict, but whatever it takes to get me my practice times.

One quirk of the new studio popped up about half way though my practice when I went to do one of the Kapotasana research poses we usually do. I was going into a wall supported version of Viparita Dandasana, where the feet are placed on the wall at about hip level rather than lowering them all the way down to the floor. Tim stopped me and made me come down. I was thinking he was going to tell me not to use the wall with my feet because we were only subleting the place and he didn't want us leaving footprints all over the nice clean walls. Turns out, on the other side of the wall is a curio shop with various clocks and vases and expensive gewgaws on shelves and on the wall. When people have plopped up against the wall in the past doing supported inversions like handstands, some of those items ended up getting knocked down. He mentioned that the other store's proprietors didn't like that very much and would come over to let the yoga people know about it. I guess it's okay to do inversions against the wall on the opposite side of the yoga studio though. On the other side of that wall is just a shoe store, so we should be able to whale away at it without causing too much damage.

Despite being the very first day in a new location, the room was packed. I guess some of the folks who hadn't come as much when we were at the Best Western were just waiting for a place that was free of mildew and spider webs. It will be interesting to see if the students who stopped coming to Tim's and started going to the other new ashtanga studio will now come back to practicing at Tim's.

My practice yesterday was another upbeat one. Nothing was real standout but it was just good overall. I did get all the way down in Hanumanasana on both sides and was able to fold forward as well, although the forward bend was incomplete and off center too. I am unable to fully square the hips so I still sickle my back leg a fair amount . It's a lot better than it was just a few weeks ago though. This was the first time in a long, long time that my neuromuscular/central nervous system feedback loop was not screaming at me to pull out of the pose after more than a few seconds. Usually the internal dialogue in the pose is something along the lines of:

groins/hams: Okay, easy there, that's far enough big boy.
me: I haven't even straightened my leg yet
groins/hams: So? Hey! Hey, Hey, HEY! Hold on, I said go slow.
me: I am. just a little bit more today... almost near the floor...
groins/hams: well, that's plenty far enough for today thank you. Iyengar wasn't bent in a day you know. Time to do something else
me: yeah, ok, ok, let me just try to see if I can....
groins/hams: OMFG!! what the hell do you think you're doing? I'm dying! AAAAUUGH! Please stop. plz, plz, plz, pleeeeze, just stop it. You said you were going to stop!!
me: I never said I was going to stop. you did. There, I touched down. Ooooh, that's intense. Now, let's see if I can just fold forward over my leg...
groins/hams: AAAUUGH!! you dirty motherf#%#er! stop this crap NOW. You're not some teen aged mother f%#%ing cheerleader!! You're a god damned 48 year old gynecologist!! you don't need to be doing the splits. GET YOUR STIFF ASS OUT OF THIS RIGHT NOW YOU...... (remainder of expletive discussion deleted)

Then I would do the other side. Yesterday was more amicable. I was able to just be in it with out the neuromuscular stretch receptors going into panic mode.

I'm getting better binds in Pasasana lately too. I don't think I've lost weight, which I thought I would need to do to be able to get back to where I was before. I guess my shoulders and my quadratus muscles are letting me twist better lately. Wouldn't hurt to lose some weight though. I can't help wonder if I wouldn't be better able to jump back, twist and bind, etc., if I weighed what I did twenty years ago (and 30 pounds ago). Odds are good we'll never know.

I ran out of energy again around Karandavasana. I gave it a few tries then let Tim help me do it. He did get me down into it and then let go. I initially started to tilt toward my butt but he repositioned me and I held the pose on my own momentarily before he yanked me up and out of the pose. As hard a time as I'm having getting into the pose, I'm going to have an infinitely harder time ever getting out of it.

Viparita Chakrasana was more of the same. My first couple of drop overs were not quiet but I did okay with my next two tries. I went on and did the drop over and then stand ups and then Vrshikasana on my own. I then stood at the front of the mat to wait for the assisted drop backs. Tim came up and gave me a questioning look, "Viparita Chakrasana?" "I did", I told him, "but not coming back over on my own." He pointed to the back of the mat and we did it all over again. When I was doing the initial drop overs on my own, as I was repositioning myself to try and hop back up and over, I was looking straight down at the floor and it struck me that if I hopped upward and did the needed arching through of my chest but didn't make it and fell, I could potentially land with all of my weight directly over my chin and neck. Comforting thought. Not surprisingly, I had pretty feeble attempts at coming back over. But I didn't fall this time.

Today I did the 6:00 Mysore class at the other studio. For some reason, I wasn't moving through things as efficiently today. When I finished my try at Karandavasana, my last pose before closing, it was almost 7:00. I did three quick backbends and blew off most of the closing sequence so that I could get to work on time. Good thing too because there was a snafu on one of the railroad crossings nearby that routed a lot of traffic that would normally go on the coast road onto the the road that I take to get on the free way. I lost about ten minutes crawling along that 2 mile stretch and made it to work with no time to spare.

All the good practices had to be followed by a less than stellar one at some point and I guess today was that day. I wasn't able to do a lot of things that I typically can do or that I had been able to do just the day before. I couldn't get down easily on either side in Hanumanasana (groins/hams: "see, you need us, you're not going anywhere unless we let you, so next time LISTEN when we say stop!!"), I couldn't land any of my attempts at Bakasana B, Kapotasana was shallow, I never once was able to fold over to any degree in Karandavasana. It was just one of those off days. I didn't attach too much to it. I had stayed up till around midnight reading. I woke up several times before finally getting up at 5:15 to get showered. Doing the class in that kind of rush mode setting is off-putting, I almost expect it to not be a good class. I just want to get it in, keep it going. Hopefully, I'll put an end to this blog post soon and get to bed so that I can get up and go tomorrow as well. That will be first series if I go. I'll have to figure out what to do to get it all done in 60 - 70 minutes: leave stuff out, like leaving out the closing poses today or go really, really fast. Or just sleep in.

I promise. This posting won't be as long as the last one. I can't believe it went on that long. Even I started dozing off as I tried to read through it.

So, where to start this time? I guess I can start by adding a clarification to Julie's feedback to my last posting. Despite observances to the contrary, I never fell out of handstand. I fell on my back trying to get back up into handstand from backbend. Totally different thing. At least one order of magnitude down on the spaz scale. From my perspective that is. Except, I had pulled my mat out into the middle of the room so that I wouldn't be close to anyone as I tried to do the Viparita Chakrasana stuff. By placing myself so plainly in everyone's view and then loudly landing flat on my backside on my first attempt, that definitely qualifies as pure grade spaz material.

I'm on a special schedule most of the rest of this week and half of next week, where I have to be at work from 8:00 am till 6:00 pm. That translates as no chances to practice at my studio. Aghast at the thought of no practice for almost ten days, I decided to see if I could fit in a practice at that new studio that opens at 6:00 am. To get a practice in and still get to work by 8 am, I had to be out of there by no later than 7:15. I was undecided on whether to do a fairly quick, and maybe even abbreviated first series versus doing my second series poses. I opted for the latter. I didn't do any research or extraneous poses, with the exception of doing the Samakonasana and Hanumanasana sequence that we typically do in Mysore practice after the Prasaritas. I'm going to keep doing those, no matter what. I have to or I lose too much ground. I moved through the poses today at a reasonably brisk pace, not hurried but no dicking around either. I did all of the poses and was on the road by 7:10. When I saw what time it was as I finished backbends, I considered also doing my dropbacks and Viparita Chakrasana, but I didn't want to push it. I'll probably try this pre-8:00 practice thing again, so if I can maintain that kind of pace, I'll see if I can fit in those extra backbend things too.

Today I managed to dodge the Parsvottanasana adjustment that made me nervous last week. I did get a really good set of adjustments for Eka Pada Sirsasana and Dwi Pada Sirsasana. Beyond just helping pull the foot further behind the head, he made a point of moving my knee back away behind me. Way back. When I got finally situated in Dwi Pada, it was amazing how much further my shoulders were through my legs than they typically are. There was significantly less pressure on my neck from the legs also. I felt like I could sit with a much straighter back, not my usual Hunchback of Encinitas curvature. I screwed up doing Karandavasana with him, unfortunately. I had forgotten how he did it the last time and I think he was counting on me to do it the same way. He had wanted me to try to just lower part way. I was expecting him to help me all the way down and back up since that's how people usually adjust in the pose. I'll be ready to do it the other way next time. It's how I'd like to go at it right now anyway. I didn't give it any extra tries because I didn't have the time. For better or worse, today I had to do the best that I could in each pose and live with the result. No do-overs or mulligans.

Monday was Memorial Day, a work holiday for most people in our country. Not for our yoga teachers though. I went to Mysore that morning, along with a bunch of other people, regulars and quite a few like me who were taking advantage of a rare weekday to get to do Mysore class with Tim. There were four or five out of town type people and a like number of people who had come in the past but not in a long while, that I had seen anyway. We were stacked up into four rows of mats. Not much room to fall over or flail about. I did as much as I could but had a bit less strength near the end than I had in my classes last week. I was trying to do that partial lowering and then raising back up in Karandavasana. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at maintaining my balance as I tried getting my legs back up to vertical, I asked Tim's assistant to watch me and tell me how close I was getting to the horizontal when I did the lower. After the next attempt, I looked over at him. He held his hand up and tilted it to approximate the angle I had in my hips. It was maybe 20 degrees down from upright. I had to laugh at that. It's so weird how different things really are from how they feel. I was certain I was at, or at least close to having my folded legs out at the horizontal and it turns out I wasn't even half way to that. Back to the drawing board.

By the time I got to Viparita Chakrasana, I was pretty gassed. I guess I must have overdone the researching or did a couple too many tries at Karandavasana. While I took a few seconds to catch my breath, I watched a couple of people near me who can go over and come back on their own do the sequence. The woman next to me, who has a very nice Third series practice, really lifts her head and shoulders through and up as she comes back over. The guy I watched, also with a strong, fluid Third series practice did a couple of other things. In dropping over, he would hold handstand and then extend his legs over and hold the arch. After arching over pretty far and holding it, he would let his knees bend and drop down to back bend. Then he would walk his feet in a step, raise up on his toes and give a slight hop up. Rather than getting the legs back over by noticeably scooping the upper body through, he would just hold the position of his feet being a few feet off of the ground. He then slowly and gradually straightened out of the arch into handstand and came back down to Uttanasana. That looks like it would really be strenuous for the back muscles to pick up all that weight in a static hold like that. When I tried mine, with Tim's assistance, I tried to do what I had seen the woman doing and arched up as much as I could with my head and shoulders as he brought my lower body up. I think I was doing something right as it felt like I was able to do more of the shifting of my body weight back over than I usually do when Tim is helping me. I still don't think I can get my feet and lower legs up high enough for me to make that move on my own. We'll see next time I try it.

I am going to go to Mysore with Tim tomorrow. I made another adjustment in my clinic schedule, shifting my first couple of patients down a bit, to give me enough time to practice. I wanted to go to this class since it will be the first class at the new temporary studio. After that, I'm going to be in that 8 to 6 grind for a while, so I'm going to have to see if I can do some classes at that other studio.