I have added another wrin­kle to my bed­time regime of yin yoga. While I am on my back in reclin­ing bound angle pose (Supta Bad­dha Konasana), I rest a sand­bag on each knee. I leave them there as long as I can stand the stretch. This angle of my leg and hip is extremely prob­lem­atic for me. I do not have much range of move­ment in that direc­tion. The best illus­tra­tion of this obsta­cle is in tree pose: I have been unable to place my foot on my thigh; I may reach my thigh, but I can’t hold it there becauase my mus­cle torque pulls my foot off. My knee/​leg, instead of being extended at 0 degrees to my body, is at 45 degrees. This issue also com­pli­cates my hips and bal­ance since the rigid­ity does not lend itself to the micro-​​adjustments made to keep bal­anced on one leg, as well as in seated pos­tures because I can’t rotate my thighs.

In class today, I was rewarded for my efforts by see­ing that I could put my foot on my thigh, just above my knee, and hold it there. I still have a prob­lem main­tain­ing my bal­ance, but the change shows that with just two weeks of work I am see­ing results. In the past, I would have told myself that the obstruc­tion was just the way that my body was put together, and I should never expect to get into full tree pose.

Sub­tle shifts in the spine make it pos­si­ble to reach back to the foot

I finally made it to a yoga class. Over the week­end, sev­eral issues (reduced sched­ule at Thrive Yoga, fam­ily activ­i­ties, late nights, urgent tasks, and the men­tal trap of talk­ing myself out of going to class because I’ve got more impor­tant things to do) kept me away from class. I played it safe and took the Hatha class with Mary­lou rather than the 3/​4 vinyasa flow class with Susan. I just think I was in the right mind frame (and in con­di­tion) to tackle an advanced class. In any case, the heat was cranked up so I worked up a good class even in a Hatha class.

Because I have main­tained my evening rou­tine of keep­ing spine and shoul­ders loose for three months, I was able to get into some deep wheel poses (Urd­hva Dha­nurasana) and did not feel like I had back­slide due to my absence from orga­nized class. It also helped that Mary­lou led us through a sequence of poses that pre­pared us for get­ting into a deep backbend.

My evening rou­tine can take as lit­tle as 10 min­utes or as much as 45 min­utes — or for that mat­ter, I could turn it into an com­plete prac­tice. But the daily dis­ci­pline helps main­tain a con­di­tion that I want to keep or improve on. After more than five years of prac­tic­ing, the sin­gle most impor­tant instruc­tion I would give a begin­ner is to do a lit­tle yoga every day.

I went to Thrive Yoga for my Sat­ur­day morn­ing vinyasa flow 2/​3 class just as the snow storm was hit­ting the DC area. There were treach­er­ous dri­ving con­di­tions. I took my cam­era with me because I thought I’d try to take some cuts with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens, which gives some inter­est­ing effects. After about 15 min­utes of prac­tice, I stopped and picked up my cam­era to take some shots. I wish I hadn’t. After about 20 min­utes, I got back on my mat and I did not get into the full swing of the inspired vinyasa that Susan Bowen had put together.

Dur­ing work­shops, like the recent ones with Rum­baugh and Kest, the ses­sions are 2.5 hours long. There are nat­ural pauses and inter­rup­tions. I some­times need a blow. Even then, I felt that my mind was divided; that I was rush­ing through the shots with­out care­fully sur­vey­ing the full scene to cap­ture the details in my mind before shoot­ing; that I was skip­ping steps in mak­ing sure the cam­era had the right settings.

Norm classes are shorter (75-​​90 min­utes) and the seg­ments hang together more inte­grally. For instance, today, I missed a seg­ment to loosen up my shoul­ders so I was not prepped for the seg­ment on revolved bound side angle pose. On the other hand, tak­ing good pic­tures requires con­cen­tra­tion and patience to cap­ture the right angle, light and pose. If I’m con­stantly think­ing about when I should get back to my yoga prac­tice, I am not giv­ing the pho­tog­ra­phy suf­fi­cient attention.

Les­son learned: in most daily cir­cum­stances, either prac­tice yoga or take pic­tures; don’t try to do both. I need my yoga just as much as I need to prac­tice tak­ing pho­tos, if not more. I put an exam­ple of the shoot (on right) in this blog entry.

Bonus point: I did feel the dif­fer­ence for hav­ing prac­ticed three days dur­ing the work week and doing some sim­ple yoga on the other days. I also fit in a hot vinyasa class with Stephanie Rosen­bltatt on Thurs­day so I pushed myself phys­i­cally at least once dur­ing the week.

At the Desirée Rum­baugh work­shop, I was explain­ing my knee injury to Desirée and how I had recov­ered from the surgery. I told her that although the down­time from yoga had been felt, I did not look at it as a loss. In fact, it had helped in many respects; most impor­tantly, it had allowed me to approach yoga from a beginner’s van­tage point. My mus­cles had soft­ened, loos­ened up and become more mal­leable. I had to slow down my prac­tice and become more aware and alert to what my body was telling me. And even though I was once again a begin­ner, I was not com­ing at yoga from the same point of five, six years ago. I had learned a lot about yoga; I was less fear­ful of “doing some­thing wrong;” I under­stood the impor­tance of consistency.

In other words, to para­phrase a quote from the Greek philoso­pher Her­a­cli­tus, you can never step in the same river twice; for other waters flow flow over you. And, for that mat­ter, you are never the same person.

It occurred to me that this is good advice to any begin­ner (or prac­ti­tioner). You have to accept the injuries, the ill­nesses, the inter­rup­tions in prac­tice, as oppor­tu­ni­ties to approach yoga from a fresh angle. The lapses are also chances to empha­size the other aspects of yoga beyond the phys­i­cal asanas: med­i­ta­tion, pranayama, seva. After “back­slid­ing,” the first reac­tion is to feel regret or peeved.

Tonight I went to a Hatha yoga class with Mary­lou McNa­mara at Thrive Yoga. Some prac­ti­tion­ers would look down on it and con­sider it only appro­pri­ate for novices. I call the Tues­day night ses­sion my “reme­dial” class because it always makes me come back to the basics. Last night, Mary­lou gave a mas­ter­ful class that was full of nuances and sub­tleties grounded in Anusara prin­ci­ples. These details prob­a­bly went over the heads of most peo­ple there because of the pecu­liar vocab­u­lary of cuing that Anusara instruc­tors use and because their prac­tice prob­a­bly is not yet mature enough to rec­og­nize the ins and outs of this type of instruc­tion, but the yoga still did them a world of good and they will reap its ben­e­fits, as I did.

Every year, I set an inten­tion for my yoga prac­tice that I bring to the mat every time I take a class or do my home prac­tice. Last year, it was “Lis­ten­ing with the whole body.” In 2008, it was “dis­cov­ery” and empow­er­ing my brother’s health.

This year, my inten­tion is a kind of mantra that I repeat silently to myself: “Mike, don’t work so hard.”

I’ve been prac­tic­ing yoga for six years, often with explicit goals, like “chang­ing my life,” “man­ag­ing my depres­sion,” “improv­ing flexibillty,” — and the list goes on. Any when I come up against my lim­its, whether phys­i­cal, men­tal, spir­i­tual, what­ever, my instinct is to try harder, to redou­ble my efforts, to suck it up. But that approach does not nec­es­sar­ily get the results that I want. Yoga is dif­fer­ent than West­ern dis­ci­plines and sports in that it requires that you be present in the moment, dwelling in the body as it is now, aware of the present. If I am con­stantly mea­sur­ing my pos­ture against some ideal or count­ing how long I can hold head­stand, I am not fully grounded in the moment.

There will be times when I want to explore my edges, as dur­ing the Desirée Rum­baugh or Brian Kest work­shops, or try­ing a pose that I had never attempted before. That’s fine. But I also need to find the ease and grace that allows me to fully inhabit my body as it is here and now. At my recent work­shops, I became aware of what could be called “black holes” in my body — areas that I could not touch or access so I could not move past them to attain cer­tain poses because I could not exert any power or con­trol over my “black holes.” Push­ing hard does not do anything.

What’s required at this stage of my prac­tice is to pause, pull back and focus on deter­min­ing the topog­ra­phy of my “black holes.” I have to let yoga itself show me the way, let yoga do the work. I don’t have to “work harder,” but sit back in patience, ready for a new com­pass to guide me forward.

I am look­ing for­ward to my yoga over the next month. I have extended use-​​it-​​or lose-​​it vaca­tion time between now and the end of the year so I will not be restricted to the avail­abil­ity of yoga in the evening at Thrive. I can pick my classes through­out the day (at least, when I am not being called into the office to fin­ish off last-​​minute essen­tial work). Although Christ­mas and New Years wipe out two days, and other days have reduced sched­ules, I can still fit in a ses­sion, almost every day.

What’s been frus­trat­ing is that since the Brian Kest work­shop, I have not had an oppor­tu­nity to build up momen­tum in my prac­tice. My brother’s funeral, a week-​​long busi­ness trip and the weeks prepar­ing for it, my daughter’s move back home and upheaval in the house­hold, work­ing late, fam­ily mat­ters, Christ­mas par­ties and recep­tions at work, the Metro Red Line mak­ing it unpre­dictable as to when I’ll get home, have all con­torted my yoga rou­tine into fits and starts. At most, I man­age to get in three ses­sions a week, not enough to allow me to get into a rhythm.

I have not been dis­ci­plined enough to have a home prac­tice. At most, I fit in some med­i­ta­tion, per­haps, some pranayama. It’s those days away from class when my body back­slides: any extra range of move­ment is shrunken by dis­use, any skill at swing­ing into hand­stand does not set into the mus­cle mem­ory. A home prac­tice does not have to be elab­o­rate. I could work one theme, say, ham­strings, and focus on that for a week. I know I have areas that need sys­tem­atic work over time to show a break­through — the back, shoul­ders, hips.

Another inten­tion is to keep it sim­ple. I’ve been steer­ing myself to exclu­sively vinyasa 2-​​3 classes, except for Susan Bowen’s Sat­ur­day morn­ing class. I usu­ally take Mary­lou McNamara’s Hatha yoga classes. Lisa Johnson’s classes are along the same line. I’ve taken Dana Cohen’s vinyasa flow all lev­els on Tues­day, and she has fairly acces­si­ble style that does not demand mas­ter skill lev­els. I also took her yin yoga work­shop and it required a lot of dis­ci­pline and men­tal stamina.

So What’s my point? I am try­ing to keep my prac­tice sim­ple. I don’t want to over­reach or impose my A-​​type yoga per­son­al­ity and sets goals and tar­gets that may keep me striv­ing for excel­lence, but not be aware of what other rewards yoga can give me. I keep telling myself: relax and don’t work so hard; it’s the ease and grace of the prac­tice that will carry me the farthest.

Oh yeah! And Desirée Rum­baugh is com­ing back to Thrive Yoga on Jan­u­ary 15-​​17 for a week­end work­shop: The Heart Stim­u­lus Plan (four ses­sions of 2-2.5 hours). The last time I took her work­shop, I really mus­cled my way through many new poses — and tore the menis­cus in my right knee. So I want to be ready this time, with healthy knees, a body that shifted into a gear appro­pri­ate (build­ing on con­di­tion­ing, strength, strong fun­da­men­tals, all guided by mind­ful­ness) for the work­shop, and the right atti­tude. So I have four weeks to pre­pare myself for the chal­lenge, and much bet­ter chances of accom­plish­ing than with the Kest work­shop due to per­sonal issues.

As men­tioned last week, I’ve been try­ing to get back into a rhythm of prac­tic­ing and run­ning so that I could step up my con­di­tion and deepen my yoga. But some­thing seems to be work­ing against this inten­tion, start­ing with the four days in a row of cold rain and driz­zle that removed any desire to fit a short run in the evening.

On Fri­day, I wanted to catch a late-​​afternoon yoga ses­sion at Thrive, but my wife picked me up from work (after her doctor’s appoint­ment) and we got slowed down by DC traf­fic and did not get home until late. But I did end up going to the gym to fit into 30 min­utes on the sta­tion­ary bike and another 30 min­utes on the ellip­ti­cal trainer. On Sat­ur­day, I was eager to get to my yoga 2/​3 class because I expected it to really test my edge. When I walked out into the rain, I was con­fronted with a flat tire. I tried to fix it, but the lug nuts were on too tight for me to loosen up with the puny tire iron that comes with my car. I called for road­side assis­tance, which arrived 90 min­utes after my call. So much for my Sat­ur­day yoga. I was drag­ging the rest of the day from the after­ef­fects of my gym work­out and sleep deficit.

Today, I made to the morn­ing hatha yoga class at Thrive, but the usual instruc­tor, Mary­lou McNa­mara, had mis­tak­enly thought that this week­end was the Brian Kest work­shop (it’s next week­end) and her class had been can­celed. Susan Bowen had to impro­vise by com­bin­ing her Fun­da­men­tals class with the hatha yoga class. Susan tried to keep it sim­ple for the begin­ners (hip open­ers was the topic of the class) while still pro­vide chal­lenge for the more expe­ri­enced students.

I’ve decided that I have to take the approach of accept­ing what­ever comes my way: if there’s a suit­able yoga class avail­able on work­day evenings at Thrive, I should take it because I never know if some­thing will come up later in the week to pre­vent me from attend­ing my pre­ferred classes. Get­ting on the mat is more impor­tant than cal­i­brat­ing the level of inten­sity or sophis­ti­ca­tion of the instruc­tor. Even after my “easy” class, my mus­cles feel sore and my joints stiff. When I’m access­ing deeper lay­ers or com­bi­na­tions of mus­cles for long holds, I am still get­ting some­thing out of the prac­tice, even if I’m not breez­ing through a cou­ple dozen vinyasas or Sun Salutations.

By the way, the Smith clan cel­e­brated my mom’s 90th birth­day today so there really was a mile­stone this weekend.