For­ward fold

I went to Thrive Yoga for the third day in a row, a vinyasa flow with Jes­sica Apo. When­ever the stars align and nei­ther whims or cir­cum­stances pre­vent me from tak­ing class, I notice that my prac­tice tends to be bet­ter, more flow­ing, build­ing on the con­ti­nu­ity of prac­tice, and even with sur­prises that make me pay atten­tion to how I am respond­ing to each cue. It always helps when I’ve taken one of Susan Bowen’s 2-​​3 vinyasa flow classes that pushes me hard, fol­lowed by a Hatha yoga class with Mary­lou McNa­mara that makes me focus on the fundamentals

But this time, there was some­thing spe­cial. When I went into Stand­ing For­ward Bend (Uttanasana), I noticed that I was get­ting in much deeper than pre­vi­ously. I could place my hands flat on the floor while keep­ing my knees straight, and that made the jump back to plank or chatarunga much more con­trolled. I also felt the dif­fer­ence in Intense Side Stretch Pose (Parsvot­tanasana).

One of my obsta­cles in yoga could be sim­plis­ti­caly called “tight hips,” which most men would rec­og­nize as a com­bi­na­tion of tight ham­strings, hip flex­ors mis­aligned by years sit­ting in chairs, rel­a­tively dis­en­gaged quads, and a stiff spine. The end result is that when I am seated on the floor and want to move into Seated For­ward Bend (Paschi­mot­tanasana), I would ended up in a fairly upright, L-​​shaped posi­tion. I sim­ply did not seem to have the means to get passed a lim­ited range of flex­i­bil­ity. I would take hip-​​opener work­shops and they did not seem to have any last­ing effect.

What hap­pened to allow me to make this break­through? The World Cup soc­cer (foot­ball to the rest of the world) matches over the past six weeks, but most notably in the past two weeks. For the games that I watched at home, I sat on the floor and held yoga poses for as long as I could tol­er­ate: Seated For­ward Bend, Wide-​​Angle Seated For­ward Bend (Upavistha Konasana), Head-​​to-​​Knee For­ward Bend (Janu Sir­sasana), and espe­cially Bound Angle (Bad­dha Konasana), some­times with my feet up on blocks so that I was not crank­ing my neck to watch the game.

It took me ages to grad­u­ally break through the bar­ri­ers of these poses. Look­ing back, I can see that most yoga classes don’t have that much time time to spend in one sequence of poses. They are excru­ci­at­ingly bor­ing when held for that long — unless you’re watch­ing a soc­cer match on TV or a movie or what­ever enter­tains you. Even from one sit­ting to the next, I did not notice any sub­stan­tial change, just sub­tle shifts that kept up my nerve to keep going. But this past week­end, I pushed past an edge. The full real­iza­tion of how far I had come appeared in tonight’s class. In a vig­or­ous vinyasa class in which I was juiced up and sweat­ing, I could feel that some­thing was dif­fer­ent in my practice.

I should note that it was not just the soccer-​​cum-​​yoga ses­sions. At bed time, I do a yin yoga sequence, ini­tially spinal twists, but now with for­ward bends, and that rou­tine helps me release mus­cu­lar ten­sion. It is a daily reminder to my body of the new edge that I had been creating.