Gratuitous PDA · 7 April 2008
I once attended a yoga class in Billings, Montana. Three students total: me, my brother, and the Editor. The instructor, who advised that the ultimate goal of asana was to scratch your third eye with your big toe in a seated forward bend, enthused about ashtanga yoga:
Is that the yoga where you pull all the power moves?
The boys snickered. Nodded to each other as they implicitly incorporated "power move" as a regular term of abuse for the yoga.
Um. You must be thinking of "power yoga." Ashtanga's more contemplative.
Understated. Dignified.
Power moves pshaw.
So... I'm finally going to answer those questions about the power move now. Atha yoga ekapadabakasanam. You probably want to stop reading now.
The one-legged crow has this reputation as the hardest posture, in a sense. It’s the last in my programme and I pull it off, in terms of correct vinyasa, maybe one day in two. To the degree that I can’t do it, I guess I can talk out of my ass about it. Some day, when I incorporate eka pada bakasana, the words might disappear back up my ass again.
So! Before it is too late! EPBbullets. I honestly hope they are helpful for any connoisseurs of the power moves. It requires all my force of concentration to write explicitly about asana without going narcoleptic, so here goes.
● It’s just a combination of the previous two postures. No big deal. End of post.
● Well..., if EPB is not a big deal it’s only because the previous two postures once were. It took me the better part of a YEAR to make UKKB and even now my method is a slow 1-2 left- knee- then- right- and there’s not much lift on the exit. Entering EPB without a solid daily triplet of the UKK up-chickens would have been impossible. You could do planche training instead, but behold: careful with that shit. Mental injuries likely.
● Speaking of the triple-chicken, I ate eggs last month for the first time in a half-decade: apparently the bird poses like eggs (despite my reservations about the idea of fried embryo). Or better: if you are going to make birds, you might have to hatchet a few eggs.
● First time I did EPB I thought: Hello, my cranium is a medicine ball.
● At first I practiced more a hybrid of galava and baka (and still do this many days), with the bent leg’s calf listing in to center like a lazy rudder. That’s cool as far as I care, and delays a new cycle of tricep bruises as that calf comes in to parallel with the forearm.
Not to use stupid anusara-speak, but eventually the calf spirals back out and the shoulders accordingly lift, back leg electrifies like a damn lightning rod, and accordingly the whole core lights up. Key in my case is to lift the shoulders like in headstand and feel a sort of broadness across the clavicle; others with less of a medicine ball for a cranium might be more focused on working the straight leg. There is a light socket somewhere up there behind you and once you plug your toes straight in to it, you won’t have to tax your shoulders until you feel like Atlas sustaining the weight of the world.
● About those tricep bruises. Make friends with the patella and raise it toward the thigh to increase the surface area of knee-tricep contact. No duh, but I’m still working on this.
● If the knee wobbles on the back of the tricep and just won’t stay, I can only deduce that the solution is to reduce pressure on the tricep. Either by shifting weight into the hands, or sucking the knee up by some act of bandha derring-do. Yes that second instruction is an insult to Newtonian physics.
● The excessiveness of my verbal-ness here corresponds to a severe kinesthetic dopeyness. I may be able to read emotion/tension in a body, but have to work hard to understand mechanics. Nevertheless I guess the overall posture is dependent on the relative size of your head to the weight of your leg: I have a normal head (no, it’s true) but ridiculously short legs relative to a spaced-out spine. Thus without a counterbalance in the form of long legs there is a tendency to hold the head with the traps rather than with the core and back muscles.
This tendency is not beneficial.
● Also, the very possibility of EPB has something to do with the weight in the hips and ass: men and small-ass women might not understand the level of hardcore to which we curvier girls rise. Props to the curvy girls in third, right here. Talk to me, girls.
● In a room where play is kosher: I love to come in to EPB from a tight straight-arm bakasana. There’s a lightness in the easy-entry and a possibility of keeping the arms more straight. The lungs have more space and breath comes more softly. For me, this charts the territory to come, since the true entry is still effortful in the shoulders and my elbows remain far from straight. Apparently, there’s a freedom in the full expression that will take me a lot more practice to find.
● EPB lets me know just how much juice I have left. [I practice all of 2nd and third to EPB 4 if not 5 days a week (stop your fingerpointing, my sweet loves; I couldn't care less for your critiques of this programme)—and this is not a big deal, at all, because I’ve built slowly—see below.]
● Having this as my last posture is such a nice practice. For me the only program as wonderful was finishing at karandava with no split. In both cases the crazy bandha stuff and the lift just before backbends creates a chain of strong alternating sensation. Too, long practice makes me follow a stricter vinyasa and eliminates the tendency to pause, fiddle and perfect throughout—because it’s stipulated that I will finish in under 2 hours.
If the strict vinyasa count that a long programme requires ravages your nervous system, then many experienced teachers will say you need to “build strength.” (If it takes your muscles longer to recover between practices, maybe that is a different deal entirely.) I’m still very much engaged with the second series, in which building strength refers not to muscle mass but to nadi stamina: it’s got to do with refining the nervous system, dig?
● For me, these postures are so much about using the subtle body and electric body-loops momentarily to defy gravity. So, the engagement of the nervous system and subtle body have NOT changed for me now that most of my energy is going in to third rather than second. Nadi shodana in the broad sense forges nadi stamina: and even more than muscle, this—the “secret” of second—is the source I am tapping for the EPB. Maybe that’s just me? Overall it's been observed by the experts that third can bring up a hard-chiseled brutishtess in us. I think this happens if we move from sheer upper body musculature and raw determination... but to see the suave feather touch of some women and men who are long-term adepts (yes, out there: you know who you are) makes me guess there is another, higher path through these woods.
That's all I got. This is a coarse dredging from an eka pada bakasana hack, so any refinements or parentheses, complementary experiences, questions and the like are most welcome.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, having a body
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“I practice all of 2nd and third to EPB 4 if not 5 days a week (stop your fingerpointing, my sweet loves; I couldn’t care less for your critiques of this programme”
Question: why would anyone critique this programme? I thought that was the way Guruji currently teaches it.
As for the eggs, if it helps, the ones we usually consume are unfertilized, thus no embryos. Although this poses the question: if it’s not an embryo, what is it? Well, er, waste material? Ok, I’ll stop now.
Posted by: V · Apr 8, 12:50 AM · #
I’m sure Ash will weigh in on the pose, which I don’t do, but three cheers to you for pointing out that we curvy girls are hardcore! We are strong warriors goddesses, in fact.
Posted by: Anna · Apr 8, 04:00 AM · #
Nice, Anna!! V,. Oh, sometimes I get harshed for taking a long program on Sundays, instead of keeping to 2S that day. I don’t always do it because my teacher has advised me to ramp up slowly that day, but if I can do it with a little ease and playfulness—because Sundays are like that, and I’m just practicing with one friend—then sometimes I do take it there. I’m a long way from overtraining. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 8, 04:31 AM · #
Nadi stamina, yes, this is coming. In numerous cases, even back to Primary, I have said to myself that it’s not that a given pose is muscularly difficult but just that it’s so freakin’ weird that it takes time to grok it.
I kinda like it when you talk asana, for the record.
Posted by: patrick · Apr 8, 04:42 AM · #
It really does feel like talking dirty. Transgressive…?
Oh, and I forgot to note that “Oh, my head is a medicine ball” is the response to your question weeks ago of “What is the total organic experience of this pose?”
I might be missing something yet…
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 8, 04:55 AM · #
Hah! I ask you a big wholistic question and you answer me with medicine head (errr…).
Yes, however, to the heaviness of the cranium. For me (and remember that I only do this pose the crim way for crim reasons), pushing the bent-leg down onto the arm, “sealing the bond,” moves the weight back, back, back, and lo and behold, the head levers up (hopefully).
You also said to me, and I won’t dispute this, that “having a female booty in this pose, my friend, is a world of hardcore you can never understand” or words closely to that effect.
:D
Posted by: patrick · Apr 8, 05:49 AM · #
I don’t do this pose yet. I was just thinking about it today. Thinking that my teacher was going to give it to me any second and it was going to be one more thing on the list of things I can’t do at the end of my 3rd. :)
U-k-b is just really wonky for me. I can now get into it most days using the side cheat (lean on right side, squeeze left arm as far as possible over left leg, prop up on left leg, force right leg up, look awkward for 8 breaths, come down).
U-k-c doesn’t go above the elbows no matter what I do, and I can’t jump back from it smoothly.
Galavasana is comparatively easy, actually.
I haven’t tried epb yet.
And I have a big female booty, dammit. :)
I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever ‘get’ these poses. I am on the verge of just asking my teacher to lay the rest of the arm balances on me and dragging my ass through the easier ones until I get retroactive core strength for the others. Does this work, though? I don’t know.
Owl, if your head is a medicine ball, mine is a bowling ball. :)
Posted by: katie · Apr 8, 06:54 AM · #
Okay… but how many levels do we have to clear before we get our first Power Move? Can I buy a Power Move with the Red Chakra Coin I got yesterday when I defeated the Red Dancing Wu Li Cave Defender?
Posted by: Carl · Apr 8, 09:44 AM · #
Now THAT’s a good question. :)
Posted by: katie · Apr 8, 10:44 AM · #
Retroactive core strength. I don’t know if it works! It did “work” for me to sit on UKKB for 9 months, but I’m not saying that’s efficient. This reminds me of the question with starting second series. Wait til you can stand up from backbend or forge ahead and use your kapo openness to prepare for standing up? I see value in the retroactive method on that one.
Carl, I don’t know the goldfarmer market for power moves, but maybe you could ask Baron Baptiste? He might know.
Otherwise, you get about 30 secret invisible power moves in 1S: the jump-backs from sitting. After that it’s a forest of Dancing Wu Li feints and dissolves until you hit the Scylla and Charybdis of Peacock-Croc in the downside of 2nd. Nobody can fight those battles for you, alas, but your secret 30 will make them easier.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 8, 12:16 PM · #
Has this morphed into a videogame discussion?
Posted by: katie · Apr 8, 12:48 PM · #
Were you talking about something other than Red Dancing Wu-Li Cave Defender 2.0?
Katie, you’ve advanced well in to the third level and they still haven’t told you it’s a pre-historic video game? Krishnamacharya found the code on banana leaves and painstakingly re-constructed it.
That’s why we play with avatars. Aren’t you a cockatiel? Patanjali says sou get special powers as you clear the different levels. I mean, isn’t that the point?
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 8, 12:58 PM · #
Goddammit! If I knew it was a videogame then I would have signed up to be an elf so that I could complete u-k-b without using magic!
I’ll let you know when I learn to fly.
Posted by: katie · Apr 8, 01:04 PM · #
Ashtanga Kong? Rolling barrels and whatnot? The Matrix, perhaps? “He’s beginning to believe.” A thousand references.
Posted by: patrick · Apr 8, 01:04 PM · #
The Editor approves of where this is going…
Posted by: R · Apr 8, 03:22 PM · #
It’s all just a videogame? Can I be Ms. Pacman?
Katie you can already FLY! You just have to believe!
(every time you say you don’t believe in fairies, a fairy somewhere falls down dead. think about that.)
Posted by: Anna · Apr 8, 03:41 PM · #
Dude, Larry once awakened us from svasana by entering the room, whispering, “SHHHH! Be quiet! You’ll wake up the yoga fairies!” I frequently cite the yoga fairies in class, and have described wintertime Parsvakonasana as “a ski slope for the yoga fairies.” (or was it the video games that the Editor was more interested in?)
Posted by: patrick · Apr 8, 04:06 PM · #
Don’t know about the Editor, but in order to gain the rooftop flight ability required to enter 3rd series I have personally invested many hours in Ninja Gaiden.
Posted by: katie · Apr 9, 02:43 AM · #
Oh my god. I completely forgot about that one. Are we talking the old skool NES version (circa 1989)? Or some newfangled remake?
Posted by: R · Apr 9, 09:23 AM · #
I played the NES version back in the day, but also there was a truly awesome, infamously difficult remake for the Xbox in 2004, and that’s what I’m talking about.
But don’t run out and buy it, because Ninja Gaiden 2 comes out in June.
Posted by: katie · Apr 9, 09:40 AM · #
I smell trouble.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 9, 12:38 PM · #
Oh my god. This post and thread is amazing. Also: don’t forget that yoga teacher in your hometown farted in downward dog.
Posted by: flint · Apr 10, 02:47 PM · #
Hi (0v0)
This is all inspired writing. It’s all music to my ears. Wait that’s a different sense. But the constructs of what the 3rd poses means to you is so, architecturally complex. Maybe now that I’m practicing at home during the week, home teacher will let me experiment with third… hmmm. Of course, after restoring my full second series practice.
Cheers, Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Apr 11, 04:20 AM · #