Greet's Middle Ages

Giving up on this one

The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century.  Geoffrey Samuel, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

is officially too hard for me.  I don't have the background to make sense of it, and I'm not interested enough in the culture to figure it out.  I'll pass on the citation to the SCA-India list, and call this a boundary edge.

Back on the mat

In recap:  I ended up ordering three new yoga disk sets.  Rodney Yee's "Advanced Yoga", Shiva Rea's "Yoga Shakti", and Baron Baptiste's "Yoga Bootcamp."  I've felt for some time that I wanted to broaden my yoga experience, to understand more about the various styles and types and personalities.  In short, it's time to apply some mental rigor, and not just the discipline of "get on the mat more often."  Which gets boring.

I've watched some of "Advanced Yoga".  It's advanced.  The people who did that teacher training course that I didn't, they could do this stuff at the end.  Head balances with legs wandering around, transitioning to arm balances...I'm sure backbends transitioning to other things are in there, too.  It's Yee's own practices, filmed as he made them up for himself.  There's one advanced pose I've seen in the sequences that I can do, as kind of a party trick, the arm balance where you put one leg over your shoulder, cross the other ankle over that leg's ankle, then straighten the arms you're standing on?  This one.  "Hooked foot pose arm balance"...can't find its proper name just now.

I wanted to get this disk, so that I could confirm what it is I'm working towards.  Of course I like the physical exercise, and the mental strength and calmness, and I know that stuff is why I *should* be doing yoga...but come on, I'm youngish, I'm pretty flexible when I'm consistent, I want to learn tricks!

Baron Baptiste's "Bootcamp" is interesting.  It's meant to be consumed as a three-day retreat, with 3 20-minute sessions, and one 75-minute session, performed at various times.  And you're supposed to eat better in this retreat.  And go for walks.  The whole thing sounds very lonely as a solo exercise, but it could be fun to do with pals.  The flashcards are cool, and my computer likes the audiofiles, so I might be able to play them on my mp3 player when I travel.

But it's Shiva Rea who's the real find this time.  First, the formatting of the two disks is very interesting - they're designed in chunks, so you pick and choose what you're doing today.  There's also four pre-designed workouts, so you don't have to think if you don't want to.  I've worked my way through the most basic one of those, and partly through one of the harder ones.  The scenery and music is wonderful.  She stands against sunrise/sunset beach sky in the shallows of the waves (possibly my only favored beach experience - night has been corrupted with dune fleas for me, and I fry in the sun). Rea's style really blows my mind.

She dances the yoga.  I've taken "flow" classes, and sure, there's lots of reps of series of poses, but the poses are still pretty static, and the transitions have no feeling to them, other than "smooth".  Rea is expressive...there's longing, sensuality, thankfulness, determination, in the work I've seen thus far.  And that extra effort to express kicks my butt, both physically and mentally - this, this could replace what I had to leave behind in my dance life, the ability to bring today's emotion to the floor and exorcise it, show it to myself in the mirror, face it and accept myself for who I am today.  With of course, the implied possibility that someone might see, which ups the ante for Truth.

I am so pleased, and eager to get back to the mat tonight.

Yoga

I'm going to add a new category, but this one isn't for a new interest - but one I'm coming back to.

I took up yoga seriously several years ago.  I was trying to figure out how to lead a post-academic, grownup-dancing life.  Yoga was techy/historic enough (just wait until I get to the names) and active enough to interest me.

I did a couple of years of weekly classes, and really liked it.  I bought books and videos, the occasional magazine, and really immersed myself, as I have a tendency to do.  However, some of the other parts of my life stood up and demanded more attention, and I drifted away.

One of the parts I regretted not getting out of my yoga instructional experience, was a strong sense of what home practice should be.  Perhaps I'm being too didactic, but I can't help but compare it to a ballet barre series.  In ballet, you start class with plies (kneebends) and big stretches.  You're working big muscles, warming them up.  You progress from the big muscles to the small, from gross movements to fine, controlled ones.  No jumps until half an hour into class.  No flashy leaps until the very end.

So I'm gardening and aching, and wanting some sort of quotidian yoga practice - a time-tested series that will protect and prepare my body to deal with the stresses of my days.  I want to make it into a daily ritual, so I can ground my day with it.  And I want someone to say 'here's the list, do it.'

I exchanged some email with a lovely woman I met at Gulf Wars who is a yogini, and apparently teaches (though I missed her classes at GW - too many wonderful things!), and asked her about it.  She wanted to know what books and videos I had, and what sort of instructors I'd had.  In answering, I remembered one book that (like most on my shelf, sigh) I really hadn't gotten enough out of.

It's Yoga For Your Type, by Dr. David Frawley and Sandra Summerfield Kozak M.S.  I'd associated it with the Ayurvedic types in the title, which have to do with what sorts of ill humours you're particularly susceptible to, and forgotten that in the back are lists of asana series.  Weeks and weeks worth.

So the last few days I've been doing the series.  I reread the explanation of the dosha types, and concluded that although my teacher five years ago called me kaphic, now I'm definitely pitta.  So I've done pitta-reducing 'emergency' pose series for two days, and as I felt less injured and more in control, started the 'everyday' Pitta-reducing series this morning.  Here's today's list of poses, described as Level #1, Week 1:

• Neutral Spine
• Pelvic Tilt
• Neck Stretch
• Cat Stretch
• Vrksasana
• Wall Hang
• Back Vinyasa
• Child's Pose
• Baddha Konasana
• Janu Sirsasana
• Upavistha Konasana
• Alligator Twists
• Savasana