One of my absolute favorite things about yoga is the back bend practice. When I first started yoga a year ago, I remember that just holding a simple wheel pose was difficult. One of my shoulders was tighter than the other, and I would feel a sight pitch or numbness after a few breaths. I'm a firm believer in taking things slow with by body's progress, and I knew that one day with time my shoulders would open up and any discomfort would slip away slowly, too. Also, I'm a self taught yogi for the most part. I'm on a student budget and attending classes regularly just isn't in the budget. Not having a teach to help guide me added to my belief that I needed to enter my back bend practice with extreme caution. So, if you're in the same boat as me in wanting to learn a bit of yoga during your free time here is a bit of information I found important and what helped me with the progress I've gained in a year. I only have one rule for going into my back bend practice. WARM UP! My warm up every singe time for my practice is Sun Salutation A and Sun Salutation B. If I know that I will be attempting a difficult deep backbend, I will start warming up my spine with the first posture, sun salutation pose. With the first inhale, reach back just a little at first, then foreword fold. At the beginning of every surya namaskara (sun salutation) I get deeper and deeper with the first pose. I also, add a back bed to surya namaskara B when I go into warrior 1. Gradually getting deeper with the warrior 1 pose as well. Slowing getting my back nice and warmed with surya namaskara A & B greatly increases my flexibility! Sometimes I find myself getting super excited about a pose I plan on trying out, and that will stem the urge to rush through my warm up. If this happens to you.... Don't do it! Take your time warming up, I promise it will benefit you, and you'll remain injury free. After the warm up I move into standing locust pose, sideways mountain pose. camel pose, thunderbolt pose, wild thing pose, wheel,and bow pose. these all add a deeper stretch to not only the shoulders, but your hip flexors. It is also important to engage your core during each backbend. Doing this will give support to your spine. Once you have flowed through the warm up postures you can attempt, with cation, some more difficult bends like.... hand to foot to knee tree pose, lord of dance pose, pigeon pose, one-legged inverted staff pose, king pigeon pose, and tip toe bound wheel pose. Back bends are beautiful and fun and relieving! Please, just listen to your body and know when your pushing too hard. The best thing about yoga is that every asana is attainable for everyone, but you have to enjoy the journey and not rush it to achieve one asana. I hope this helps in your beautiful yoga journey! If you have any tips or suggestion, please feel free to leave me a comment! Like I said I'm self taught, and I accept all the help I can! Alright folks, its been awhile, but I'm back to continue sharing my yoga journey. To help me keep up with my blogging, I invested in two books. The first is Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates and Kayrina Kenison. I believe this book will help me gain focus in my daily practice, and also help me learn to meditate. Day one of meditating practice starts this afternoon! Book number two is my absolute very very favorite yoga book. It inspires me for days!! 2,100 Asanas The Complete Yoga Poses by Daniel Lacerda. This is the second time I've bought the book, because a puppy I once owned literally tore it to pieces. That's ok, because I'm once again a proud owner again. With Mr. Lacerda or Mr. Yoga
In attempt to try and understand the procedure for the primary series I choose to follow Primary Series Ashtanga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois on youtube. This guy is part of my life dream! I would be so excited to go to India and study with him. I was very happy to find he had a few lessons on you tube. Although I quickly realized that even for the first series I was no where near the level of his students. Part of that was because of the jumping back technique I haven't yet acquired. Kino MacGregor, a yogi that studied under Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, stated that this jumping back technique took her about 4 years to fully develop! From now on this will be a big portion of my daily practice. Kino MacGregor has a video of a step by step practice for developing the jumping back technique. So I will practice with her video a few times to remember how to progress, and then incorporated into my daily practice. I believe this technique is what I need in order to establish all future poses such as the infamous handstand! Moving forward, but jumping back! I was very happy with myself that I decided to check this event out! I'm almost didn't go, because it was raining outside, and I really dislike driving at night; especially when it's raining. Thankfully, my Joe talked me into going by giving me ride. I was also able to talk a friend from class, Chris, into going. He was already there when I arrived. I was surprised to see that not many people were there. Yoga was to start at 7:30 and it was already 7:15. Either way I was determined to make it an amazing experience. Chris attempted the bouldering wall they had set up a few times, but I wasn't quite ready to attempt bouldering. I've rock climbed before with someone spotting me incase I fell, but bouldering with little rock climbing experience, no spotter, and the small group of people that showed up crowding around the rock wall made me more nervous than expected. I decided to draw my attention away from the rock wall, and take a look around the warehouse.
Upon reading about this event I imagined taking stairs up to the roof to check out the urban agriculture Local Sprouts advertised. To my surprise, it was a storage unit stripped down and rebuilt into a garden that was set in the back of the warehouse. The science behind it all was something I should've asked about, but my mind was intrigued more with their purpose. This one storage facility grew kale, thai basil, basil, and mint. Their purpose was to sell it commercially. Though one of the owners, Sam, expressed an interest in selling to the community. He also stated that they owned a green house at another location, and that they planned on establishing more storage units. Sam allowed Chris and me to taste their wonderfully grown herbs and veggies, and he told us about the special cocktails he planned to make with the herbs that night. Once we were finished with the urban agriculture tour, the amount of people at the event has doubled. Everyone was staking their claim against the wall in hopes of practice their hand or head stands; which made me realize I should've had done the same thing. I was envious of one guy in the back who could go into a hand stand without the wall. I want so badly to have the power of a handstand! I was looking forward to finding out what the yogis from Mobile OM had to teach me about the handstand, but unfortunately the handstand wasn't in the practice. We practiced more of a "back to basics" form of yoga,which I appreciated, because I sometimes feel like I'm pushing my body to do strenuous moves that my body isn't prepared for yet. The mobile OM instructor said something that I believe will influence me in all my future practices of yoga. She said " What ever you resist will persist." For the remainder of the practice I thought of this statement. Our bodies more often than not are taught to resist anything that doesn't give us immediate joy, or worse, causes us pain. But life itself teaches us that it's truly the hard times that make us really appreciate and enjoy where we are and what we've come from. We really thrive off the pain of our lives, because it serves a purpose. The purpose that teaches us to believe some how this pain or lack of comfort is meant to strengthen you; not break you. So, every time I felt myself focusing on the pain I was feeling in a particular pose I choose to focus more on it with an accepting mind set. I let the pain be, and I didn't resist. I encouraged myself to let the pain change me. Before I knew it the practice was over and I was collecting my thoughts about what I had learned in Shavasana. We had an hour and ten minute long session in what felt like thirty minutes! In this moment I realized I was proud of myself for not letting a bit of rain keep me from this experience. After that, Chris and I did a bit of rock climbing, and we waited for Joe. Unfortunately, we never got to try one of the cocktails Sam told us about, because the line was crazy long. Instead we all went to La Goria for what turned out to be a great ending with yummy for and great margaritas! Ok! So, my website is currently set up how I like it. I've established a schedule for learning the poses that I find most interesting. Some of them will take a very long time learn, Which means I may have to adapt my schedule according to my progress. Also, I need to go and check out the two ashtanga studios I have listed is the scheduling tab. My biggest concern is that I'm attempting poses that I'm not necessarily even suppose to be considering right now. I believe that referencing back to my Series page will help me to keep in mind which poses are safe to practice. I've learned that ashtanga is very traditional in how each pose is learned, and also they are very serious about not progressing to the next series until you have a firm grip on all the previous poses from the previous series. I plan to respect their teaching methods at home, and try not to get too excited about all the fancy new poses I could be learning.
Tonight I plan to go to a free yoga session by Mobile OM of san Antonio. Mobile Om does a variety of outs doors yoga sessions through out the city of San Antonio. Although tonight, because of the cold weather tonight session will be inside a new rock wall facility, Local Sprout's Warehouse, down town. After yoga we get to do some rock wall climbing! I've only rocked climbed once ever, so this should be interesting. Then, we'll all have drink afterwards. |
AuthorJennifer Walker |
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