Sarvangasana - Shoulder Stand
Recently, I returned from Indonesia, where I spent 2 weeks traveling solo and another 3 weeks studying yoga. It was incredibly challenging.
* Indonesia is a third-world country. A 3-star hotel in Indonesia included stained sheets, roaches, and other people's hair on the bed. Even a top-rated homestay contained so much mold that if you suffer from asthma -- which apparently I now do -- breathing is labored and scary. Imagine not sleeping well for 5 weeks.
* There are strays everywhere because Balinese Hinduism is so connected to the earth, animals, and plants. None of the animals are spayed or neutered. I love animals, and it was difficult seeing so many starving, maimed ones. One of the women in my hostel heard a pack of wild dogs eating a weaker dog in the middle of the night. I got compassion fatigue and was just sad all the time. Also, 6 dogs chased me down a hill one morning.
* There are no sidewalks, no trashcans, and few discernible road rules. This means that Bali is not walkable, unless you want to walk along a rut in the road filled with trash that no one has burned yet.
* Every morning (including Saturdays), I woke up at 6 a.m. for 2 hours of yoga before breakfast. Then another 6 hours of yoga studies throughout the day. It was hard, especially as I was considerably out of shape compared to most of the other students.
* Even the solo traveling was physically demanding, as I hiked up 2 mountains before sunrise on different occasions. I felt, for 5 weeks, like I was caked in dirt and mud and grime, like it coated not only every crevice of my exterior, but my lungs and eyeballs and throat, as well. I could not get clean, even when I was mostly clean. I threw all my clothes away afterward, because I didn't want to remember any of it.
* I got terribly sick. I had been waking up every morning having difficulty breathing. But all of a sudden during class one day, I became sicker and sicker until I started crying. I spent the next days ill, and the week after my return to America in bed. According to my doctor, I got asthma from the mold; this triggered bronchitis, which then weakened my immune system for Flu-A; which was then compounded by altitude sickness.
There were good and beautiful things too, of course. But I still feel shell-shocked and incapable of formulating valuable lessons.
After my week in bed, I had to finalize all the paperwork for my hail-damaged car, which was totaled. It took time and stress to secure a loan and buy a new (identical) car. I hired someone to convert my shed into a single-car garage so that my new car wouldn't also get hail-damaged.
The man was nice and seemed to know what he was doing. He said it was a 2-day project. Then he mostly just made excuses and failed to show up for 2 weeks after taking half my money and buying supplies. I called 2 other builders over to look at his scant work and they both said to fire him immediately.
I burst into tears. "Arek, what am I going to do?! I spent all my money and took out a loan to even do this much! Now I have half a garage and I don't even know what I learned from this experience! It was like the hardest summer of my life, and I have to go back to school next week, AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I LEARNED!"
"Maybe you don't have to learn anything right now, okay?" said my neighbor, a Polish immigrant. "Maybe you can just sit with it awhile, and we will work on fixing your garage and you can learn something later."
I'm always trying to force things to be deep and meaningful, but sometimes they just suck and you get sick and you burn all your clothes at the end of your journey, and you don't worry about learning anything because you're just too exhausted. And that is okay, too.
While I was in Bali, I got to study under this incredible instructor who left the corporate world to become a doctor of osteopathy, which greatly influenced and informed her yoga teaching. She talked to us about the challenge of holding a single pose for 5 minutes to fully understand and embody it. I wondered if there were ANY poses I could hold for 5 minutes.
I decided to start with Sarvangasana, the mother of all poses.
It turns out it's pretty damn hard to hold a shoulder stand for 5 minutes. But I did learn some things:
* shoulder stands engage the calf muscles. WHAT!? Back, yes. Arms, yes. But calves?? However, if you engage the feet and hold them in a "flointed" (flex/point) position for 5 minutes, the calves will engage automatically. As the blood drains toward the head, the calves and feet will start to tingle. So shoulder stand over time challenges parts of the body that are not even "used" in the pose at first glance.
I guess that's how crazy-hard experiences work, in general.
* the chin automatically wants to tuck to the chest. But that's a lock. If you aren't intentionally locking, the chin should be vertical, which is not intuitive (and which I did not do successfully). Think bridge pose: lift the chin out of the chest, lift the chest back up to the chin. The chin will automatically look tucked, but the intention is for the neck to be long.
* remembering to engage the glutes, squeeze the legs together, pull the belly toward the spine, press the hips forward, pull the feet back, push the back up and forward without letting the hands sink into the lumbar spine, DO NOT MOVE THE NECK, tuck the tailbone again, knit the ribs together, keep flointing the feet.... that's a lot, yeah? What did I learn from that?? This:
When you hold a pose for 5 minutes, everything is amplified. The weaknesses of your pose are amplified by time. By engaging in the asana intentionally for a long time, you expose your own errors. You can stay in any arm balance for the hundredth of a second it takes to snap a picture. But to hold a pose over time, you have to be honest with it.
I intend to keep trying 5-minute holds. Even if I'm too shell-shocked to learn anything from Indonesia and anything from my garage and my car loss... my body will continue to teach me its own lessons over time.
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