YOGA IS MY BUS (continued)
March
2009
On learning how to stand, dreading the standing poses and standing on my head
I suppose that my parents taught me how to stand right before they taught me how to walk. That was the first time. The second time I was taught how to stand was in Yoga class.
In teaching me how to stand, I remember my yoga teacher, Sari, giving me these instructions: (a) straighten your legs; (b) put your feet together; (c) lift your knee caps; (d) roll your shoulders back and down; (e) do not over-arc your back; (f) soften your gaze; (h) relax your throat; and (i) feel the balls of your feet. With the number of instructions I was given, I was so disoriented that my mind could not even command my body to stand still. I literally lost my balance from simply standing. Besides, it was unclear to me how I was supposed to relax my throat. Could such act be done?
Who would have thought that standing was so difficult to do? When I had to re-learn how to stand and found that it was not such an easy task, I learned not to take the seemingly simple things in life like standing for granted. As soon as I learned this lesson, I also learned how to relax my throat.
In the process of learning how to stand, I was taught other standing poses like triconasana (triangle pose) and virabhadrasana. Each time I execute these poses in class, I always ask myself why I find these poses difficult to do and why I always lose my balance. To be honest, I do not think that I have ever done a good standing pose. I still have not gotten over this feeling of dread every time I am asked to do a standing pose. I think there are many things that I am still not understanding.
I took a liking to salamba sirsasana (head stand), a pose that I found relatively easier to get into when I started practicing Yoga. How strange?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under Pursuits and Pastimes, Yoga is my Bus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.