One thing that has happened for me in December is that my practice has really flourished. It's weird to be having a deepening of spirituality at a time when the outside world is in crisis. Actually maybe that's not weird at all. I keep recalling the line from Rebecca Solnit's article I mentioned yesterday - "In easy times we grow slack." I wouldn't necessarily say recent times have felt easy, but in retrospect everything pre-2016-election feels easy. Because of the depths of my own disappointment and despair, I have had to get up every day and be very intentional about doing something to try to tackle it. Sitting meditation, yoga, other kinds of exercise. The motivation is powerful - I am honestly doing yoga right now to survive.
Maha mudra is one of the poses that has helped me the most. After the election I experimented with what yoga I could manage. Even though fatigue would suggest some head down forward bends, I had too much anxiety to sit still. Meanwhile I tried more active vinyasa standing poses and active backbends and ended up feeling extremely irritable. I knew that chest opening would help - the call to courage and compassion in this moment is intense. So somehow I landed on Maha Mudra.
Practicing it myself is one thing but teaching it is quite another. How many elements of the pose to develop in just one class! The bandas, practice sitting upright, the concave back actions of the arms & chest, the ability to focus on the breath at all let alone to move it into the chest. The first time around I focused on standing poses to start teaching and understanding the bandas, and then some basic arm work in tadasana, and some inversions and lying over bolsters to get the breath awareness. I don't think it was a complate failure, but I realized that my students need a lot more work on sitting upright and if you don't have the shoulder blade action you can't get the jalandara banda at all.
This week I used a sequence focusing much more on the shoulder blade action. There were more vigorous elements but I tried to separate them in time/space from the quieting poses that lead up to Maha Mudra. I think it was a little bit more successful. But in general this is a pose that takes many attempts. The first week we did 60+ minutes of prep but the students didn't know what we were aiming toward. The second week was better in part because they knew where we were headed so the prep work had more intentionality.
Here's the sequence I used:
AMV, actively working on shoulder blades toward waist
AMS hands into the wall
AMS hands on bricks into the wall
uttanasana concave back action
pinca mayurasana
sirsasana, parsva sirsasana
tadasana, gomukhasana
utthita hasta padasana & then w/urdva hastasana
parighasana, foot into wall, working on length in side chest (and slight introduction of mula banda)
prasarita padottanasana concave back action
sarvangasana, focusing on shoulder blades & breath in jalandara banda
halasana
setubanda sarvangasana on the brick, shoulder blades
sukhasana, sitting on bolster, arms down behind leveraging shoulder blades into back; long sitting focusing on breath first w/head upright and then w head down
Maha Mudra
I don't know if it was too many repetitions of Maha mudra for a group that isn't that familiar with the pose. For my own practice, I find the repetitions really deepen the experience.
*****
Maha mudra just intuitively attracted me at this difficult time, but I wondered why. What is happening in this pose that is so comforting? I looked at all the Iyengar books to see what they say about it and the fact is there isn't much written about Maha mudra. It's only in Light on Yoga and the emphasis is mostly on the organic effects, the support for the digestive system, abdominal organs, kidney, adrenal glands. That is very consistent with my reflecting on cleanliness right now. But I know it is helping me in a deeper way - at the energetic level. It's the pranamaya and manomaya koshas. I think to get at those benefits, you have to go back to what Guruji has written in Light on Pranayama about inhalation and retention. A few interesting nuggets from the section of LOY on kumbhaka:
I like the practice of working on a pose for a few weeks at a time, with different strategies for approaching it. So this week I need to practice more. It would be nice to do something more active in my class next week since we've had two relatively quiet classes. I wonder about how to integrate Maha mudra into a backbend class - could you do it at the end with a bridge to some head down poses for recovery? There is a lot of work in the back to sit upright properly, so I would have to modulate the backbends part so as not to overtax.
Recommendations welcome.
Namaskar. Love and Solidarity.
Maha mudra is one of the poses that has helped me the most. After the election I experimented with what yoga I could manage. Even though fatigue would suggest some head down forward bends, I had too much anxiety to sit still. Meanwhile I tried more active vinyasa standing poses and active backbends and ended up feeling extremely irritable. I knew that chest opening would help - the call to courage and compassion in this moment is intense. So somehow I landed on Maha Mudra.
Practicing it myself is one thing but teaching it is quite another. How many elements of the pose to develop in just one class! The bandas, practice sitting upright, the concave back actions of the arms & chest, the ability to focus on the breath at all let alone to move it into the chest. The first time around I focused on standing poses to start teaching and understanding the bandas, and then some basic arm work in tadasana, and some inversions and lying over bolsters to get the breath awareness. I don't think it was a complate failure, but I realized that my students need a lot more work on sitting upright and if you don't have the shoulder blade action you can't get the jalandara banda at all.
This week I used a sequence focusing much more on the shoulder blade action. There were more vigorous elements but I tried to separate them in time/space from the quieting poses that lead up to Maha Mudra. I think it was a little bit more successful. But in general this is a pose that takes many attempts. The first week we did 60+ minutes of prep but the students didn't know what we were aiming toward. The second week was better in part because they knew where we were headed so the prep work had more intentionality.
Here's the sequence I used:
AMV, actively working on shoulder blades toward waist
AMS hands into the wall
AMS hands on bricks into the wall
uttanasana concave back action
pinca mayurasana
sirsasana, parsva sirsasana
tadasana, gomukhasana
utthita hasta padasana & then w/urdva hastasana
parighasana, foot into wall, working on length in side chest (and slight introduction of mula banda)
prasarita padottanasana concave back action
sarvangasana, focusing on shoulder blades & breath in jalandara banda
halasana
setubanda sarvangasana on the brick, shoulder blades
sukhasana, sitting on bolster, arms down behind leveraging shoulder blades into back; long sitting focusing on breath first w/head upright and then w head down
Maha Mudra
- prep only each side, focusing on lifting the chest/getting height, shoulder blades
- one cycle of breath each side
- 2-3 cycles of breath each side (normal breaths in between cycles)
I don't know if it was too many repetitions of Maha mudra for a group that isn't that familiar with the pose. For my own practice, I find the repetitions really deepen the experience.
*****
Maha mudra just intuitively attracted me at this difficult time, but I wondered why. What is happening in this pose that is so comforting? I looked at all the Iyengar books to see what they say about it and the fact is there isn't much written about Maha mudra. It's only in Light on Yoga and the emphasis is mostly on the organic effects, the support for the digestive system, abdominal organs, kidney, adrenal glands. That is very consistent with my reflecting on cleanliness right now. But I know it is helping me in a deeper way - at the energetic level. It's the pranamaya and manomaya koshas. I think to get at those benefits, you have to go back to what Guruji has written in Light on Pranayama about inhalation and retention. A few interesting nuggets from the section of LOY on kumbhaka:
- kumbhaka is withdrawal of intellect from the organs of action, connecting more deeply to the atman/seat of the soul.
- when the breath is stilled in kumbhaka, the senses are stilled and the mind becomes silent.
- Antara kumbhaka (retention of the inhalation) is the holding of the Lord in the form of cosmic or universal energy, which is merged into the individual energy.
- In the Bhagavad Gita, antara kumbhaka is likened to oblation - another nice connection to cleanliness.
I like the practice of working on a pose for a few weeks at a time, with different strategies for approaching it. So this week I need to practice more. It would be nice to do something more active in my class next week since we've had two relatively quiet classes. I wonder about how to integrate Maha mudra into a backbend class - could you do it at the end with a bridge to some head down poses for recovery? There is a lot of work in the back to sit upright properly, so I would have to modulate the backbends part so as not to overtax.
Recommendations welcome.
Namaskar. Love and Solidarity.
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