This month we’re supposed to do posture write-ups on any two standing poses. So far, I’ve chosen the poses I want to write about: wide-legged standing forward fold, and ardha chandrasana. Both of these poses are very challenging for me in different ways. However, I’m still struggling with the idea of observing and discussing my own experience of the pose.
The first month, with the forward folds, writing about my own experience was really difficult for me. Last month, we had to write up our most and least favorite poses, so it was much easier because we were picking poses that we actually had feelings about. Now we’re back to “pick any pose in this category”, and when I think about the regular poses that I do well (for example, triangle pose, or warrior 1), I can’t for the life of me think of what I feel in these poses. When I try to pay attention when I’m doing the pose, I have no problem noticing how my body feels, but I don’t see anything specific related to that particular pose going on in my mind. Other than anatomic things (like having to be careful of my knee in triangle pose), I feel pretty much the same no matter what pose I’m doing. Calm, strong, distracted, tired: it just depends on my mood that day. No particular pose really stirs up anything specific for me. Having to do this exercise is really frustrating, it feels fake to me, I feel very resistant to it, and I will go out on a limb and say I kind of hate it.
So, this month, I am picking two poses that are challenging for me, because if a pose is physically challenging, I can talk about that and be excused from talking about my stupid monkey brain and how it’s not doing anything useful. However, this is still problematic because I just decided a few days ago which poses I would write up, and so I haven’t been practicing them all month, so I still might not have anything good to write about. I did the “I don’t have anything to write about so I’m writing about that” thing the first month and I don’t know if I can get away with it again, although in a sense, if that’s still where I’m at with this, then that’s a valid place to be. I’ll be interested to see what comments I get back from last month’s assignment, maybe that’ll help.
Rox Does Yoga 