Can you still find some joy in the reaching?
When I think of the Anusara principle of calf loop, I think of playing with drinking straws as a child. I’d take the straw out of the glass and bend it back and forth. The straw would end up with a horizontal crease where it was bent — not quite a break — but the place where it bulged at the bend would prevent the straw from serving the purpose of enabling liquid to be drawn up through it. When our knees (or our elbows for that matter) are hyper-extended, I think it disrupts the energy flow from the periphery to the core, weakening the pose, and breaking the integrity of the alignment.
As one whose legs started out bowed (though less after over six solid years of working “shins in/thighs out”), my natural tendency is to hyper-extend. I find that using calf loop, I do not hyper-extend. Calf loop (also called “shin loop”) has us draw energy from the base of the shin, up the back of the lower leg, and loop it through the top of the shin and then back down the front of the leg. We wouldn’t ever start a pose thinking about calf loop, but in the flow of a pose, after the major principles are activated, including muscular energy, we can enhance muscular energy and the integrity of the alignment of the knees by focusing on calf loop. When I practice calf loop, I find that it lifts the calf muscle and draws it more firmly into the top of the shin, and moves the top of the shin forward. These actions do not bend the knee, but firm the muscles behind the lower leg, including the calf and the popliteus (which is the muscle behind the knee that flexes the knee) to the bone.
What is tricky — especially for those who tend to hyper-extend, is that getting the knee in proper alignment feels like bending the knee. If we have been out of alignment, changing our stance will feel strange and perhaps “not right” at first. The sweet subtlety of practice (whether trying to expand our ability to do poses, heal and injury, or live in better alignment overall) is learning what is true integrity in a pose and what is habit, what will serve and enhance and what does not.
It’s been my experience that hatha yoga practice can be a wonderful way to work on adaptability.
A little after 5 this morning, the sound of the unexpected rain brought me out of my dream state. I was not ready to rise, so I realigned myself into a good savasana and just listened — following no other thoughts — until the morning musical awakening arrived at 6.
I could have thought of it in this language: the rain woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep, but I was still tired so I lay in bed until the alarm went off.
Hotels, I think, were on to something when they started offering “wake up calls,” though the sound of the phone ringing in the middle of an intense dream can be shocking. When did we start naming the sound we use to bring us from dreaming to waking “the alarm?” What perspective does it give to our day to think we need an alarm to start it? Why not at least “alert” or “signal” for the days when the only technology (think about that piece of it) was a jarring sound?
I have been thinking a lot about what wakes me up since Becky passed away. For 21 years, either Henrietta or Becky was lying on or next to me purring before any electronic signal could go off. They knew when it would go off and every morning sought a little petting (and then food) before they heard any signal to start the day. They incorporated it into their rhythm and created a good waking routine around my schedule.
Some of my waking with the cats instead of the electronic sounds must have been me ready to be shifted from sleeping to waking by the cats’ attention, because I am still waking 10-20 minutes before Bose technology utters an automatic sound (usually yoga chants) to make sure I get off to work. I also know from conscious attention to the effects on my sleep from when and what I eat and what I put into my day and until how late, that when I am keeping my eating, practicing, and sleeping schedule steady, I have no need to be called awake by something outside myself to start the day.
An exhortation to a more spacious, loving, conscious being should always begin graciously.
