From Liz: Born Again in the Blood of Ashtanga.

First off, it tickles me that you just called me an "ashtangi." Even I hadn't said it out loud yet. This is a whole other tangent, but I'm not sure at what point you can really appropriate that term. I mean, I've never even been to a true shala (though I'm practically living in the cyber-shala), I hold no pedigree. But I guess in spite of my mutt-ly orginis, I'm settling into this [false] identification. I'm a renegade practitioner of an already renegade practice.

As for the chaturanga question: I think that it gets down to a matter of intention with this pose. In Iyengar yoga, it is a stand-alone asana. In Ashtanga, it is a transition, a part of a flowing vinyasa. The in-between, the YWorks variation, performs that sun salute/vinyasa in a very slow, steady fashion. Though you are jumping back, it is a jump-back with a pause; you sort of stick the landing. So, in order to protect your shoulders, etc, you keep a 90 degree angle at the elbow. In Ashtanga, there is a lot more juice and rebound to the action; you spring through the vinyasa with bandhas engaged (which is protective, if you do it consistently and assertively). I could be fooling myself, but it honestly feels perfectly safe.

Also, personally, the tendency to dip my own shoulders forward come from the action of picking up from a seated position to jump-back. For those of us with less core/shoulder/arm and upper-back strength, you need to use simple physics to propel you legs and tush to the back of the mat. That means that while you coil up through the mid-section, you also have to nose-dive a bit to get the height to clear your legs. If you try to keep your chest as forward and level as you do at YWorks, you won't get very far. At least, I wouldn't.

All of this YWorks chat has actually brought up an interesting (and sort of catty) series of thoughts for me. Did you see this article? I have complained to you about this before. Here it is again though. I'm glad for the teacher training that I had at YWorks. I appreciate the teachers who put up with my crunchy self-indulgence, and made my practice more honest. But I have to wonder if this corporate structure hasn't somewhat diluted the yoga. Since leaving the fold, I've been on a quest for inspiration and definition. I hit a wall with the power-yoga, fitness-oriented, "protect the risk factors" brand of practice. Am I being a snotty ingrate? Perhaps. But it's nice to feel like a true believer again. I'm loathe to claim religious affiliation, but I'm a born-again Yogini since striking out on my own.

From Anna: A Watched Hamstring Never Opens

Ahhhh, the "curse" of the bendy body. Cry me a river. While I know that flexibility is a double-edged sword, for those of us with unyielding joints, it's hard to fully grasp the hindrance. The idea of your shoulders being something you can push through and sit into is both foreign and fascinating to me. I am picturing you in all of your blonde, leggy glory - flinging your body through the gateway of your arms in the manner of Red Rover.... It's quite an image to say the least.

As you well know, I am built in exactly the opposite way that you are. I am naturally strong but very tight - particularly in my hips and shoulders. (Thanks genetics!) After years of yoga I am finally starting to see teeny tiny steps towards opening, but for the most part, I'm still tight. Unsurprisingly, I tend to rely on my strength, all the while saying a little prayer that I'll wake up one day and my hips will have magically opened!

Early on in my practice, one of my teachers quoted Mr. Iyengar as saying that the first seven years that you practice yoga, you are opening up the hamstrings to prepare for the asana practice. (Interestingly enough, my google searches are not yielding results to confirm this quote so it may not check out.) Regardless, it's been burned into my brain ever since. You would think that this time frame would depress me. That the idea of something taking seven years to happen would leave me disheartened and weary. But it did just the opposite: it freed me from the daily waiting around.

If you took a phone book and tore one page out at a time, you would notice zero difference in the day to day. But over time, the phone book would start to dwindle in size. I think of this analogy often and know that each time I practice, it's one page in the phone book. Sure I have momentary lapses of impatience, for instance, seeing people in hanumanasana, a pose that seems like it was designed for another species. But for the most part, I try not to fret.

It isn't as though being able to bring my hands into reverse namaste would allow enlightment to ensue.... but then again, because of my tight shoulders, I couldn't say for sure....

From Liz: Line Your Bones Up.

There are days when I feel that my entire practice is an attempt to just get "get to the point." (I just read a funny little list where the author suggested that the whole practice is just foreplay for savasana. That's not what I'm getting at, but it's what got me thinking.) Those days, each pose is an attempt to decipher the meaning of the whole endeavor.

But I had one of those mini-awakenings in my Iyengar class the other day. My teacher D kept making small adjustments to my poses. Little tiny tweaks that made a huge difference. In Down Dog, rather than splaying my fingers out, she asked me to line my pinky finger up with its metacarpal. It's the tiniest shift inward, but it took the frantic strain out of my fingers. I was no longer gripping at the mat, I was rooting down into the floor. She also reminded me a couple of times to draw my arms up into my shoulder sockets, both in D. Dog and in a couple of backbends. It all amounted to her simply trying to get me to LINE MY BONES UP, and PUT THEM IN THEIR SOCKETS.

We throw the word "alignment" around so much, that it loses all substantial meaning. But at the heart of it is a simple idea: asana practice is designed to line your bones up, so that there is a support structure for your muscles to do their job (which, funnily enough, is to keep your bones aligned and your limbs in their sockets) and then the energetic body will slide into place accordingly. For those of us "blessed" with flexibility, this can often amount to lazily hammocking into our joints. In my body, it's the perfect storm of vata flexbility and kapha laziness, and it makes for some loosey-goosey poses. Also, D reminded that my shoulders are a support structure, and not, as I tend to treat them, a barrier to push through (a notion that I've found instructive in balanced inversions like handstand or forearm stand).

On the heels of your post about surrender, this is a counter-point. I surrender too much, or rather, I kid myself into thinking that I'm surrendering. In fact, I'm hiding in the depths of my own "open-ness," cowering under my shoulders and avoiding building strength. There is no ease in my "surrender," just limp acquiescence to the status quo. So, my work is to pull myself together and earn my ease.

From Liz: Confessions of a Cross Trainer.

In response to your quandry: is this one of those "mat as microcosm" moments? I find resistance to my practice is actually resistance to something else in my life (if you'll forgive the facile insertion of the idea of "tranference" into our wee dialogue).

For instance, I've just come off a nightmarish first family vacation with Humble Husband and Terrible Toddler. I packed my mat, but was so caught up in the drama of difficult travel that I only ended up using it as a changing pad. I was too scattered, pulled by my inherent vatta tendencies to focus and step onto mat/into practice mode. I think this is where the yamas and niyamas would come in handy, if I were to apply them dutifully and consistently. I know they are referred to as "constraints" and "observances." But I think the whole set acts more as an energetic funnel, harnessing prana, rather than a barrier. The ritual act of tidying my kitchen becomes an offering, etc. Maybe set up new rituals related to the yamas and niyamas in your new home??

Anyway, I am back to my routine now. First practice was predictably leaden, but it has gotten better since. In my ashtanga practice, I'm learning to trust my hands. I realized recently that a big part of my problem with jumping back has been that I don't trust my hands and arms to hold my weight, so I never really shift it completely into them as I try to transition. The more faith I've put in the palms of my hands, the smoother it has become. Still a lot of work to do, but "practice, practice..."

And I took an amazing Iygengar class where the teacher focused on having us lengthen our psoas muscles, all while broadening and wrapping our quadratus lumborum (deep back muscle) as we did a bunch of forward bending, and eka padas. For example: in eka pada sirsasana (the version of headstand where you lower one leg parallel to the floor, not this one), he had us lengthen the psoas on the lifted leg side, while wrapping the quadratus on the descended leg side, in order to stabilize. But I noticed that this action has the effect of creating a little uddiyana bandha. Which I got really way too excited about. This must be what Mark Whitwell means when he says, "asana creates bandha."

At any rate, the realization also kind of made me feel vindicated. I've heard a lot of people say that you can't mix styles of yoga, that you really should pick one thing and stick to it. But I really believe that some styles are complementary. I walked away from that Iyengar class feeling like it nourished my private ashtanga practice.

Now I just have to figure out a way to justify my love of cardio, and we'll be all set....