164/236 - Superficial Lines

Monday 4:30 with Cisco

Cisco led another good class. This time, his theme was stillness between poses, which is right up my alley. He confessed to adjusting his towel with his feet between poses. I thought I had the stillness thing pretty much licked, but I still find myself fidgeting with my shorts when I'm not thinking about it.

I'm still feeling some limitation from my knee, but it's not keeping me out of any poses. It's holding me back some in the standing poses, with one notable exception. In Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee, I've been going into the pose with a straight forward leg, because it hurts the knee to bend it. Of course, this is where the pose is supposed to end up, and it turns out I can go into it without the bent knee if I really apply myself. Today, with my bad leg forward, Cisco still said that I was doing this pose beautifully. So that's one pose where the knee injury has actually led to progress.

The high point in the class came somewhere toward the end of the floor series. I was coming out of one pose feeling a bit sorry for myself. My eyes met Ciscos, and I just started to laugh a bit and smiled. A little later Cisco said, for all the class to hear: "I love it when Duffy smiles in class. Most people look at me and all I see are daggers in their eyes." Bikram likes to call the room his "torture chamber," but its really only torture if you let it be. It can be just as easy, and much nicer, to treat the class as being fun and a bit lighthearted. And it's possible to do that without compromising the class itself.

The day 231 meditation returns to the body work ideas of a "superficial front line" and a "superficial back line." Forward bends (down dog is the example) open the back line, and backbends (up dog) open the front line. Maybe so. But I've got some problems even with this. The back line runs from the bottom of the feet. Well, what about the separate leg poses? Is it one line, or does it somehow split? The superficial back line makes sense if you are talking about a pose where the feet are together nicely, but it doesn't fit for other poses.

And then, what about compressions. In Rabbit, does it make sense to talk about a "line." The goal of the pose is to make your back look like a nice arc, not at all like a straight line. Now this is probably picking at nits, and I'm pretty confident that there could probably be some good explanation and useful analysis from these body work ideas. But, at this point in the meditations, I think they basically present many more questions than they answer.