The alarm woke me at five thirty. I got up from bed and slid the window open. My cat jumped to the windowsill, cock his head to sniff the fresh early morning air. To wake my body and mind from deep sleep, I went to the kitchen, boiled water, and made some coffee. At six o’clock I was going to have a yoga class focused on the posture Sirsasana (yoga headstand), also called the king of all asanas. Though I had been practicing yoga consistently for a couple of years, Sirsasana still appeared challenging to me.
A few minutes before six o’clock, I spread the yoga mat on the bedroom floor, set up two cameras, and connected with the live class. It’s a small class of less than ten students. ‘’Let the breath flow and focus on muscle strengths’’, I told myself. Following the teacher’s instruction, we did a few rounds of sun salutation to warm up, moved on to work the shoulder and core muscles intensely and minutely, before we embarked on the headstand. I wiped the sweat with a towel and took several long breaths. ‘’Keep the space between ears and shoulder, stabilize the shoulder joints, and summon the back muscles’’, I repeated in my head some key notes for a successful headstand. Yet as I slowly lifted the sit bone upwards, till some point, the neck felt mildly compressed and stuck, like the river blood flow was blocked and obstructed. After a few attempts under the teacher’s instruction still no success. ‘’You cannot keep the shoulder depressed while lifting the leg, therefore the neck is always restricted. Call it a day and try in the next class’’, the teacher said. My head and neck indeed started to feel uncomfortable, so I stopped trying as told. I felt quite disappointed, no frustration though, unsuccessful attempts were always part of regular practice.
The Sirsasana pose was like an intense, detailed interrogation of the body. In one of the lectures B.K.S. Iyengar gave during his journey of bringing yoga to the west in the 1980s [1], he gave an example of how subtle the headstand practice can be. For most people in the headstand pose, the hole of the ear transformed from circular to oval shape, which was a sign that the head-balance was wrong. He helped a deaf young woman recover her auditory ability with his tremendous knowledge and experience—Ivengar had been practicing yoga for over fifty years at that time. Every yogi aspired to a culmination in self-realization, but, as Iyengar put it, the infinite should be reached with the finite means at our disposal, which was to treat the practice as part of life.
After the most strenuous part, the classed ended with my favorite pose: shavasana, the corpse pose. I lay serene and happy on the yoga mat to finish my morning ritual. Outside the window, the beautiful Zurich city had woken up fresh in the morning sun.
Reference
[1] B.K.S. Iyengar, The tree of yoga, Shambhala Publications, 1988.