three impossible things

Glad that's over.

That pretty much summed up practice today. No energy combined with an amazingly sore body today. I think I must have gotten dehydrated overnight from my fan which I usually don’t run on a night as cool as last night. Ironic, since I pretty much survived the heat wave intact, well, a bit brain addled on Friday. It was the cooler humid air, however, which did me in. I managed UHP on the first side by myself, then the second side completely disintegrated (I even looked around to see if I could muster up an assist, and had brief thoughts of, oh, maybe I can just skip this side since my teacher isn't looking..)

I am continuing along with my clumsy jumping through to seated. I need to work on keeping the legs bent more when I "land" or maybe I should say skid or slide, so I wont feel like I am blasting off the mat. I have added a few "scooting my feet under" and hop hop hopping back from seated. I so doubt that I will ever be able to lift myself up and jump back properly..but this is a tiny step forward. And it suits me...why get stuck on step one before starting step two if step one seems impossible..

The one exciting development for me, is that I am starting to feel my inner thighs waking up and connecting down to my feet in backbends. I must have spent a year at Jivamukti trying to hold a block between my thighs during backbends to develop this connection..to no avail. This new feeling in backbending just started recently, since I have been working on navasana with straight legs (it feels like the bent leg modification never leads to straight legs or develops the same sort of strength). I wonder if this is what will finally make it possible to come up to standing (another seemingly impossible thing!).

Lastly, I have been really interested in Nobel's recent posts on inner body awareness and practice. Today I tried to see how much inner body awareness I could observe in savasana. Lo and behold, I could feel a lot of my upper body but not so much my legs/lower body. This is sort of analogous to how I think I am using and overusing parts of my body in practice (and perhaps too my rather ungrounded feeling of late). I can't even imagine having this sort of complete presence throughout my practice, but it is something interesting to move towards. Focusing on my breath allows for partial internal awareness at times. The other sort of presence which I do notice during practice is one where my limit is reached (and not surpassed), say in a standing posture, and my thoughts are much quieter than at other times.