Necessary Illusions

BODY WORK IS POSSIBLY BLACK MAGIc

Welcome to Yoga Class, my name is Severus and I’ll be your instructor today.

You might have had this experience before. You’re in yoga class, or acupuncture, or massage, or whatever, and you’ve got this pain. Let’s say it’s a pain in your knee. And you’re complaining about this pain in your knee and this person you’re with - this ‘body worker’ as they call them - just… just completely ignores your knee. Instead they do something weird to your shoulder, or your toes or the back of your neck. And just as you’re about to object and be like, “um… do you even know where my knee is?” your knee stops hurting.

Now you’re freaked out. This is black magic. How did that little adjustment to my shoulder fix my knee? What is this person doing? Are they a wizard? Is this a dream? We’re confused because, as far as we could tell, the problem was in the knee. Therefore, the solution should be in the knee. Right?

Right…?

OUR BRILLIANT, STUPID BRAINS

Here’s something weird but true; the way most of us learn to see bodies is wrong. Not exactly wrong as in the information is incorrect, but in the way that it’s incomplete. When we learn about bodies we are, mostly for efficiency purposes, taught a highly mechanical idea. In this idea the body is separated into “parts” that operate independently. They cooperate, to be sure, but their functions are isolated.

This way of thinking is helpful, it simplifies things. When we take the body apart into little bits we make it easier to comprehend. So we learn piece by piece how the body works. However, if we get stuck in this way of thinking, we lose the (literal) big picture. The forest is much more than just a collection of trees.

Think about a bicep muscle. Pretty standard, run of the mill muscle. Not too complex, it pretty much does one thing; bend your arm at the elbow. Fine, no problem there. But if we only see the bicep this way we will miss an entire field of activity involved in bending the arm.

How will I ever complete today’s essential errands with my all consuming nose-itch problem?

Let’s say you are standing in a checkout aisle and you get an itch on your nose. When you lift your forearm to scratch it, your center of gravity moves. Maybe not a lot, but it definitely moves. Your body has to account for this shift in weight; your shoulder and neck tense up just so, your torso makes millions of micro-adjustments to hold you stable, and your legs distribute this little shift all the way down through your feet and into the ground. Energy has to transfer throughout the system instantly, without thought, to adjust for a movement in your arm. Your bicep might seem to be the only thing in action but in reality you never just move an arm, you move your whole body.

Basically, there’s no such thing as a “bicep.” Not really. ‘Bicep’ is just a concept, a term we use to describe a particularly dense bundle of a particular type of cell. It’s an illusion, but a necessary one.

YOU NEED TO BE WRONG MOST OF THE TIME

I know it’s delicious, but why is it delicious?

Our brains didn’t evolve to understand everything, they evolved to keep us alive. Our minds are finite, puny things that are constantly doing their level best to keep us going. There is absolutely no evolutionary need for us to have all the information, we just run on life’s Cliff’s Notes. If you’re gathering food, you’re not going to spend mental energy on understanding the molecular composition of a tangerine. You simply figure out the best way to get a hold of that orange orb in a tree and keep surviving.

The idea that your body is a composite of isolated pieces is a necessary illusion, we simplified the body to make it halfway accessible to our limited minds; a hand is a hand, a tooth is a tooth, a spleen is a spleen, etc… We need this illusion, it is absolutely fundamental to our basic function in the world. If we didn’t divide the thing up into rudimentary chunks we’d have no way to understand and discuss our bodies. So celebrate! Your amazing mind pulls an amazing trick! It’s helping! Well done, mind. Have some toast.

NOW WE ARE STUCK

But wait! This illusion is great because it helps us function in the world. It’s not so great when we confuse it with, you know, reality.

Oh god no my arm…

Let’s say that same bicep of yours gets torn during a wild polo match in Argentina. Under the false assumption (illusion) that your bicep is some kind of isolated bit of your body, you put a cast on your arm. This cast will keep your arm bent and stable until the muscle heals. It’ll take about six weeks, let’s say.

Sadly, over the course of that six weeks the the muscles in your forearm atrophy from lack of use, the tendons in your elbow freeze up and shorten, your shoulder develops strange tension patterns from holding the arm in one position for so long, which makes your neck tweaky and your back starts to spasm, and oh-my-God pretty soon you’re never going to play polo again.

See, you treated just one ‘part’ of the body and lost sight of the interconnected nature of the system. It’s not your fault, it’s just our default way of thinking. Doctors did this kind of thing with casts and braces and immobilization for a long time. (Luckily, the trial and error was helpful. Doctors and PTs don’t do this much anymore.) These days, smart people try to get you moving again as soon as it’s safe, because movement is full-body integration.

If we get “stuck” in the illusion that your bicep is just one, isolated part of you, we make bad decisions on how to heal. The illusion was helpful - necessary, even - for learning the basic concepts about your body, but it’s not the whole story. The whole story is something much more complex and interconnected.

THE WHOLE STORY (NOT THE WHOLE STORY)

…EVER SINCE CREATION, ALL BEINGS ATTAIN IGNORANCE BY THE DELUSION BORN OF DUALITY, O ARJUNA.

Bhagavad Gita, 7:27

Your every movement contains trillions of micro-actions and reactions. You’ll never catch them all. You’ll never understand them all. But you can appreciate their existence. Your body is doing ridiculously complex things at all times, and a lot of it has nothing to do with your brain or even your nervous system. It’s doing them without you knowing or thinking about them. You’re just… happening. It’s amazing! It’s terrifying. (Who is running this ship, anyway…?)

Even a ‘Holistic’ image of the body is incomplete. We’re using a new illusion to talk about the old one. (We could go around for hours.) The point is you’re not an assembly of parts. That’s the necessary illusion. You need to see yourself in parts to get by from day to day, but the truth is something different entirely.

OH MY GOD KYLE WHAT IS THE POINT

I mean, look, it’d be great to have everyone feel a deep connection with their physical bodies as undifferentiated holistic entities. I’d dig that. But this is really about much more than that. When we practice Yoga we discover that our bodies are microcosms; if we listen closely they can teach us about the world around us, and perhaps even the nature of reality itself. Physical insight can illuminate fundamental, powerful truths.

So here’s one:

We all create necessary illusions to make life manageable for our simple minds.

This is where the rubber meets the road in yoga practice, where brain science and Hinduism really groove together, where philosophy of the mind and ancient spirituality intermingle. It’s where humility sneaks in. It’s where new-age woo-woo actually has some ground to stand on. Because listen, if we construct necessary illusions about our bodies where else do we make them? Where else do we draw arbitrary lines?

You don’t have to look to hard to find them. Race, class, nationality, citizenship, gender, generations, political parties, and even time itself are all organized along arbitrary boundaries. These are the illusions we conjure to make the world make sense. Even things we think are “hard” lines, like the idea of distinct animal species or the boundaries of physical matter start to break down the harder you look at them.

It’s… it’s weird. And the point isn’t to try and resolve the weirdness. We’re not here to be right. We will never be totally right in the literal, logical sense, we don’t have the cognitive power. Human beings aren’t made to comprehend their existence on an intellectual level, we’re just too small. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though. In many ways the work - the practice - is to acknowledge and embrace our limitations, and then continue to act in the world. Get really close, or really far. Change your perspective, figure out where you’re wrong, challenge your mind to solve the puzzle and see what it comes up with. Dive into the mystery and try to find its bottom.

(Spoiler Alert: You won’t.)

all the way down

On Meaning, Thresholds, And Ice Cream On Waffles

Originally published in the Second Circle New Years Day Newsletter, January 1, 2021

First, Happy New Year! We made it to the other side of.... whatever that was....

2020 was in large part a year that required profound resilience. Many of us were called on to dig deep and discover new forms of personal strength. Or maybe just an older strength that was in hibernation. (Assuming of course, as I do, that strength is some kind of psycho-spiritual grizzly bear.) In the whirlwind of this calendar year I have myself been edified and bolstered by the kindness of my fellow humans, particularly you all. Second Circle's purpose has always been, in part, to create lasting bonds between us; it's been humbling to see this family come together during difficult times.

Of course, the challenges of 2020 will not simply fade into the past as we tear off the final page of our Far Side Gallery Daily Comic Desktop Calendar and hurl it into the closest trash fire. Things will go on. But that doesn't mean New Years is devoid of real potential and personal magic. On the contrary.

BRAIN FOOD

Not pictured: an actual human brain.

The turning of a year into another is a pretty arbitrary moment, in large part. If someone were living in the woods without the internet or their Far Side calendar they would have no idea what day was "New Years" because, in a strictly material sense, nothing meaningful really happens. We don't get an annual meteor shower every December 31st, the drinking water doesn't glow purple and taste like caramel or something for five minutes, it's just more time passing.

But it's also not, because meaning is a real thing in the world. Humans need meaning; meaning is the fruit of the garden of the mind, both product and food. So when we hear the know-it-all cynics remind us that people simply make up what New Years means, we might recall that people make up all meaning everywhere. Because we must, our minds need to eat. Even the act of saying, "well that's meaningless" is a way to create meaning. (Sneaky, sneaky brain...) We're all in this water, friends. Calling it air doesn't dry us off.

THRESHOLDS

The threshold to a traditional 80s New Wave temple.

You know how sometimes you go from one room to another to get something, but the second you step through the door you forget what you were there for? That's called the "Doorway Effect" and many psychologists believe your brain is quite literally "resetting" your experience when you go to a new room. It is creating a new context, a new space for understanding its position in time and space. This can have the unintended consequence that your intentions from the previous room are lost in the shift.

Did I just enter the kitchen? Oh man, I have all kinds of specific feelings about the kitchen, gotta reboot and make sure those are all loaded up for... Wait, why am I here?

A threshold is literally just the object or sill at the foot of a door, where we cross from one space to another. In a strictly material sense, it's nothing special. The stone that marks the entrance to a temple is just a stone like all the others. We could choose to see it as pointless, inert, devoid of interest. Or we could embrace our nature as meaning-makers and acknowledge that moving from one space to another changes us somehow, whether we comprehend it or not. At the temple threshold this fact is embraced, drawn forward, and composed into a shared agreement: "The place you're now entering is different."

You can join this agreement or not, neither option is correct. The point is not really to find our way down to the "truth" of life, that's not available to us. The aim is to investigate how we create meaning through things like thresholds and boundaries and love and desire and illusion, and then assume a bit of agency within the process.

We have a wonderful opportunity for this kind of work today, should we so choose.

PRACTICE

This is all to say, I invite you on this New Year's Day 2021 to take a moment and find your own temple stone, your own practice or moment whereupon you can lay a threshold and cross it in your own way.

If you need an idea here's what I'm doing:

Find a good pen and decent paper. Card stock is best if you've got it. Sit down somewhere quiet and close your eyes. Then just ask yourself, "what does my Wise Mind want for me this year?" (If you're not familiar with the concept of the Wise Mind, it's exactly what the name says. You've got one, it's in there, and it can be pretty chatty if you give it an opening....) Let that question sit, maybe repeat it inside a few times, and wait until you hear that part of you speak its thoughts. Write down what you receive with the aforementioned crafting supplies. That's it.

(Or, conversely, have waffles and ice cream for dinner. I'm also doing that, it's a threshold I stole from Emily.)

Much, much love to you all. Here's to a new year in practice.

Sincerely,

Kyle

On Things That Matter

From the Second Circle Newsletter, June 2020

We weren’t going to do this. This was supposed to be the quiet part, the message beneath the messages, the end of the trail of crumbs.

But the time for quiet has passed. 

———

A Neuronal Network

Here’s how the neurons in your brain work. Ready? Little chemical signals called neurotransmitters activate one ‘end’ of a neuron, turning on an electrical charge. This charge travels the length of the cell to various endpoints, which in turn release neurotransmitters of their own, which cross tiiiiiiiiny gaps called synapses until they land on adjacent neurons, turning their electrical charges on and continuing along the chain. And that’s how your brain does brain things.

When whales die, their bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean and become the food supply for thousands of deep sea dwellers. In fact, a “whale fall” can feed these scroungers of aquatic carrion for over a century. Migration routes for whales have created entire ecosystems of such organisms, denizens of the darkness that lie in wait for a humpback or a blue to descend from above like manna for the Israelites. In the process of sinking into the deep, incidentally, whales bring up to two tons of sequestered carbon down with them.

In 2001 Warner Bros. released Osmosis Jones, a combination live-action/animated feature film in which Chris Rock voiced the titular character; a white blood cell who is also a cop and who must save the human in which he lives. The movie bombed, in no small part because it was really gross. 

The largest known organism on the planet is a fungus that lives in Oregon. It grows underground mostly, but pops up in little mushroom tops all over the North Pacific rainforest. If you walk the Pacific Coast Trail, you’ll likely think you’re encountering thousands of individual fungi when you’re really just hiking over one.

The best way to determine the political beliefs of any given human being is to study their friends and family. This is also the best way to predict if they will take up smoking, turn vegan, or start practicing yoga.

Do you see?

———

A question that seems only to get harder by the day: should I watch the news? The information arriving through the digital aether is so often overwhelming and negative and dark. Should I tune in or tune out? What is the responsible choice? What makes me strong? What makes me gullible? What is the line between being an informed citizen and an anxiety-ridden information addict?

These are real questions with few easy answers. And they all source back to an undeniable truth about human beings: we change each other. When I observe suffering, I feel suffering. This can have difficult emotional consequences. For example, when I watch a police officer kneel on the neck of a handcuffed man, a man who is calling for his mother and saying he can’t breathe, I am overwhelmed with emotions I have trouble naming.

I heard an old song the other day. It swelled in the middle, and I began to sob without warning. I had to sit down in the grass near St. Paul street until I could walk the rest of the way home. I didn’t know who I was mourning, I have only images and tales to grieve.

Passing through the produce section this week I made eye contact with someone I knew, but wasn’t sure, because of the masks. Because we were protecting each other. 

———

The concept of a superorganism is usually applied to insects like ants or termites; groups of small, unintelligent creatures that coordinate - somehow - to perform relatively complex tasks. What appear to be distinct individuals (bugs) are in fact members of a collective, a more comprehensive unit with a higher purpose than any single component could achieve or even understand.

My friends, we aren’t what we are so often told. You and I are not you and I. We are filled with electricity and we share it across spaces small enough to carry a virus. Beneath this soft loam you will find mycelium for miles, an embedded substrate, a communication, a bond. If you choose goodness and love, if you move to compassion, I am more likely to do the same.

There is an inborn networking capacity to human beings, we radiate ideas and emotions. We perpetually receive and transmit signals, whether we like it or not, in heartbeats, glances, and iambic pentameter. The Tao moves everywhere and nowhere. God is in the hearts of all mankind. The sound of Om is an infinite chord. 

Do you hear?

———

Osmosis Jones rode on a fever-born teardrop into his host Frank and revived him from certain death. The citizens of the ‘City of Frank’ celebrated Jones for saving their lives. Years later, Chris Rock made a statement about “bad apple” cops, noting that bad apples spoil the whole bunch. The group is conjoined, he pointed out, and their condition affects their entire community.

———

We live in a culture that wants, desperately, to convince you that you’re alone. That you have to do it by yourself. That the pain of the oppressed has little to do with good people in liberal states. These are lies. 

On average, the ocean is over two miles deep. The humpback whale only dives to around 200 meters; the ecosystem it sustains when it falls will be completely alien to it, unknown in the most complete sense.

At the studio we try to draw a boundary - a circle - around the space so we can all remember: we are not alone and never will be. Second Circle is not a place to connect, it is a place to rediscover a connection that was always there. We are embedded within a network, both individuals and pieces of something beyond ourselves. When we deny pain and anguish and oppression we do not end them, we only push them away like Syrian refugees turned back from Lesbos. Just as capitalism thrives by externalizing costs, individualism thrives by externalizing suffering.

This myth of individualism lets us invent ‘others’ that are not like us and pretend the past has nothing to do with us. However, biologists have confirmed that trauma can be transmitted through generations, embedded in our genes. You did not begin when you were born, friend; you extend back into the unknown darkness of the past. Your ancestry lives and breathes inside of you. How deeply is slavery written into us all? How many generations before our DNA forgets that some of us were masters and others property?

If you need more evidence, look no further than our tribes. Look and see how instinctively we flock towards the call of a group, the promise of a place. Look how we form ideologies by sharing our beliefs in word, thought, and deed. 

And then look to the lines of riot shields and black boots and gas masks, tell me you do not see a collective. A murmuration. A pride.

The joint pursuits of group psychology and marketing are clear on this: the essential need for human connection can and often does override moral judgment, particularly when we deny its power. If you can manipulate empathy you can start a world war. Empathy is a sort of interpersonal nuclear power; it can go either way.

———

So here is our position. (And thank you if you made it this far, we don’t know how to do this type of thing succinctly.) When George Floyd was murdered a charge in a cultural neuron flipped and sent something undeniable hurtling across our synapses. And much of what emerged was pain, some ancient and buried and girded with shame. Second Circle isn’t here to make that pain go away. Instead, we ask you to notice how the pain of others extends beyond them like the light of a signal fire. Notice that you have within you the inherent capacity to receive this sort of message. To read this code can be as natural for you as breathing.

I don’t like to preach about progress at the studio, or tell others about their responsibility in life. Nor do I feel right telling anyone else how systemic racism feels on a personal level. I’m a cis white man, what the fuck do I know about it? However, I will say this: empathy is not an ethical principle; it is a way of experiencing life, like a sixth sense. Pain we refuse to acknowledge must still be processed somewhere, by someone. Perhaps notice that being a node in a network of healing can hurt, because we are called to look upon and sit with suffering beyond our own. But also notice that your actions reverberate and touch others. You can help. Because you are embedded in the totality, what you do matters.

Black Lives Matter because life matters. Systemic oppression matters because it causes tremendous individual and communal suffering, which in turn creates massive trauma in the shared body of all humankind. We are all connected. What we do matters.

SOME STARTING POINTS WE RECOMMEND

https://guidetoallyship.com/

https://blacklivesmatter.com/

http://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/

https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

https://www.theconsciouskid.org/white-fragility

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/opinion/sunday/sick-of-racism-literally.html?smid=tw-share

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611?i=1000476756446&fbclid=IwAR1oRgkOnc-VYt66Vj3v7aem5yviPczIU1UmomavTUiKxQIAKaeF1QC2Fb0

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jun/03/do-the-work-an-anti-racist-reading-list-layla-f-saad

https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1266894029498675200

Thresholds and Breath

Image Credit - 'Gothic Doorway' by The Rabbit

One of my favorite practices in the last few months, both as a student and a teacher, is to create and cross thresholds. Ordinarily, we consider a threshold is a physical object at the entrance to a structure of some kind, say a home or a business. In sacred places like temples or monasteries thresholds mark the transition between one attitude and another. They are the physical representation of an energetic and spiritual shift. This passage across an intentional space impresses on us just how different inside and outside are.

What makes a threshold valuable is not its physical structure, but how we engage it. This means any place, practice, process, any action at all, can serve as a point of transition. We already have thresholds in our personal routines; little barriers and turning points are everywhere throughout the day. A cup of coffee, brushing your teeth, the first step out of your home, and the drive to work are all emotional thresholds. They just happen to be unintentional.

It is possible and fairly easy to choose thresholds for yourself. We can create them for ourselves anywhere, at any time. In practice, all it takes is a breath. When you’re feeling unfocused or unmotivated in some way, or you want to center yourself in preparation for a posture, simply apply an intention to the breath. Use that breath to create a threshold, an intentional space that you can cross to enter into something different.

Like most breath practices, this might seem almost silly in its simplicity. But try it out. Create a threshold in your mind - anything works; visualize a doorway or simply think about moving into a more relaxed state - and use a breath to cross it. You may be surprised to discover a palpable feeling of transition, that you have in fact moved in some way into a different environment. 

This is not a new concept, it’s not special, it’s not unique. We all already do this in a certain form. For me, the power isn’t in its newness or invention, but in creating a practice for it. The idea of a threshold shapes the action, at least for me, in a way that feels relevant and relatable and simple. The more we engage this practice, the more it becomes a habit. It develops our sense of mindfulness and gives us personal, emotional agency throughout the day. Imagine, in a moment of anxiety, if you could find one intentional breath. How powerful might that be?

Strength & Flow & New Toys

Following a bike injury, hamstring tweak, a strange grinding sound in my hip, and some serious investigation into what exactly all this Asana work means to me, I began searching for a way to ground my practice in strength, balance, and meditative focus without losing functional movement. First, I discovered Yin Yoga. Suddenly I didn't have to push my stretches anymore to stay mobile, I could simply relax and breathe. 

Then I found the mace. This thing has invigorated my practice, challenging my body and mind without demanding extreme contortion or "new" poses and methods. Suddenly everything is new and engaging again. I'm addicted. It's so much fun.

Keep breathing, friends. Keep digging. Find something that brings you out again.

What is Alignment?

Perfectionism and Yoga

We live in a culture of perfection. Blame it on the internet or school testing or media or puritanism in American history, whatever. The point is, we have an obsession with the perfect. We long to be purified, idealized, and celebrated for our attainment. Our current health and fitness craze is, in many ways, a new manifestation of this old ideal. Admit it, “wellness” is in many ways an advertising catch-phrase for “perfection.”

“You cannot ascribe intrinsic properties to postures apart from the people that are doing them.”

— Leslie Kaminoff

This perspective has found its way into the culture of yoga in a big way. A major challenge that teachers and studios face on a daily basis is how to assist students without encouraging a sense of perfectionism. This can be especially tricky when it comes to the idea of “alignment.” When we talk about things like "alignment" we may enable the idea that there is a single standard for every human being, to which all of us should aspire. This idea is incomplete at best and dangerous at worst. Despite the cliche that "we're all on the same path," we all have different histories, different bodies, different wounds and blessings. The way is unique to each student.

alignment without "alignment"

“The idea that specific alignment is keeping people safe is just not true.”

— Corina Benner

When I began teaching alignment clinics students would often become very excited about alignment principles, as though they might use them to perfect their practices. They seemed to think they finally had the keys to the kingdom of “perfect.” While this was flattering personally, I knew it wasn’t a fair assessment. I needed to sort out some way to present alignment in a more compassionate, honest way.

It was with this in mind that I developed what I call ‘The Three Fundamental Principles of Alignment.’ These are the concepts I want every student to understand as we discuss the body. I write them on the board before every clinic I teach now. I didn’t invent them, their essence is present in the work of many great teachers, I just figured out a way I like to communicate them to my students. 

They go like this: 

THE THREE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF ALIGNMENT

1) EXPERIENCE IS PRIMARY

For years I was taught, and promoted, a posture-first method in my practice. I regularly heard and repeated the phrase, ‘don’t try to make the pose fit the body, make the body fit the pose.’ The idea was that the pose knows better than the student. In this structure, the method has final authority. 

I’ll be honest, I really liked this idea. It appealed to my desire for an external standard of perfection, a standard I desperately tried to meet. Needless to say, my attempts to match these standards of perfection were not productive in the end. 

When a rhetorical tool becomes dogma we lose sight of complexity and subtlety, which are necessary for real understanding. All commands, all principles, and all teachings are at their core just best guesses. They are external rules for an internal experience.

Here is an essential truth: You are the only person who knows what it feels like in your body. Only you can feel its strength or stretch, focus or distraction, joy or despair.  In the end, you are the only one who can determine the value and direction of your practice. A teacher can make suggestions from a place of knowledge but the bottom line is experience. If something in the practice doesn’t feel healthy, that is a very good sign it’s not. When we trust ourselves enough to deeply listen to sensation, the practice comes to life.

2) EVERY BODY IS DIFFERENT

"We are not machines. We are not mass produced on a factory line."

For a long time I was very frustrated by my struggles with lotus pose. I could get into it, but it was always lopsided and tight. Whenever I entered it, I would have to come out after thirty seconds or so because of strain in my knees. I told myself my pain was a necessary part of opening the body. I committed myself to more hip opening, more mobility, more symmetry. I wanted to be like those yogis who could sit in lotus for hours. I even let myself believe that if I could just get lotus to work for me, I would finally have a good meditation practice.

But bodies are not the same. We are not machines. We are not mass produced on a factory line. Some people aren’t meant to sit in lotus for a long time, simply because of the shape of their pelvic bones. Some people have a harder time with headstand because their arm bones are shorter. Some people have to work harder in chair or awkward pose because of the length of their femurs. The architecture of each body is unique, so the challenges of the practice will be unique for each and every student. This is far from bad news, it’s actually wonderful. It means we can truly embrace the personal nature of the practice and create our own way, based on our own experience. Of course we want to study with knowledgeable teachers and practice proven methods, however, we must be certain to respect and celebrate the individual capacity of each body.

3) STRUGGLE IS NOT A METHOD

So many times I have looked out into a room of students and seen grimaces, gripped breath, and clenched teeth. While I deeply respect the commitment of these students - they are certainly applying themselves - I can’t help but wonder how much they’re getting in their own way. 

Struggle is what happens when we meet a limit and only apply more strain and effort. “Try harder” is not, itself, a valuable command. If you’re a runner, “try harder” isn’t going to help you run through a brick wall in your path. You’ll just run into the wall over and over, and you’ll probably get hurt. It is the same with postures; you need an effective plan, plus effort, to have a method. Struggle itself is no method at all, it is effort without a good plan.

With these three principles in mind, it is possible to discuss alignment with a sense of curiosity and compassion. We can discover what works and what doesn't work, from our unique position in our own body. We can play in the realm of experience and find our own sense of illumination in the practice. 

THE ALIGNMENT CANOE

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in a canoe, preparing to cross a lake. You start to paddle, but the boat just doesn’t move. You struggle and fight and splash and yell and eventually exhaust yourself. You do this day after day, maybe for years. Maybe you get frustrated because you never go anywhere, so you start to tell yourself your exhaustion is the measure of success. If you’re completely spent, you think, you did it right. Since you couldn’t find value in moving across the lake, you found value in how hard you fought in the attempt.

Now imagine that one day you look down and realize that this whole time you’ve been facing sideways in the canoe. You were actively working against the design of your vehicle. What if you just turned yourself, faced forward, and tried again? This is what it’s like when you find your alignment. You drop the illusion that exhaustion was the point. Your vessel begins to move along, as intended. It’s still hard work of course, but things operate more smoothly. You glide. And in that place, in harmony with action and environment and design, you discover why you got in the canoe in the first place.

This is, to me, the real practice. When you drop struggle, investigate the uniqueness of your own body, and listen closely to your experience, you start to come into alignment with your individual perfection. Practicing postures and principles can illuminate the way, but in the end only you can glide across the water.

Bow Pose Tutorial: Kicking and Stretching

MOVING THE PRACTICE OUT OF STRUGGLE

One of the things I look for most in my students' practices is the presence of struggle during their poses. It became clear to me a while ago, through teaching and my own practice, that if a student is struggling through a pose it has ceased to be productive for them. This of course doesn't mean they shouldn't be trying or applying effort, but struggle is different. Struggle gets in the way. Struggle is a sign we are adding stress to the effort, and this is just going to freeze you up.

By seeking out where we struggle, we find where we are getting in our own way. Usually, we are simply trying to push through something without real understanding of how to do it. It's kind of like trying to drive a monster truck through a lake. You'll only get so far, no matter how much power you apply. To really make the journey, we need to change the approach. 

One of the most obvious places where I see struggle, suffering, and stalling out in my classes is Bow pose. For a while I just figured people weren't kicking hard enough, and simply told them to kick harder. That didn't really work. I'm embarrassed to admit that I tried it for years - literally - to no avail. We live and we learn.

It turns out that the missing element wasn't effort, it was understanding. People were kicking, but they didn't really know why they were kicking. They understood, "kick up" but there wasn't much explanation beyond that. They just kicked and hoped. And struggled.

KICK FOR A SHOULDER STRETCH

Somewhere along the idea got out there that if you kick harder in Bow you go higher. But that's not really the case for many people. Most people with cell phones have locked up shoulders and will never get up higher in the pose without opening them up a bit. 

See, the kick stretches the shoulders. Unfortunately there's no mention of this in the dialogue, so it doesn't get a lot of attention, but a simple look at the shape of the pose makes it obvious. The grip, behind the back, directly mirrors a standard shoulder stretch. The front of the deltoid, as well as the biceps, get a nice opening. Then in time the pectoralis major and minor open up. It's a lovely feeling.

But we need to practice the pose with this in mind in order to get the benefit.

HOW TO:

The most effective method I've found so far is a three step entry. After you've bent the legs and established the grip, do the following:

1) Melt the heart down into the floor and lift up the shoulders. (Rolling them onto the back can be helpful here.)

2) Tone the core. Without kicking, inhale and lift the thighs and chest. Use only the muscles of the torso.

3) Release extra neck and shoulder tension. When you feel comfortable, begin to slowly kick. Let the shoulders draw back and turn upward as the kick pulls the grip back and up. You should feel a deep, comfortable stretch across the chest. 

Keep the breath even and the deep abdominals active the whole time. Don't push your belly button down into the floor, it will collapse the pose into the low spine. Make looking up to the ceiling the last thing you do to enter the pose.

Check it out and let me know what you think! If you've got better methods for getting into the shoulder stretch, have comments or questions, hit the comment section below. Much love, my friends. Be well!

Why Yoga? Part 1

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a couple of yoga teachers about different workout methods and physical fitness and I began asking myself, “why do I do this? Why yoga? Why not another form of body work or physical training?” I am not teaching the Yoga Sutra to my students in the hot room, I don't get very deep into mythology in class, meditation is a relatively small portion of what I do, so what sets this apart? Why practice yoga instead of another form of group fitness?

These questions stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. I went to bed last night without a real answer. Today I woke up with one.

Nataraja, the dancing Shiva. Image Credit

Yoga is more than a system of body work. It is a process of working through illusion. The body is the tool we use, as it provides a touchstone to reality, but the practice goes deeper into the core of who we are and how we approach our place in this world. There is a deep philosophy to the physical practice of yoga, and like all philosophical practices yoga makes us confront our daily illusions and helps us to dismantle them.

Some of these illusions are simple, some of them complex. Some are shallow and some are deep. Regardless, as we practice body and breath, watching the mind, we start to see them for what they are. Some are nearly universal, but are far from impenetrable.

ILLUSION #1: I AM NOT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE

The modern world has a very real problem with isolation. More and more, people are spending time alone in their homes, away from the people around them. Communities are breaking down and being replaced by digital versions of social interaction. This grows in us the idea that we are different from other people, that somehow something inside of us is ‘off’ or ‘weird’ in a way that cannot be changed. This makes sense, since we spend more and more time on social media and less and less time in face-to-face human contact. Social media presents us formalized, perfected versions of humanity that we ourselves can never be. We begin, perhaps unconsciously, to believe that everyone Out There is not like us. We are imperfect, informal, chaotic, and changing. There is a stark divide between us and our ideas of those around us.

Yoga helps to dispel the myth that we are different. It pulls us out of our ideas and puts us in our bodies, often in rooms filled with other people who share our changing, unpredictable struggles. What’s more, Yoga has been around for thousands of years, benefitting tens or even hundreds of millions of people throughout human history. As part of this tradition, we cannot deny that there is a commonality between us an the rest of humanity. We share something. Our bodies and minds respond to the practice in similar ways. Our experiences are shared. The more time we spend in the practice the less we feel like we are a different sort of human, because Yoga highlights our similarities. Sure, some people can do more or less than us, but the framework of the practice has common effects across all students. 

This is transformative for us. We start to feel a connection beyond ourselves, even beyond our time in history. We gain a broader perspective of humanity across thousands of years and thousands of miles. No longer isolated in our ideas about who and what we are, we start to come alive to the reality of our position in a continuum, a greater whole. We begin to feel connected through the simple act of moving our bodies. 

ILLUSION #2: PAIN IS BAD

One of the primary messages of our society is that we should always be happy. Or rather, that pain is in some way “wrong.” Advertisement culture creates an idea of a perfect, stable happiness that feels no pain and can be bought. This is of course a complete load of BS, but it is nearly impossible to avoid the constant assault of messages that say otherwise. 

But pain is not bad. Pain is a messenger. Pain signals to us that something is in transition. Sometimes this signal can mean a negative transition, like an injury, but sometimes it signals the opposite. Yoga, with its emphasis on mindful engagement of the body, encourages us to look clearly at our experiences of pain and find their source. Instead of automatically panicking at the first sign of discomfort, we learn to slow down and engage the message of pain. What does it mean? How am I changing? Where do I go from here?

This process first arises in the body, but in a dedicated practice it very soon grows to include the mind. We begin to address our felt, emotional experience with the same level of introspection and patience as we did the body. When we feel sadness or loss, despair or heartbreak, we learn to recognize that these emotions and feelings are not themselves ‘wrong’ they are simply a message that something is changing. Just like a physical injury, there is potential for emotional change to be a sign of mental distress, a negative change, but we will never know the truth if we do not engage our suffering and pain with compassion and honesty. Yoga, unlike anything else, teaches us to do just this. First with the body, then with the mind.

ILLUSION #3: I AM INSIGNIFICANT

The universe is huge. Our minds do not have the capacity to fully comprehend the size of the ocean, much less the cosmos. There are more people in Philadelphia alone than one mind can truly understand. Size and scope are terrifying when we look right at them. Think too long about your own place in this vast eternity and it is very easy to start convincing yourself that you don’t matter at all.

But you do. In the practice of Yoga we begin to understand the power of the microscopic. The more we explore the body in the context of familiar poses, the more we realize subtle changes have profound results. Committed students often have stories about a master teacher who gave them a seemingly minor correction in class, only to have that one command revolutionize their pose. This lights our way to a deep truth to the universe; it is holistic. Beyond interconnected, it is unified. Small adjustments within any system reverberate throughout the whole, the key to transformation is almost always small, minuscule, seemingly insignificant. 

Yoga shows us our place in this vastness. We may feel insignificant, but when we truly understand our place in the unified whole, we see our own deep power and potential.

ILLUSION #4: EVERYTHING I THINK IS TRUE

The ego is a tricky thing. We are always thinking, always storytelling in our minds, making sense of the world around us. This process is powerful, and essential to survival, but it comes with a glitch; we find it all to easy to believe everything we think. We latch on to ideas that we like, and build our entire concept of reality around these ideas. These concepts can calcify, becoming a rigid and unyielding cage of belief. This is especially true when we are stressed out, and our fear reinforces the cage in self defense. Fear says, “keep everything out” but in the process it locks us in. 

This cage of belief is apparent in our bodies. We hold emotional tension throughout our physical systems. Eventually this tension, after years of stress, stiffens around us and holds us in a vice grip. Yoga works to erode this cage, to move it around and slowly, compassionately break it down. Indeed, it is when our cage of ideas opens a bit that we see breakthroughs in the practice. Every student has had a moment when suddenly a pose that felt impossible opens up to them. It feels like a revelation beyond the body, into the spirit. And indeed, it is. These breakthroughs happen when we release ourselves from an aspect of our cage of belief, when something inside us moves beyond our ideas of “can” and “cannot” and steps into awareness of what is, in the moment.

We must remember that thoughts and bodies are constantly shifting. Much of what goes on in the mind is illusion, it will simply fade if you let it. If we grasp onto ideas and beliefs, they will hold us in one place and we may never arrive at the transformation we seek. Instead of gripping and trying to know what is and isn’t true, yoga gives us a place to humble the ego and explore our deeper potential in the moment, as it is. We learn how to do this through the body in the poses. We have our ideas about what we are, and one day at a time the practice will prove us mistaken.

ILLUSION #5: IT IS ALL ABOUT GAIN

Many people think that physical activity is about gaining something. We want to gain strength or flexibility or well being. Even weight loss is spoken about like something to get, a goal to attain. Yoga shows us this is only half the story.

The truth is that life is a zero sum game. You cannot add or subtract from the system of your life, you can only transform it. In order to gain something, something of equal size and value must be let go. All of life is transactional. Like buying an apple, you have to pay the corresponding price for nourishment.

If you want to gain strength, you will often have to let flexibility go. If you want to gain abs you will probably have to let sugar and alcohol go. If you want to gain peace, you will have to let passion go. These are the simple equations, and yoga teaches them to us. 

Many times in the practice we feel stuck or unable to develop a pose, and we don’t know why. We grip and struggle and work for depth in the poses for a long time, and we become frustrated with our lack of progress. We don’t feel intense pain or anything specifically in the way of the pose, it just won’t move. And then one day we relax. Or we inhale. Or we think about some great sadness within us while we are in the pose, and suddenly it grows before our eyes. In my own experience, these moments usually make you cry. Because, as my brother once told me, “when you cry you let something go.” Once we get beyond the idea of gaining something all the time, we discover that much of the journey is about stripping off layers.

THE PRACTICE IS YOUR OWN

Of course this list is incomplete. It could go on infinitely, every student’s experience is different, but there is a shared direction. The practice of yoga - done with humility and awareness - shows us our own illusions, and where and how to let go of them. The amazing thing is that the more you strip yourself of your ideas about yourself and your body, the more the body begins to respond. It grows beautifully into this space you create for it. It becomes strong and healthy on its own, without the burden of responding to stories and stresses that are made up in the mind.

If we are to let our inner power grow, it must have light and air to breathe. In time, we will be asked to let go of things that we thought were important or even essential to our us. And in those moments we will have a choice, to release or to hold. Neither option is right, but the choice will be yours. 

Yoga Nidra Audio

This October I was honored to join the beautiful community at Jenkintown Hot Yoga for a session on Yoga Nidra. Here is the recording of that session. Feel free to download, share, and use however you wish. May your practice bring you peace.

Recording of a Yoga Nidra session with Kyle Ferguson at Hot Yoga Jenkintown in October, 2016.

Fixing Low Back Compression in 26 & 2

The human body is a marvel of engineering. It can perform innumerable tasks with relative ease, both general and precise. It is astonishingly durable, when you really think about it. It responds marvelously to the different challenges of each and every day with remarkable consistency and malleability. It exists in a constant state of adaptation, regeneration, and growth, depending on what challenges and movement patterns it encounters on a day to day basis. This is a necessary miracle; if the body does not adapt it breaks under the weight of experience. However, as students of yoga we should understand that some adaptations have long term consequences that, if left unattended, can be detrimental to our health. 

Western culture is not designed to support healthy bodies. Our daily routines often generate physical adaptations that cause us pain, limit our vitality, and undermine our longevity. The harsh reality is that sitting down, texting, and working at computers all create unhealthy body adaptations. Our daily habits create misalignment. Good yoga teachers and students can spot these misalignments and work to correct them through informed yoga practice. 

One of the most common misalignments that I see in my students is a pronounced compression in the low back (it's really at the meeting of the mid and lower spine, but I'm just going to say "low back" for the sake of simplicity). It is often mistaken for a healthy lumbar curve, but there is a very real and functional difference between the two. A healthy lumbar curve evenly distributes the weight of the body along the length of the spine. A compressed low back instead puts a large amount of the load on a specific part of the spine, right where the thoracic and lumbar sections meet.

You can see the difference between low back compression and lumbar curve pretty easily. It looks like this:

Low back compression on the left, healthy lumbar curve on the right. Red arrow courtesy of the internet.

In students with low back compression the abdominals are weakened and the belly falls forward, the psoas muscles are usually shortened and tight, and the QL muscle in the back grips intensely. This is a rampant condition in Western culture, where we sit down all the time. Sitting down shortens the psoas and compresses the low back. A healthy yoga practice should work to correct this situation, but if you pay attention in a hot room you'll find a whole lot of sharp angles in the back. Often, the most committed students have lumbar compression just as bad as the average sedentary American who practices no yoga at all. 

Quadratus Lumborum, or "QL" muscles, run from the back of the hip bones to the back of the lowest ribs.

Psoas Major, part of the greater Iliopsoas - the Hip Flexor or simply "psoas" - muscle group along with the Iliacus, runs from the low spine to the thigh bones, across the hips. Image credit

So what gives? Why do serious, dedicated, long-term students of this practice have this issue? And what can we do to support healthy alignment?

BACK BENDS

26 & 2 can be transformative for the spine, but in my experience many students are not getting the full benefit of the practice. Part of the problem is the language we use in backbends. A healthy back bend will lengthen the psoas evenly and relieve tension there, but it needs muscular support from the abs to avoid collapsing. But there's pretty much nothing in the traditional dialogue that talks about keeping the core strong as you lean back, so students often collapse into their backbends. This collapse drops the weight of the body right into that T12-L1 area, where the spine is most mobile (aside from the neck). The solution to this drop is core support in the front body. It's important to remember, as students and teachers, active (not clenched) muscle engagement in the belly while lengthening into the back bend.

Likewise, tight psoas muscles will make the legs externally rotate in a back bend. If you look around the room in standing back bends you will regularly find - often in the deepest back benders - that students' feet and/or knees have turned out. This little alignment cheat releases the psoas and makes the pose less effective. It is important in the backbends to look for this external rotation and correct it whenever possible, even if it means we can't go as deeply into the pose. (Note: I have personally removed command in the 2nd set of Camel to "open the knees 8-10 inches," as this adjustment is really just another form of external rotation. The pose gets easier and 'deeper' with this modification simply because it releases the psoas.)

FRONT SIDE COMPRESSIONS

The back bends are only part of the story. The heart of the issue lies in the poses designed specifically to address low back compression, and the way they often get left behind in class. These poses are the front side compressions - primarily Standing Head to Knee, Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee, and Rabbit. These are powerful poses and they should, in a healthy practice, alleviate low back compression. But this isn't often the case. Instead, these three poses tend to get lost in the series and their effectiveness is compromised. There are many reasons why.

1 - EXHAUSTION

One reason these poses can be ineffective is their position in the series. Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee (SSLHTK) comes right after Triangle, and Rabbit follows Camel. By the time these poses come around students are often exhausted and their focus is diminished.

2 - DIFFICULTY

Standing Head to Knee (SHTK) only has a front side compression in its final form, which is not practiced by many students, and those who do practice it are usually more focused on balance and locking the knee than front side compression. So we don't get much real stretching in the back here, usually, simply because the pose is so challenging to most students.

Rabbit is a somewhat confusing, claustrophobic shape, and you can't see the people around you. As a result, many students lack the confidence to really explore the pose.

SSHTK can feel nearly impossible for some students with the amount of emphasis teachers put on getting the head to the knee. If they can't meet that one goal, they often decide the pose is simply beyond their capacity. Or, once they have met that one goal, they make the whole pose about straightening the front leg and keeping the head in.

3 - LACK OF UNDERSTANDING

I regularly ask the most experienced students in the room if they feel any stretch in Rabbit, and the answer is almost always a slightly embarrassed "no, nothing." And if you ask what benefits students feel in SSLHTK, they usually tell you they feel the throat compression (which is good), and perhaps a stretch in the hamstring, but not much in the back.

Looking at the shape of these poses it's pretty obvious that the back should experience some sort of stretch or at least opening. The torso is rolled forward, lengthening the back muscles. However, in my experience with students, they rarely feel any opening in the mid and low back.

I have found that when entering these poses, students lose core support and put almost all their focus on bending the neck inward/compressing the throat. The dialogue is part of the issue here, as it talks much more about head placement ("forehead must touch the knee" and "if forehead isn't touching the knees, you can walk the knees right and left") than extending the spine. People with a lot of mobility in the neck can usually perform these commands and still not get a stretch. In these two poses, look to the most flexible students in the room; very often the forehead touches the knee and the lower back is flat as a board. In order to stretch the QL muscles, and the rest of the back muscles, you need to create an even curve down the length of the spine.

The real issue is that many students don't know that they should experience a stretch in the back during front side compressions. We even have the dialogue phrase, "this is not a stretching pose, it is a compression pose," which leads to the misunderstanding that the back doesn't stretch during effective front side compression. The term "front side compression" is itself confusing, as it highlights the front body shortening instead of the back body lengthening. Simply telling students to look for the back stretch, or at least back expansion, in SSHTK has been helpful in my teaching.

The truth is, real back stretching and opening in Rabbit and SSLHTK may have not have been really necessary when the original Bikram dialogue was designed, because sitting/typing/texting hadn't done as much damage to people's bodies at the time the yoga was first developed. But today, for modern students, this expansion - performed slowly, mindfully, and with proper core support, is absolutely essential to the long term progress of a practice.

4 - FEAR

The low back, much like the hips, contains a great degree of emotional tension. Clinical trials have established a correlation between Fear-Avoidance and chronic low back pain. As students of yoga, we know that often a physical opening corresponds with an emotional release. So if you're going to open your low back, you're going to have to face some fear. Fear avoidance will make students unconsciously protect the low back from a true stretch and opening. Confidence is essential to moving deeply into the proper pose. This of course doesn't mean be reckless in your front side compressions, but their practice requires deep honesty and exploration. Students who are afraid to work into their low back tension will often times clench and struggle in Rabbit and SSLHTK, with very little progress, sometimes for years.

WHAT TO DO

I have spoken with many yoga students who abandoned their 26 & 2 practices because of low back pain. Many of them remained committed to yoga and found healing in other forms. Their attitudes have almost universally been positive toward 26 & 2, but they feel certain that something inherent to the style is damaging to their bodies. 

I think we can do better. This series has built in solutions for low back compression, we just have to teach/practice them correctly.

ABDOMINAL SUPPORT

We all know that good front body engagement supports the forward bends and front side compressions. We talk about it often. However, our directions about the abs and core strength can get misinterpreted in class and even make the problem worse.

The popular idea of abdominal muscles is that of "abs," specifically of the six pack/washboard type. Tell a student to use their abs/core/belly strength/etc... they will invariably clench these muscles. But these muscles (Rectus Abdominus) just pull the ribs and hips closer together. Alone, they do not necessarily support length in the spine. Another issue with this limited engagement in the "abs" is that they can make the QL muscles clench, to brace against the tension in the front body, exacerbating the problem. (You can try it now. Just think of the "six pack" muscles in your own body and clench them. You'll immediately notice a hardening and bracing happen in your low back.) Pretty much all of this happens unconsciously, but it happens. 

Likewise, the command "suck the stomach in" implies some kind of internal suction, probably from a deep inhale. We can be misled by this image, and as soon as the exhale arrives they drop their bellies down again and all support is gone. We might also associate this single command with pushing the rib cage forward and up, which creates a "stomach sucked in" image in the mirror, but just makes the low back compression worse. This action in the ribs is most visible in pranayama, when the dialogue says to suck the stomach in so "rib cage visible in the front mirror."

Healthy abdominal support includes the deep muscles of the core and hips. Here are some commands I use to create better abdominal support:

-Pull the belly button back towards the spine.
-Draw the hip bones together. (I usually point out the hip bones first so they don't get confused. In this case I am referring to the Anterior Iliac Crests, the bones in the front of the hips that are often visible in very lean people.)
-Pull your belly button up to the ceiling. (When in a front side compression.)
-Imagine there is a lasso around your belly button and it is pulling up to the ceiling. (When in a front side compression.)
-Draw in your low belly, below the belly button.
-Pull your low ribs toward the spine. Breathe to the collar bones.

These commands help activate the deep abdominals and truly support length in the low back. Explore the concept of spine lengthening in front side compressions in your own practice to develop your own language.

STANDING SEPARATE LEG HEAD TO KNEE

When teaching this pose, try not to emphasize head touching the knee too early. Eventually, this command becomes important, but students often clench too hard too early or lose the hip alignment if they become obsessed with just this one direction. 

Instead, try telling students to take their time getting the forehead to knee and emphasize drawing the belly in/toward the spine as they slowly curl into the pose. This way, they avoid gripping in the back and adding stress to the posture, which will only prevent progress. 

I also like to tell students it is fine and occasionally even preferred to keep their hands separate on the floor. In time, hands in prayer becomes a powerful tool for compression in the belly, but it can be distracting for those who have not yet created length in the spine. I tell students to put fingertips down on either side of the heel and press down into the floor as they put the head to the knee. The spine will act as an accordion, compressing on the front and lifting into length in the back. Once this is established, keep pressing down with the hands. For added compression and stretch, try to push the floor towards the front mirror (or whichever way the front foot is pointed).

RABBIT

Ooooooh boy. Rabbit. Much can be said about this one, but it's not a stretch to say that this pose is understood the least by the average student.

I'm going to put up a video tutorial on this one eventually, but if you are a capable student or teacher try this method:

-Enter Rabbit as normal, all the way to lifting the hips up and getting the elbows straight. Make sure the grip is very secure. Do not roll to the back of the head, go no further than an inch past the point of the skull.
-Pull the belly button up to the spine.
-Press the heels together.
-Press the feet down into the mat.
-Keep the grip strong. Without letting the feet come off the floor, try to pull the heels directly up to the ceiling. Keep this action going through three or four breaths, then exit the pose slowly.

My experience is that this command - pull the heels straight up - fully engages the pose to the student's potential. Move slowly with it, the experience can be somewhat intense (remember how we talked about fear), and make sure to take care of your body. Don't try to push through pain or bounce in the pose, and never throw yourself in and out of it quickly.

FINAL NOTES

There are other poses in the series that are good for addressing low back issues, namely Fixed Firm, Janusirasana, and Half Tortoise, but we will leave those for another time. Until then, I'll leave you with a few notes. 

-In Half Tortoise, don't overemphasize the forward stretch. It'll just grip your shoulders and back more. Let gravity do some work, and feel the belly press onto the thighs.

-Fixed Firm is not intended to be a back bend. (That's right. I said it.) Don't try to back bend it, you'll just increase low back compression.

-Keep both hips down in Janu. The hip of the bent leg side loves to get light and even lift off the floor. This releases the QL stretch.

Thanks for coming on this ride with me, friends. Let me know if you have any questions or want to hash this stuff out. Keep your practice alive; explore, breathe, and trust yourself.

*This is not medical advice. Take care of your body. Remember to be patient, listen to your body, and always practice with qualified teachers.