And I got the DVD for this one:
But I digress ...
Here was the workshop breakdown and key points. I'm trying not to look at the wonderful notes she gave us — how very generous of her — as I want to only get down what I remember and not feel like I'm plagiarizing her:
Overarching Key Points and Goals:
• transfer of weight from feet to hands and hands to feet• to lift and land lightly
• to gain lift and lightness in your practice it's important to really pay attention throughout your whole practice to your form in plank, chatarunga and any arm balancing you do as this is KEY to strengthening and stabilizing your shoulder and shoulder girdle for lightness and weight transference. Use every opportunity to employ proper form even to doing extra chatarungas in your practice, as chatarunga is the base for so many balancing postures.
Jump Back to Chatarunga:
• First she explained that "jump" is a misnomer. As it misleads you to think that your just jumping haphazardly and flinging yourself rather willynilly into space. Whereas you must think of it as a transfer of weight. Your transferring it from your feet to your hands and vice-versa. It's a deliberate and controlled jump and or lift causing the weight to transfer into your hands/arms to a hang in the air catching your balance as in a handstand/hand balance (which is really what your literally doing) then down to plank/chatarunga or straight into chatarunga. You have to have an attitude shift here.• When you transfer your weight always think deliberately to PUSH your hands into the floor with straight arms.
• Use your fingertips to keep your balance when you catch the hanging/pause. This is the same action as in a handstand to keep you from falling forward over your body. It keeps your balance. Fingertip action is VERY important in all the hand balancing and jumps. Who would of thunk!
• Always hands FLAT down and the position will be in front of your feet in the beginning and also finding the perfect distance from feet that's best suited for you to start this approach. Keep the hands shoulder width apart and arms straight. As you get better at this and more flexible your hands can then go closer and closer to your feet until they're beside your feet.
• When jump lifting, you lean forward and with hands flat and arms straight, you transfer your weight into your hands whilst really pushing your hands into the floor you jump lift your hips and feet up, thinking of lifting hips up almost to handstand and lower to plank/chatarunga. You start by doing it bent leg and as you become super-yogi you can start moving your legs back with straight legs.
• As you get better at this you will eventually catch a balance and can hang/pause there as you're literally in a handstand balance before shifting your feet back into chatarunga. It was so cool as I was starting to find this as I was doing it. Felt amazing. Although there wasn't much of a pause, but I was getting my hips up there! Wee!
• The final phase is being able to press to lift: This is when you're the bomb-yogi and got your float on and have mega-bandha control! You can now lean forward, press the weight into your palms again transfering the weight into hands/arms, employing those mega-steal bandha's to lift your legs slowly to a pike position and lower to chatarunga! Nice!
Jump to Feet From Downdog:
• Think transfer of weight again into your hands with straight arms and hips lifted when jumping.• It's important to look forward slightly beyond your hands to cause your feet to follow.
• Tighter hamstrings (most of us) will use bent legs. Only when your hamstrings are super/duper loose can you really do it with straight legs.
• Get your weight in your hands/arms when jumping with bandha control and allow for a controlled landing to feet.
• Use the end of the breathe out to "float" in the air to land. This allows for a compacted/controlled/bandha'd torso for floating forward.
Jump Through to Seated:
This was alot of fun. She taught us different approaches for doing it with bent legs. Too much juicy details to get into here. Sorry guys/gals. Suffice to say, she said it's actually harder and requires more strength and coordination to do it bent legs than straight legs. Yeah, as I do it bent legs and always thought that it was the kinda loser way to do it. I thought of it as the more inelegant, less practiced approach and in actual fact it's harder! Awesome! She finds the straight legged approach easier for women as they tend to have looser hamstrings and employs less strength. But you must have very loose hamstrings and can practically just fall into a perfect seated straight backed chin to shin forward fold to do this properly. Of which I do NOT have. I always had a sneaky feeling you needed that flexibility to do it anyway. In fact she can do both perfectly as she demo'd so well, but she said she purposely does mostly bent legged as she wants to train herself in strength. Neat!Jump Back:
Misnomer again as it's a lift up swing through to lolasana to chatarunga arms lolasana to chatarunga dandasana. So many things to keep in mind AND to practice here but the essentials are:• Try using a block in your practice half of the time to get the coordinated lift up swing through to bent arms to chatarunga
• When swinging through you need to bend your arms to chatarunga arms in order for your hips to go up at the back so you can kick your feet back to chatarunga. It's again a transfer of balance since when you bend your arms your front goes down so your hips can go UP.
• Practice holding a tight tuck, knees to chest, crossing at the shins not the ankles, holding your feet close to your butt. As that is key for being able to get your feet through. Now if I could do that, I'd be going places! I still have oodles of trouble getting my knees to tuck to my chest properly (I think weak hip flexors comes to mind) and it's still hard to tuck my feet close to my butt. Now try doing that when gravity takes over in lolasana and you'll see what I mean! lol! Oh well!
• She had us practice many types of lift up manouvers back and also to practice lolasana with two legs, then one leg on the floor, then bending arms to chatarunga with one leg on the floor (practically impossible for me!) and then using that position to jumpback with the other foot springing you back. SHEWF!! That can give me LOTS of homework!
This was an awesome workshop by an amazingly generous, knowledgable, organized teacher — I love when teacher's are methodical and organized when building our knowledge base — and was really good at getting the message across and how to incorporate it in our real day-to-day practice.
She said it took her 5 years to learn "to get her float on" as I like to say. And that the key for her and the key for us is to really incorporate those techniques throughout our practice day in and day out. And as for the jumpbacks in seated she used her blocks religiously to get the coordination and lift to swing through to bended arm to chatarunga. It was practice.practice.practice. I see a pattern here. Lol! She said it.was.time.consuming, it.was.tedious, it.was.exhausting, it.was.cumbersome but yet it was all worth the effort to build the strength, stamina, coordination, lightness and flow in the practice.
Hmmm, sounds like practice and all is coming ...
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