Practice, sometimes you just want to fly

I rediscovered Twitter last night, though it took me a while to remember my password. Still don't really understand twitter, it was about a year before I realised I had an inbox type thing that had several messages going back months, all unanswered, my apologies.

So that (this post title) was my twitter post, refuse to say twxxt and by the way, what is the past tense of twxxt anyway?

'Practice, sometimes you just want to fly'.

I was just about to start my evening practice yesterday, the 20/20/20 thing I do, twenty minutes asana, twenty minutes Pranayama and twenty minutes meditation.

This is something we did on Ramaswami's course although that was more like 20/40/40. Ramaswami would leave the room for twenty minutes and let us do whatever asana we felt like before coming back for the pranayama. We had a week of this. Each day I would try something different and see what seemed to worked best as preparation. One day I did mostly sury namaskara's another day slow, meditative, Asymmetric postures, another day backbends. One afternoon was all fast paced arm balances.

So last night I thought, arm balances, why not. After a week of being mostly on my back in the supine sequence it seemed like a good idea and there's a slew of them near the back of Ramaswami's book, kind of like 2nd and 3rd series ashtanga stuff.

Started with a few floaty Sury's, they were nice then jumped into headstand, folded my legs into lotus to lower down into my old favourite urdhva Kukkutasana and ....splat. Tried it again and again splat, splat and SPLAT.  This was pretty much my practice session last night. Galvasana, Splat, Eka pada bakasana, Splat, Koundinyasana....wobble....... SPLAT.

I had thought about doing a couple of tictaks ...... thought better of it.

Quite shocked at how much upper body strength I've lost and of course how much Ashtanga builds. It's been, what, three weeks since my last Ashtanga Primary. I do the occasional jump back in Vinyasa Karma but clearly not enough to keep my strength up.

Not too bothered about it, the floaty sury's were still OK and the jump backs and through, when I do them, are still fine and of course, if I've lost upper body strength from the lack of arm balances then my hips have probably become more flexible from all the Supine series  along with strength in the legs. It's a good argument for a varied and balanced practice.

This morning I moved on from Supine to Asymmetric and Seated sequences, not the whole lot but a selection of subroutines from both. I added in a few more jump back between the subroutines, nice practice.

Every time I do this Asymmetric/Seated I realise how Ashtangaish it is, which makes me think about what I'm including or leaving out from Primary. Krishnamacharya, he knew a thing or two, feels a little disrespectful to leave anything out but then that was a sequence for a particular time and group of students, later he taught in a different way to different students. I've studied both, how to do justice to and respect both the early and late Krishnamacharya?

In the end I include much of Primary but missed out a few of the variations and most of the jump backs allowing me to stay in some of the postures longer and include some other VK variations. This morning was more Asymmetric focussed, tomorrow will probably have more attention on seated and perhaps the next day more time in the twisting postures. Consistency and flexibility, my new mantra.

It's an improvement though, this time last year or six months ago even I would probably have gone running back to ashtanga with my tail between my legs.