Usually my time in the hot room is spent in my right hand corner, tucked up by the mirror, and I practice there rather unobtrusively for 90 minutes. Standing head to knee, as I’ve mentioned before, is my nemesis pose. I fight for balance, but my real problem is getting the grip of the interlaced fingers just under my toes. I maintain that my arms aren’t long enough, but I have yet to find an instructor to corroborate that fact.
In the beginning of my practice I heard that if you can’t get that grip, then don’t kick out your leg. Just stand there, bent over, holding your foot for the entire 60 seconds. Then a different instructor said kick out your foot even if you don’t have the correct grip. She said if you never kick out your foot, you’ll never get beyond this point. So I began kicking out my foot after standing there holding it for four months.
The thing was, now that I think back, slowly over the four months I was making progress on the grip. Once I started kicking out, the grip went out the window and, I guess, over time I developed my own grip – this I just found out today. (Imagine, 21 months of this and I’m still working on things from my first 6 months – same 26 postures; boring? I don’t think so. If you look at the photo, I’m talking about the step that happens even before the first picture shown here. I’ll be 70 before I get to the last two pictures!)
Today the instructor looks really sideways to her right and says, “Linda, what kind of a grip do you have going on over there? It’s very creative. Would you mind showing the class?”
“Uh …no…I’ll show them.”
I turn sideways, modeled my grip, they laughed and said I had a “golf grip”. The instructor told me how, again, the right way, and I tried to insist my arms didn’t reach, but she wasn’t buying it either. She said, “You try a little each day. Each day it gets a tiny bit better. Difficult things take time, both in here and in life.”
Hmmm….I’m struggling with things in the writing world right now where that same advice would apply. I need to stop trying to do everything perfect everyday. I really need to stop trying to do EVERYTHING everyday. I need to pare down my next step, set my next goal and scratch at it a bit, crafting it a little more each day. (New rule for overwhelming days.)
How will I remember this new rule and make it part of my being? Why, in the hot room, of course – every morning when I pick that foot up and push for that ten finger interlocked grip, trying a tiny bit each day will take over and slow me down.
And so, as another day goes by, Bikram yoga is not fun everyday, but it’s so necessary, and ….I have written.
My arms are too short as well! 10+ years doing Bikram Yoga and I still can’t interlace properly. Recently I have decided to not kick out until I can comfortable interlace.
But, I have seen Bikram himself in old photos NOT interlace…