Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Practice report, floating, and some random thoughts on out-of-body experiences in the practice

Did full primary and second up to Supta Vajrasana this morning. When I started my practice, I felt this slightly tweaky sensation in my left elbow joint, which worried me a little. As I went through Surya A, the cause of this sensation started to dawn on me. In the last week or so, I have made an interesting breakthrough in my Suryas: I have succeeded in doing that cool, "floaty" move where I lift my body slightly off the ground in trini position before going into chatvari position, so that the entire movement looks more like I'm kind of "floating" back into chaturanga rather than jumping back. I don't know how well I'm describing this, but hopefully you get what I'm saying: You see Richard Freeman and David Swenson (among others) doing this in their videos. I suspect that my movement still has some "jumpiness" in it that needs some working on. Maybe I'll make a video of myself doing this one day, and then I'll find out.

In any case, I think the tweaky sensation in the left elbow is caused by the fact that I tend to shift my left wrist ever so slightly on the mysore rug when I jump/float back, and this shifting causes instability in the wrist and elbow joints, which leads to that tweaky sensation. My hypothesis seems to be confirmed during practice today, because I made a more conscious effort to avoid shifting my left wrist, and the tweaky sensation eventually went away as I went further into the practice.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about being able to finally start floating back. The feeling is, well, almost magical. Speaking of magical, you should check out Cathrine's latest blog post about magic moments in yoga practice and life in general. I'm honestly feeling just a little bit envious of her :-), because I've never had any really magical moments in my yoga practice so far. As I mentioned in my post about backbend epiphanies, I'm not the sort of person who gets epiphanies or flashes of light during deep backbends. Cathrine and a few other people I know have had out-of-body experiences during savasana and other postures. I wonder if the ability to get out-of-body experiences during practice is also a siddhi? If so, this is one siddhi I really hope to get one day. Do any of you out there also get out-of-body experiences during practice?

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