Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 6 & 7
Now that he's used to the idea of weight and the feeling of shafts, he's almost ready to drive in the cart. We gave him some exposure to the sounds of the cart next, pulling it around in front of him. We also had him trot along behind the cart with Liz driving an experienced pony and me holding Shadow's line.
After that, we hitched him up to a cart himself:
I'm still ground driving in this picture, letting him get used to the cart - and letting me work up some nerve to actually get in. (He's yanking on the lines very rudely in this shot...)
And here we are! For the early attempts, we had Liz walking along holding Shadow's head. We have just started taking very short little drives without her as a safety net. I think what's limiting us at the moment is more me being brave enough, rather than Shadow knowing enough!
Labels: horses
Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 4 & 5
After Shadow was ground driving reliably, we went through two stages designed to prepare him for pulling a cart.
Tire:
We hitched him to an old car tire to let him feel what it's like to pull weight. The rope trailing behind the tire was originally there so that Liz could pick the tire up and give him a break, when he was first learning.
That's Baxter following, and farm dog Daisy supervising.
Shaft trainer:
The shaft trainer gets the pony used to the feel of shafts on either side. This step was a real challenge for Shadow. He would wiggle one way and Oh No That Pole Is Touching Me!! so he would wiggle over the other way and Oh NO! Pole On That Side Too!!! He also got worried about the shafts coming on and off. He finally got the hang of pushing into the shaft with his shoulder when he had to turn.
Bax thinks that these are all just odd ways of taking a walk.
Labels: horses
Teaching Shadow to drive, stages 1 , 2, & 3
For the Kittitas County Fair, I made a poster for Shadow's door with some photos of the stages of training we have taken him through in the past year or so.
Thought I'd post the pictures up to show all of y'all that couldn't make it to the fair. Thanks to Shadow's owner Liz Lasell-McCosh for taking these pictures of him and me!
Lunging:
We are in a round pen, Shadow is moving around me in a circle. We practiced verbal commands (Walk, Trot, and Whoa) and he learned to wear a surcingle (belly band) and a bit and bridle.
Ground driving:
We are still in the round pen, but now I have two lines running from the bit, through rings on the surcingle, to my hands. This is how we taught Shadow to steer and stop from the bit.
Outside the pen:
Here we are still ground driving but we are outside the pen. Now that he steers and stops (fairly) reliably we are going around the farm and up and down the driveway. He's also wearing a real driving harness in this shot, what he will use to pull the cart. Special thanks to canine assistant Baxter.
Labels: horses
tips from Yoga Anatomy
What I learned from the book
Yoga Anatomy, even though I don't know the names of the muscles.
"Diaphragmatic" breathing is a misnomer. You pretty much can't breathe at all without using the diaphragm. The choice you have between breathing into the ribcage/chest (using abs to stabilize the belly) or breathing into the belly (stabilizing the ribcage).
The lumbar curve in your lower back is a unique trait of humans. You pretty much only need a lumbar curve if you want to walk bipedally most of the time. Babies are not born with it; their spines have one long curve from neck to tailbone. The S-shaped, secondary lumbar curve develops gradually between the ages of 1 and 10 years. Will have to remember this if I ever teach yoga to kids younger than 10!
In balancing postures, it is best to breath quietly. Deep "yoga breathing" just disrupts your balance. If it is hard to breath quietly, you may have muscles working (and using up oxygen) that don't need to be working. Relax muscles that are not part of the posture.
When sitting for meditation, hips should be above knees, in order to create a neutral spine (that gentle S-curve). That is part of the point of things like
lotus posture. But note that you can get the same effect by
sitting cross-legged, with your butt on a cushion. Killing your knees to get into lotus seems unnecessary.
Stretches should be felt in the "belly" of the muscle, the widest part, not at the joints or the places where muscles attach. If you are (say) seated, with straight legs, and reaching for your toes, and you feel the stretch (as I do) in the backs of the knees, one option is to bend the knees slightly, place something to support them, and see if that moves the feeling of stretch into the belly of the muscle.
Janu sirsasana: one leg stretched out in front, the other leg bent with the sole of the foot against the thigh of the straight leg, fold forward. The safest position for the bent knee is fully bent. If it is only partially bent, be aware that your forward fold is putting extra stress on the cushioning inside the knee. For the same reason, cow face posture is risky on the knees; be gentle when knees are only partially bent.
A feeling of tightness in one part of the body may actually be caused by tightness elsewhere. The place you are feeling it may not be the place you need to stretch! Guess we better stretch everything, not get too focused.
Looking at a human skull from the side, the center of gravity is under the TMJ joint, right in front of your ear. But the actual support of the skull is where it sits on top of your spine, an inch or two farther back. No wonder it is so easy to let your head fall forward and hunch over your keyboard.
Sometimes you can really tell that humans only recently evolved to walk bipedally, and we are not quite perfectly adapted for it yet.
Labels: yoga
Hatha and raja yoga
I recently spent some time reading
Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the most respected and comprehensive books on hatha yoga, and it prompted some thoughts about hatha and raja yoga.
Hatha and raja are two different yoga paths - not the only two, but two major ones. Most of the schools and branches of yoga that we have in the west today fall under hatha or raja traditions.
As is often the case with "competing" or rival schools of thought, they each have a sort of cartoon caricature view of the other side.
Hatha is caricatured as yoga that is purely physical, only caring about physical purification, postures, and breathing, not caring about meditation or ethical living until the body is "perfected" first (yeah, right...)
Raja is caricatured as yoga that starts beginners out with the first principle of "do no harm" and won't let them progress to do a single asana until they have "mastered" living without causing harm (yeah, right...)
After going through teacher training in a raja tradition, and then reading this extensive book about the hatha tradition, I have the impression that the two schools have a lot more in common than they have differences.
Hatha does start beginners out with physical purification and postures. But the main concern is that they do not want students "battling" or struggling with their thoughts while trying to sit in meditation. Focusing on the physical is (I think) meant to be more accessible as a starting point. Unfortunately the
Pradipika book is not very consistent about telling you exactly where to start. It gives some purification exercises (
shatkarmas) that are supposed to be the starting point, but several of them are very very scary (I am NOT going to swallow a strip of cloth and then vomit it back up... thanks anyway) and the book recommends those "for advanced practitioners," so are you supposed to do just the ones that don't scare you? But even for some of those there are caveats and warnings. I'm not scared of
nauli, which seems to me like a good workout for the abs. But the book says before doing it, you must learn to do
uddiyana bandha. But it also says that all the
bandhas are things you learn AFTER you master the earlier stages. In general it's pretty confusing as to what the earliest stages are supposed to be, which makes the whole project seem confusing and overwhelming. Of course you are meant to be studying the book under the supervision of a hatha yoga guru.
Raja does place a lot of importance on the first principle of non-harming, but the way you practice that principle is by keeping it in mind *while* you go about practicing asanas, breathing, meditation, and whatever. As my teacher said, raja practitioners do "everything all the time" - there is no progression of "mastering" asanas before you even try meditating. Good thing, too, because the idea of perfecting *any* aspect of yoga before trying any other aspect is just loopy.
Since you are supposed to do all the aspects all the time, the beginner at raja yoga can start wherever she or he is drawn to start. Want to do postures? learn to meditate? Great. Don't have time for a daily practice? You could start by living with the ethical guidelines for a while - see if you can live your daily life while doing less harm, telling more truth, and so on.
In the advanced stages of practice, hatha and raja yoga have the same goal. The
Pradipika acknowledges this towards the end. The idea is to attain a mental state of oneness, where you no longer perceive a difference between yourself and the rest of the universe.
Labels: yoga
Critic brain and creator brain
So as a follow-up to the last post, how can you tune into your body's feedback and make your yoga practice your own? It is difficult, because different people do this in different ways. Body feedback can be in the form of mental pictures or messages, or you might feel a particular body part calling for attention (with pain or tension), or you might just get a hunch or a feeling that the next posture should be
this.
I asked my teacher about how I could explain this better, and she helped me develop these thoughts.
Writers know about having critic mind and creator mind. Critic mind is the mode of thinking that says this is good, that is awful, here's how it could be improved. Creator mind is the mode where you make things, write things, have new ideas. Writers know that if you accidentally turn on critic mind while you are trying to write, you get nowhere. Critic mind is fantastic when it is time for editing, and it is fantastic for reading other people's work and learning from it. But it stinks at creating. Critic mind is rational, clear-thinking, and has reasons for things. Creator mind is artistic and intuitive, and sometimes is comfortable doing things without knowing the reason.
Yoga practitioners have two mental modes too, a rational and an intuitive. So if you have a yoga practice that you do the same every day, and you designed it carefully to stretch and strengthen all the major muscles, that would be doing yoga in rational mode. If you have a practice where you listen to your body's feedback and improvise from one posture to the next, you are in intuitive/creative mode.
Our culture seems to place a lot of value on rational mode, which is why some writers get blocked. When critical/logical mind never shuts up, creative/intuitive mind never gets to talk. Creative mind is also the one that takes feedback from the body.
There is a need for both minds in yoga practice. If you get stuck in critical/rational mode, you miss one of the great gifts of yoga, which is the chance to work on your mind-body relationship. If you get stuck in intuitive mode only, you can fall into the trap of only doing postures that are easy and feel good, never challenging yourself with things that feel "hard."
This (my teacher explains) is why yoga teachers get so mixed up in front of class sometimes: can't remember which is right and which is left... or refer to the "palms of your feet" and the "soles of your hands"... can't describe a perfectly simple move like "raise your left hand off the mat." We aren't flakes (well, not all of us). We are trying to be in rational and intuitive mode at the same time, and that scrambles up your mind a bit. You have to talk the students into the posture, which requires rational mode (here's how you do it, do things in this order, and here are the reasons why) and then observe feedback from your own body and your students, which requires intuitive mode(how does this feel? will we need a break next, or a counter posture? are they stable and comfortable, or just being polite?) Then once you have the feedback, rational mode has to kick back in (my students felt some wrist pain in that posture, what should I do next and how should I adapt the rest of the class to take care of their wrists?)
So if you are stuck in your practice, this might be one way to determine what is missing. Are you thinking mostly in terms of "here's what I do and why" or mostly in terms of "listening," feeling, or intuiting your body's feedback?
Labels: yoga
Making your practice your own
So, while talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I commented that doing yoga teacher training had changed the way I did my home practice.
I have been doing a morning yoga practice for years, but for most of that time I did the same routine day after day, or else I consciously chose and planned a change to it here and there. These days, I am more likely to improvise my practice based on what postures feel good at the time, and what goals I'm working on.
One of the gifts of yoga is that it can change your relationship to your body. Most of the time we shut off feedback from our bodies, and ignore or power through any discomfort. In yoga you can change that adversarial "mind-over-matter" relationship and give your body a chance to speak up and ask for what it wants. If your back is twinging after a particular posture, you can alter the rest of your morning practice to take care of it, by doing some relaxing work, even if you "planned" to do more strengthening.
It is hard to establish those lines of two-way communication, but once they start to open up, you begin to get all sorts of useful information about what your body likes and dislikes: foods, exercises, positions that you sit in at the computer, all sorts of things.
One of my teaching goals is to get my students started on the project of listening to their bodies, which (sadly) you don't always get to do in a beginning yoga class. For example, I would like to offer my students a lot of choices in class, like showing them two or three variations of a posture and asking them to find the one that feels the best to them. Oftentimes when yoga teachers do this, they label the posture variations as "beginning," "intermediate," and "advanced," which I think is counterproductive. You don't want your mind making the decision, or choosing the word it thinks best applies to you. "Oh, I'm a beginner, so I'd better not even try the other versions"... or worse yet... "I'm going to show everyone how talented I am by doing all the advanced versions!" You want your body taking charge, and your body doesn't care about the labels. It might like the "beginning" version of one posture, and the "intermediate" version of another.
I am hoping to short-circuit that problem by offering (say) two versions of the posture, and having them try both, while I ask, which feels better for your body?
Gary did a
Reverse Namaste easily, the first time he tried, while after ten years of regular yoga practice, I am not even close to being able to. I'm not sure that "advanced yoga student" is a meaningful phrase. Or at least, its meaning has little to do with physical strength or flexibility. A dancer or gymnast might be able to do every yoga posture in the book perfectly on day one, but if they don't have that friendly, open communication between mind and body, I'd hesitate to call them "advanced." Yoga asanas are for getting to know your body and what it wants, not for looking pretty like the Yoga Journal models.
Labels: yoga
I'm still ground driving in this picture, letting him get used to the cart - and letting me work up some nerve to actually get in. (He's yanking on the lines very rudely in this shot...)
And here we are! For the early attempts, we had Liz walking along holding Shadow's head. We have just started taking very short little drives without her as a safety net. I think what's limiting us at the moment is more me being brave enough, rather than Shadow knowing enough! 
