Suzaji’s Blog

Written May 24, 2014—-posted June 14, 2014, 4 a.m. , with the still full moon beaming down

For my birthday, I went to yoga heaven. First, playing on the yoga wall ropes, back and forth, and hanging upside down. Next, I stretched on my backbender (shown below) to open the front of my body and excavate the stiffness out of my shoulder joints. Then, still feeling frisky from the yoga practice a few days ago with my friend and student Sunny Bower, I placed my secure black Manduka mat near the wall and experimented with pushing up into the Upward Facing Bow Pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana) lying over cross-bolsters (instead of two stacked bolsters, the top bolster is positioned horizontal across the center of the bottom bolster).

Whenever my body feels like dead weight, I pause to remind myself that the ability to press up into a weight bearing backbend is not just upper body flexibility and strength, but also leverage and learning to really use the feet and legs.

Every pose after that was icing on the cake: Standing Poses with back heel braced against the wall, the top of the back leg secured in the lower wall ropes, to give my spine traction. . . ending with a long, deep, heavenly rest in the Goddess Pose, Supta Baddha Konasana, the Supported Lying Down (Supine) Bound Angle Pose (shown below).

I consider this pose essential for women in my age range as we move into the crone stage of life. Honestly, the Goddess pose should be taught to all females as a rite of passage. It is a key pose for navigating all the stages of a woman’s life—menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause, and postmenopause (i.e., Maidenhood, Motherhood, and Cronehood).

Alas, even some of the more enlightened men (and sometimes women) I know tend to cringe when they hear the word crone. The crone represents the third (post menopausal) phase of a women’s life—the wisdom years, the mature years. And, ready or not, chronologically I’m so there!

(The Three Stages of a Woman’s Life: http://www.sandiegotherapists.com/threestages.html)
(5 photos)

Tags: journal writing, writing yoga

This entry was posted on June 14, 2014 at 11:46 am and is filed under Life in Ojai, Yoga Writing Memoir. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.