Practice | Finding the Axis Mundi at Fort Tilden

practice | Finding the Axis Mundi in the Desert

practice | Yoga in the Icosahedron

Yoga | How Group Practice Matters

It is frigid Saturday morning in New York, single digit temperatures with the wind chill factor. Yet, I drag myself out of my apartment to attend the 9am yoga class at the Upper West Side Lululemon store —offering every Saturday morning a free yoga class. I practice yoga and other movement routines daily, in four  segments of 10-15 minutes each; but attending a group practice becomes a time challenge —specially on a painfully cold Saturday morning, with many tasks in the "to do list" after another difficult week. But today I was rewarded: during the class at lululemon there was a Eureka moment: my main insight was that the importance of becoming part of a yoga practices led by somebody else —even the affinities with own's practice are not that relevant. The learned lessons more specific to hatha yoga were also important for my own individual practice and teaching:

• Development of twists into spiraling movements starting from bālāsana (child pose)
• Transition from virabhadrāsana 3 (warrior pose 3) to seated position twisting the lifted leg
• Spiraling movements in head stand
• focus on different types of alignment in bhakti virabhadrasana (devotional warrior)
• Ending a class with a restorative pose, which is not necessarily savasana
• Working on development of yoga mat design 

Moving together with many other yoga practitioners helps, bringing the individual energy into a collective synergy: "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". But another important insight was that every group practice can teach a lesson, beyond the scripted instructions of the script: the lesson I learned today was about to be open to others' suggestions, not only in yoga but in life.

practice | Moving inside the Icosahedron in Sun Farm, at Noon

Last Sunday my movement practice inside the icosahedron —which has been recently installed at Sun Farm— was coincident with sun crossing the meridian. The geometry of the three anatomical planes inscribing the vertices of the icosahedron was in turn framed by the cubic structure of the trellis. The sharp shadows of the icosahedron and trellis created a strong geometry on the ground. My moving body had clear geometric references in both the icosahedron, the interventions in the landscape and the sunlight. The movement sequence included Laban scales as well as yoga poses flows. Below are sequential frames from video of the movement routines which have been referencing to the geometric context.

The cycle begins in tadasana

Extensions in the three anatomical planes following Laban's scales.

Hands in namaste marks transitions from sequences

Rotation of arm and opposite legs with centers in the vertices defining the frontal plane

Transition to a yoga sequence including:
tadasana, uttanasana (standing forward bend), chaturanga, sirsasana variations 

The cycle ends in tadasana