Upside Down

That's one happy cervical spine!

The other day in my yoga class, the teacher repeated something she had once heard from another teacher: "The point of Ashtanga practice is not to be comfortable. It's not a spa treatment. It's a liberation practice."

I'll say, and for my money, few poses are as liberating as headstand. For about five years now, I've been able to do an unsupported headstand (in the middle of the room), and I've never had any issues with it.

All that changed when I started my regular Ashtanga practice. I think there are a couple of factors at work: one being that I've never practiced inversions so frequently before, and the other is the teachers encouraged me to come into headstand by slowly raising both legs rather than kicking one foot up first, and that really threw me off.

Just a few weeks into the regular practice, I started having neck issues. I've read about the problems people have from doing headstands, but hadn't experienced them myself. One night during the neck trouble, I was hanging out with a friend who is a physical therapist. She told me in no uncertain terms that the cervical spine was not meant to bear weight (except for the weight of the head). And the thing is, when you do headstand properly, you don't put more pressure than that on it, but I had been recently, both in trying to get up into it the new way and in trying to lower my legs to 90 degrees, also part of the Ashtanga primary series.

Enter inversion stool. This baby is a dream for going upside down with a happy neck, and it arrived on my doorstep yesterday afternoon!

As I played around with my new toy, Diana Ross started to play on the internal ipod:

I said upside down
You’re turning me
You’re giving love instinctively
Around and round you’re turning me

Upside down you’re turning me
You’re giving love instinctively
Around and round you’re turning me
I see to thee respectfully

Yeah, I cut out all the lyrics about boys. There are no boys turning my world upside down at the moment. Just me, giving myself love instinctually, and seeing to me respectfully with my new inversion stool!