There were only about 8 people in the class, most of them also teachers, including a gorgeous husband and wife team, both lithe and tiny and beaming, who apparently perform a kind of yoga and acrobatics around Los Angeles. They had brought along a photographer, there to shoot them working in class, as part of a photo essay about the two of them and their work. Apparently they had spent the earlier part of the day at a studio doing aerial silks--which, if you've never seen someone work in aerial silks, you should go YouTube it right now, as it's super beautiful to watch and apparently incredibly difficult to do. It has now gone on my list of things I must try. It will go right below "Trapeze School" (I passed by one in Santa Monica yesterday and I can't stop thinking about it).
Scott, the teacher, divided us up into partners right away, as most of the class was going to be a series of partner-assisted poses, and I was paired up with the lovely Jennifer, who can backbend like such a gumby that her head can touch the ground behind her in crescent pose. For those of you who are visual learners, that looks like this, except picture her HEAD on her back FOOT!
Yup. She can do THAT.Now, normally, I'm not a huge fan of the partner poses with strangers in yoga classes...it usually proves to be awkward or uneven or at the very least a teensy bit aggravating, but this was not like that. We spent most of the 2 1/2 hour class in our partners and it was AMAZING. But before I go into the specifics of the amazingness I'm going to say the following...
Up until my (as of yet short) tenure in Los Angeles I have been a Vinyasa Flow girl. My heart belongs to the flow. Vinyasa is in my blood and my bones and that is not going to change. However, it had become clear to me, even before I came here, that my practice was lacking some in alignment. The teachers at Laughing Lotus are amazing, and a few of them are masters of alignment, AND, the practice at the Lotus definitely has Anusara at its heart (the style I've been practicing since I came to LA), but the flow, by the nature of the practice (speed, music, flow flow flow) can sometimes leave little room for alignment work. So, although I've been frustrated by the lack of, um, VIGOR in the yoga here, my practice has been forever altered, for the better, by the teachings I have gotten in the Anusara classes I've been taking. Which are all about alignment. A few of the small adjustments I've been given since I got here have affected every single pose I do.
So, the amazingness: A 60 second assisted handstand, lifting up into handstand from pike, jumping into handstand, lowering from handstand into chatarunga, lowering down slowly from handstand into pike, backbending like nobody's business, backbending and backbending and backbending, pressing into splits, pressing up into dual handstand...I was just waiting for us to start throwing each other across the room like gymnasts. And the husband and wife? Mr. and Mrs. Lithe and Beautiful...everytime I looked over at them she was doing an arm balance on his bent over body like some tiny flexible fairy. Gorgeous. All the partner poses, actually, are beautiful, like complicated human sculpture...the geometry of the poses is magnified by the mirror of the two bodies.
Sigh.
I left class vibrating and as I drove home I pretended that all I had to do, ever, was yoga...and I thought about flying on a trapeze, and I thought about dancing in silk strung in the air, and I thought about going to the Bhagavad Gita study group that Scott was talking about and I thought about where my practice would go if I could practice even MORE...2 hours a day...4 hours a day...what would happen? I think I would just explode into a cloud of bliss.
But, for now, that is just a funny little dream. In the meantime, I am so grateful to stumble into a class like today's. Maybe LA yoga isn't so bad after all...
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