1. As I was thinking about what to teach this morning in Focus on Form, several principles about forward bending crystallized in my mine. 1. Keep the groin soft. 2. Keep the legs strong. 3. Get length in the spine. 4. The concave back stage is important. 5. the arms have an important job to do with respect to points 3 and 4.
2. BKS Iyengar's remark that Vira III is a continuation of Vira I and Patricia's observation that Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana is a continuation of vira III. Follow that trajectory all the way through and you get to supta trivikonasana and hanumanasana. One can trace this trajectory even further back to something like ardha pavanmuktasana.
3. I really enjoyed teaching down in San Marcos last night. The class is quite mixed in terms of age range. About half the class is college age or in the first years out of college. The other half is my age or older. What they all seem to have in common is really liking living in San Marcos and that they are really enthusiastic about good yoga in their own town. I was also struck by how many of them do some sort of creative/active work with their hands, music, music theory, art, baking, home brewing and rope wall building. I am always struck by how classes develop their own personality and a lot of the job as a teacher, in my mind, is to facilitate and simply allow that development to occur. Once it does, there's an important sense in which the class teaches itself.
That's often why I'm a bit nervous at the start of the new semester. I don't know the class yet. It's particular dynamic is yet to be formed, yet to come into being, the component parts are there obviously, the texts, me, the students and the perspectives each of these components bring to the table, but exactly how all that will unfold remains to be seen. I'm actually not nervous about the upcoming Plato seminar. I'm mostly excited to dive into the new experience. It has been a year since I've taught a straight philosophy class and the Greeks are my favorite thing to teach.
4. I've been thinking a good bit about the essentiality of soul in the yogic context. What we are upto in yoga is what Patanjali discusses at the opening of the yoga sutra, "When yoga happens, the seer resides in /sees its true nature." Our true nature is perfect. Yoga is about getting rid of all the things that get in the way of our perception of that. Largely, yoga is a practice of perception, learning to see what truly is the case. By and large, I think this is what Plato was upto as well. Plato lived and wrote before there were clear boundaries between modes of human endeavors (what we might call academic disciplines today) but he was clearly interested in what made philosophy different than say, reciting Homeric epics. Philosophy is the practice that enables us to see what is, what truly is the case about ourselves and the world.
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