Beloved Tadasana

Class was overflowing today with new students for therapy. It’s very interesting to see how the hall divides after the opening prayers and first asana. There are groups of people with similar conditions and then the oddballs who have a different sequence. I fall in the latter category.

The knee has been feeling better, enough to ask for something besides the asanas I do. I don’t think it’s ready for any bending yet but building some strength, yes. I finally got into a trikonasana, ardha chandrasana and a few other standing asanas. Of course given an open instruction to do standing poses, I reached out to my beloved tadasana, albeit propped. The props made it such a wide open experience. It was a moment of elation at doing the simplest of asanas and finding my feet, literally. The rods continued to keep me company until it was time to let go in ardha halasana. Of course, the voice inside is waiting to see everything that needs to be ‘aligned’ but that’s a while from now.

Finally, there seems to be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. It would be interesting to go back to the basics with a little memory of how it used to feel. I look at my legs and can see the wasting of the muscles but that can’t be helped. It will still need to wait for a bit before they can be strong again. In the meanwhile, I’m considering an Ayurvedic massage treatment in Kerala. My parents have been under the treatment of a vaidyan there and he is highly recommended. I’m still on the fence when I think of leaving the household during school months.

As I type this, the leg feels like alive. It is spring and this improvement feels like new shoots of green. Cautiously optimistic is still what I remind myself as nature does her thing. I have started to visit a nearby trail once or twice a week for a 10-15 minute slow walk but it’s really just to be barefoot in the open and to watch the birds and feel the sun. I missed feeling the sand and mud, stones and gravel all these days. How do I even begin to say how much it feels like slaking my thirst? This time around I don’t wish to know what works or doesn’t, I’m just grateful for the healing however it happens.

At the risk of sounding like I’m imagining things, I did feel Guruji’s presence very strongly during the Invocation today. It was in my breath and in the steadiness of my closed eyes. Perhaps, staring at his pictures in the hall might have led to the steady and quiet sense as we chanted the few lines.

On a different note, I was at a ceremony yesterday and mentioned to my friend that one of the men there had strong, healthy feet. He also looked very familiar and I kept associating him to RIMYI for some reason and it turned out that he was a student of Iyengar yoga for over 30 years! Small world. He and his colleague were reciting the shlokas beautifully and I was lucky that life gave an opportunity to ask where I could learn the same. Their answer was easy, youtube. 😁There’s no escaping technology and the way we learn and entertain ourselves. Thanks to the digital explosion, I can listen to talks by recent masters. It also allows me to share my thoughts and experiences as I wander on unknown journeys. This is pretty much a space for soliloquy and I write in the hope that someone searching for answers as a beginner finds my journal to have a glimpse of how the journey meanders. It’s a little fellowship of some known and mostly unknown travellers on a solitary road. Thank you all very much for being part of my wanderings.

In gratitude