i woke up this morning feeling tired and achey, with a dull throb emanating from my forehead and a cramp in my right calf muscle. i got up anyway, did a 10-minute sitting meditation with Ulrich, and then promptly crawled back under the covers and slept for another hour and a half before finally deciding to stumble out into the pale daylight.
i wondered if it was a lingering effect from yesterday’s concert. i had noticed a headache forming sometime before intermission, which i initially attributed to the too-tight strings on my face mask. but later in the evening, when the headache persisted even after the concert was over, i thought it might have been due to emotional overwhelm: experiencing joshua bell perform live was like being engulfed in waves of raw emotion which reverberate through the body. his technique is so impeccable that the notes themselves seem to duck out of the way, like the breaking of a dam which allows a direct, pure flowing of expression.
i am not sure why but as i considered what to do about my head and calf aches this morning, it occurred to me that spending some time upside down might help. so throughout the day i’ve been peeking my head between my knees for seconds at a time: my legs shoulder-width apart, hinging forward at the hips, my fingertips or palms on the floor in a vague imitation of a yoga posture i used to do called prasarita padottanasana. which reminds me: back when i practiced yoga for almost two hours daily one of the closing postures i’d work on was headstand, which utterly terrified me. i was always sure that i would lose my balance and fall, my torso and limbs crumbling awkwardly onto my mat, causing my neck to snap and thus killing me instantly. but i kept trying anyway and managed to stay in headstand for a few seconds at a time for about a month straight, totally in awe at my newfound ability to embrace feeling dizzy, almost weightless and warm in the cheeks, not to mention the itchy pressure of my cork yoga mat against the top of my skull. and then after about a month the fear re-emerged and just like that, my ability to do headstands disappeared just as suddenly as it came.
it’s been so long since i’ve done a full yoga practice that i didn’t bother to attempt headstands today, but just peering at the world upside-down through the triangle between my legs seems to have done the trick: by late afternoon i felt well enough to practice violin and, though i’m still moving a bit slow, my headache has disappeared and my calf is only about half as sore as it was this morning. all thanks to some brief, sporadic shifts in perspective!
(either that or it was the creamy cheesecake topped with raspberry frosting that we had during Kaffee und Kuchen Zeit).
I've been doing yoga regularly for the past 6 yrs and have the same fear about falling out of a headstand.
I fell once. My foot clipped a plastic shelf and knocked a chip of it off. That one hurt pretty bad lol