Friday Morning

Well it is off to Corpus Christi I go this weekend. We have a big weekend planned with special guest visitor Manorma there to teach Sanskrit and spend some time on the Bhagavad Gita. We will end the weekend with an Eye of the Tiger (or Gaze of the Tabby) practice. As some of you know, I am somewhat of a traditionalist and while I am not a purist I do have a purist streak. (I relate a lot to Sally Kempton on this. She described her philosophical leanings by saying that she vacillates "between a Tantric "Its all Divine" kind of perspective and a tight-assed Vedantic scene.") And like I said, I am not a purist, but I have a purist streak.

So I want to go on record that "back in the day" the Eye of the Tiger was a 6-hour version of a full spectrum practice and we called the 3-hour version simply The Practice. There was a back bend day and a forward bend and inversion day and when you put them together it was Eye of the Tiger. And it took a good 5 or 6 hours to get through depending on how far down the list of poses you could actually go due to your ability. So how the 3-hour format ever got confused with the Eye of the Tiger is beyond me because it is a different animal all together! (One time Jesse- where are you Jesse?--suggested we call it The Glance of the Ocelot but it never did catch on. Oh well.) Anyway, not criticizing, just sayin'. 3 hours is plenty of fun and plenty of work it is just in my world it is not The Eye of the Tiger!

All right, other than that, I had a great day yesterday with some scheming with Mandy for future projects to collaborate on and then the 4:30 class was a ton of fun. We spent a lot of time prepping for revolved parvakonasana and since it was our peak pose, we explored the challenge of its classic form- back heel down, front thigh to 90 degrees and the outside edge of the front thigh parallel to the side edge of the mat. Brutal. Fun, but brutal. We worked a lot with thigh stretches, hip openers, maricyasana 3 and variations, made a foray into eka pada koundinyasana along the way. We even had time to practice parivritta sirsasana and parsva halasana.

Had we had more time, we would have been set up perfectly to clasp in pasasana as well. In fact I mentioned that in class and Gioconda went ahead and tried it (She is so delightfully hard core and enthusiastic. I love that. It is a delightful combination in a practitioner.) and she got the clasp for the first time. I got the clasp easily on my own several times after the same sequence in my practice before class which is how I knew people would be set up perfectly!

I stayed after and took Gia's class which was fun and then she and enjoyed a meal together at Whole Foods, which was delightful.

All right so- off for the weekend to see the good folks of Corpus Christi and what is really fun is I get to be a student for a lot of the weekend. YAY.