I'm on my third time through the "Moving Toward Balance: Yoga in 8 Weeks with Rodney Yee", and for the past 5 months or so have been doing the Rodney Yee "Power Yoga" DvD every morning. That's about 1 1/2 to 2 hours of yoga every day. That much yoga can only result in profound changes in ones life. And sure enough I am finding profound changes. One of my latest revelations was the holding of my body as I'm walking.
About two years ago I had an episode where my back refused to hold my body up any longer. When I sat in a chair, I would feel as though my spine was collapsing my body so that my internal organs were getting squashed. After going to one doctor after the other, I finally became desperate for a cure, and decided that no matter how much it cost I would find my own cure. I did acupuncture, Alexander technique lessons, reiki, massage, healing, and whatever else I could find. Well, I finally pulled out of this by finding a physiatrist who put me touch with a physical therapist who gave me a weight training program. But that's an aside. The important thing I wanted to mention is the Alexander work. The Alexander technique consists of a series of lessons where the practitioner "teaches" your body to understand what the perfect alignment is. He or she basically does things to cause your body to find its own alignment, and then continually guides it. Over the course of time, theoretically, your body will "learn" by incorporating this into other parts of your day.
I never got much farther than a couple of months with Alexander, and never completely understood it. But I retained a lot of the words of what my teacher taught me. One of the things he said was to "think about your head suspended over your body, with the spine hanging from it".
Last weekend, I was walking my dog and thinking about this, and also thinking about the correlation with Rodney Yee and other yoga and tai chi instructors, who say "think about your shoulders moving down, and by moving down allowing your neck to elongate and your head to be suspended as though it's hanging from the stars (note the similarity with the Alexander teachings)".
After about the millionth Sun Salutation, I think I'm finally understanding how to walk with my head suspended and my shoulders down. When I get into this "groove", it feels as though everything from my shoulders down is one unit, separate from my head, whose purpose, it feels, is to dangle my spine. Then everything from my shoulders down moves as though a puppet on a string. This is a recent discovering, and I'm still exploring it, so I may not be on the correct path at all. Still, it's nice to have these periods of self discovery as my body begins to release itself and my mind.
