Tony Advanced: Day 4

Tony explains Mountain Posture

Practicing Handstand with Tony's help

The dual forces are starting to reveal themselves: 1)pure energetic strength and relaxation from practicing so much asana and mindfulness, and 2)physical exhaustion from practicing so much asana. My body is at once tired and energized. My mind craves both practice and release. I need to sleep and also I am too energized to sleep.

My right knee is sore. It is my medial collateral ligament, and I keep irritating it every time I do a hip opening posture. So my challenge is to back off of those postures to let my knee heal. Luckily (and frustratingly) Tony is attentive and constantly offering modifications for me, telling me to back off and chiding me for my ego. "Is it hard to let go of the postures?" he asks. Yes and no. I am here to practice the advanced postures with him. I want to be pushing myself physically. Instead I struggle mentally, trying to protect my knee from my own desire to progress.

He goes over all of the Lotus positions in detail. It is a thing of beauty to see someone execute the positions with such ease and precision. But we have to be careful with these postures. They are generally not good for the knees, especially if we do them frequently and for long periods of time.

In the morning's 'short series', Tony does everything starting with the left. He is determined to show us how flexible yoga can be. All the things that we think are rigid, the things we have done thousands of times, can be changed. In this afternoon's class he does something different. He omits some postures, does 2 sets of other postures, does the whole Cobra series as mudras, and then includes all the inversions. It is enlightening to experience Tony's freedom and control over the yoga.