The Edge
Am I the only one who still thinks of that guy from U2 every time the phrase “The Edge” comes up in yoga? Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless… : )
A friend & I were emailing on that topic today. The first thing folks usually learn is that they’ve hit their “edge” in a pose when their breating becomes short, or labored. That’s a good first instrument to use.
But I think it’s a more interesting & complicated concept (of course! : ) than that.
One of my favorite teachers Heidi Sormaz at Fresh Yoga (www.freshyoga.com; and she’s a Forrest Yoga Mentor), passed on something Ana Forrest told her: the point to exploring our edge isn’t to go into drama or trauma; rather, it helps us find the many levels of sensation that exist between Nothing and Pain.
A lot of the time we go just directly from numb to excruciating & miss out on the full range between — warmth, tingling, stretch, fatigue, gooey juiciness, just to name a few. Edge is a tool to find richness of experience, not to beat ourselves into submission.
Edge to me is the places where we find resistance in a pose. The resistance can be mental (hey, I don’t like this pose!), emotional (I wanna cry or scream in this pose & I don’t know why), physical (ooooh, can’t stretch/hold any more without owie), or just being stuck & losing our ability to breathe.
But that doesn’t mean we have to grit our teeth & force, or back out of the pose, or flee the class physically or bail on ourselves mentally by wandering off to a fantasy or our shopping list.
The edge is where the pose begins to work out the stuck places in our bodies/minds/spirits. We stay with ourselves, work to lengthen & smooth & soften the breath, hang out where the sensation may be intense but we can still remain in feeling.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway cuz I love taking credit for the obvious : ), where our edge is changes moment to moment. Staying curious about our edge rather than rigidly pursuing X outcome for a pose makes practice alot more fun & keeps us in the vast land between nothing/pain — right where it’s fruitful to live.
Today got a 45 minute warm up, then an awesome Forrest class. The apex pose was Firefly (Titthibhasana), and the teacher did a nice job sneaking in the warm up poses, including straddles, crows, head-to-ankle as well as some twists. Helped alot to open up the back (oooooy, my back gets tight!) enough to enjoy Titti. Yay!!