108 sun salutations…in a row?

I got an email a week or so ago advertising an event at the Frederick studio that sponsored the Shiva Rea event I attended. They were going to be running a mala on Sunday the 21st, and even though Frederick is a long way away on highways that suck, I was still considering going. A mala is most commonly a strand of 108 beads, used for counting prayers or mantras. 108 is a holy number in Eastern religions, as I understand it, but that’s really all I understand about it.

I don’t know how it came to be this way in the yoga community – I think it was Shiva Rea’s doing – but what was going on in Frederick is known as a global mala, a celebration of transformation and a prayer offering. The offering is specifically 108 sun salutations, done together on the day of the solstices (winter and summer), and the idea is that you get a lot of people all around the world doing it at approximately the same time, and this is supposed to signify…something. I’m still not clear on the point of it, truthfully. While I hadn’t made up my mind to go, I still thought it would be a cool thing to participate in, so I kept it penciled in on my mental calendar. On Friday I realized that I had been looking forward to the mala before I’d even decided to go, so I…decided to go.

I love sun salutations. (Here is a good demonstration of a single sun salutation, although because he’s Ashtanga he talks about alignment and so on a lot more than I usually think about. Also, he jumps forward after the second down dog, which I often do in my regular practice, but did not do once during the mala – I put one foot between my hands, and then the other, to get forward again.) I love the rhythm of them, when they start moving with my breath, when with my eyes closed I think and feel nothing but the movement, this ancient holy movement that is so simple and so true. When I told BF about this event, he said that 108 seemed like a lot, and when I told him that I liked them, he said yeah, but even if you like them, 108 is a lot. I am here to tell you that he is absolutely right.

I had never been to this studio before, because the Shiva Rea event was held in a nearby gym, and while I had seen pictures of the studio on their website, I was stunned to find out just how small the studio was. I mean it was tiny. There were only about 30 people there, total, and our mats were all next to each other with not even an inch between. People were even doing salutations out in the hall. The folks at this studio were a lot more serious about yoga than I was used to – the teachers I have are strongly into yoga, but they’re also fun, and there’s a measure of spontaneity in the class. This, however, was a no-laughing zone. Very serious yogis in there.

They had free tea, though, and the other people there seemed nice. There was also live music – a gal with a guitar and a truly beautiful voice led us through the mala. I bought the three-track CD she had to offer there, and while repetitive, it was also lovely.

As for the practice itself, they had six teachers lead us through 18 salutations each, and for each set there was a meditation that we were supposed to think on as we went through the practice. I admit that I failed to do this. Sun salutations clear my mind entirely; I’m thinking only about the breath and the movement, concentrating everything I have on the breath and the movement, and trying to think about something else (even if it was spiritual) seemed like it would just take me back to my life. Not what I’m looking for.

They gave us only a few moments between each set of 18, and by the last set I was definitely ready for it to be over. I only did consistent chaturangas during most of the first set; after that I was on my knees almost every time. It was exhausting. I think I also did something weird to a nerve in my neck. I’ve had what I think is a pinched nerve in the slope between my neck and my right shoulder since high school. It only bothers me once in a great while, and I don’t know what the pain actually is, but when I heard the term “pinched nerve” I thought it was a perfect description. In the middle of the fifth set, I felt a funny sort of pop at that spot, and a flare of 10% pain and 90% heat. It faded over the course of the practice. I don’t know what the medical explanation for this is, but it felt like I somehow blew out the pinched nerve, and I hope this means it’ll never bother me again.

I noticed at Saturday’s Bikram practice that something weird was going on in my right shoulder. It seemed like there was a strange, strained soreness in a radius all the way around the joint, not in one muscle or another. In Hannah’s blog, she has talked about how her athletic past came back to cause her trouble when she was in her first year of yoga, and eventually she kneaded through all the old tissue and her shoulders seemed brand-new. I didn’t play water polo for umpteen years so I can’t explain why my shoulders are behaving this way, and again I don’t have a medical explanation for it, but my shoulders are so weak and I think I might be on the road to breaking through the old tension and remaking those muscles anew. I felt the same soreness as Saturday’s in the middle of the salutations, but it had gone away entirely by the time the practice was over – instead of getting worse, which would make sense if I had injured the muscles somehow.

When the salutations were over, we gathered around and did a little kirtan with Daphne (the lady with the guitar and the pretty voice), and then we laid down for savasana while she sang and played some more. She sang one of her own songs first, and then she started singing “Imagine”. I could not help but roll my eyes. Much as I respect John Lennon as a musician (and a martyr), that song to me represents all of the most foolhardy naivete and liberal extremism of the 60′s. Not that there wasn’t good stuff in there, but…imagine there’s no country? Let’s imagine ourselves to have been in the biggest rock band of all time, and that we never have to worry about money again, eh? That way we’ll be free to be dreamers, and the world can really live as one.

I guess part of it was that I was REALLY ready to go home. I was trying to be in the moment and enjoy the practice and whatnot, but I was trembling and hungry and exhausted even before we laid down for savasana, and by the time she started playing “Imagine” I just wanted to get up and leave. My body felt weird. My hamstrings were sending confused signals to my brain – “Are we overstretched? Are we painful? I don’t even know, dude” – and I wanted a bath so badly I could see the steam in the air.

Trying to balance between the yoga-ness of staying in the moment and enjoying the lengthy savasana for what it was (despite having to beat Redskins game traffic and being ready to eat my yoga mat), and thinking about the kind of thing that was in those parentheses along with the rest of the practical issues in my life, was in stark contrast last night, and it’s something that troubles me more often than I’d like to admit. I find it impossible to believe that I could ever be as serene and untroubled by the nuts and bolts of life as some of the yoga instructors I meet. In part because I think it’s impossible not to be attached to those nuts and bolts if you live and pay bills in 2008. I think about a dozen things during savasana; a chunk of it is thinking about the practice I just did and relaxing out of it, but that’s not even half of my thoughts during that time. Does this make me a bad yogini?

Part of the problem is that I find peace in the pure physicality of yoga, and in the midst of practice, invoking the top half of my chakras – spirituality, meditation – is not as attractive as staying down where I’m sweating and my muscles are working. Iyengar calls this “mere acrobatics” and it pains me that that’s what I enjoy the most. I’ve discussed this before, in sort of a different context.

Anyway. After it was [finally] over I bought some tea, I bought a CD, and I went out to my car. We’re having a severe cold snap here – it’s as cold as New England right now – and it was terrifically windy. I got in my car and put my key in the ignition and my car did not start. Did not. Start. I moaned and banged my head on the steering wheel and called BF, who kept me company until the next try, when it started and then stalled because I failed to gun the engine and I screamed “FUCK” loud enough to deafen poor BF. I ate some yogurt raisins (yum) and a banana, and then I put my head on the steering wheel and started talking to myself about how lucky I was to be in a car instead of out in the cold, to have a warm lovely house to go home to and BF who loves me, all the wonderful blessings in my life and what a tiny glitch this was, how happy I should be and how this should not be a despairing moment. I was hoping to push some of these positive thoughts into my car’s engine so it would start on the third try. And it did.

(I’m a bit concerned about what this means the rest of the season holds for me. The solstice is a time of transformation, of a new period beginning and an old one ending, and if the failure of my car is some sort of sign, I’m not happy about what the first half of 2009 holds for me. I will try to stay positive, though, and hope that 2009 improves by osmosis, like my car did.)

When I got home I ate the best Kraft Mac & Cheese I have ever had and ran a lavender-vanilla bath. I don’t take baths very often because they are not terribly relaxing to me – they are more in the realm of boring, to tell the truth – but my muscles were wandering, lost, in a strange world of strain and exhaustion and I wanted the steam and heat like a desert nomad wants a glass of water. I was sleepy and loose when I got out. BF agreed to massage my shoulder, which felt unbelievably good, and then I went to sleep.

Today my muscles are more painful than at any other time I can remember in my life. My triceps, my hams, my calves, shoulders, back, hips, all of them are singing a lament of suffering. I feel like I ran a marathon (I guess, in a way, I did). I can barely walk or lift my arms. But, and all of you should be grateful for this, I can STILL TYPE.

The best moment of the whole practice – aside from the suspended joy of salutation after salutation, one and then another and then another – was at the very, very end when we did closing Oms. This is by no means the biggest group I’ve ever been a part of, but it was the loudest Om I’ve ever heard.  The intensity was amazing. I felt lifted by that Om, hanging in the air, vibrating with the sound of creation.