three things in ashtanga yoga I just can’t seem to get

Have I mentioned lately how much I adore my yoga practice? I do.

But there are a few things that continue to elude me. I don’t mean certain asana. And I don’t mean samadhi. I mean three seemingly simple things that have remained annoyingly mysterious thus far. Here we go.

1- rolling over the toes

How in the fuckity fuck do people do that? I just don’t get it. It’s not unlike the mystery of how those boneless ballet dancers STAND on their toe-tips. I still don’t know if I believe they really do that. But ashtangis DO roll over their toes and they do NOT wear pretty shoes to conceal the mystery. The toe rolling is out for everyone to see. If I knew how to capture a bit of video from one of my dvds, I’d put a clip here of a close up of Lino rolling over his toes to prove it. It looks perfectly effortless, as if toes were made for rolling over, as if he has rounded stumps instead of toes. He does have sort of stumpy toes, unlike my freakishly long, finger-like toes, that flap and fold when I attempt this rolling thing. They fold and I get stuck right there, with folded toes, and I do not go up into Up Dog, and/or do not go back into Down Dog. There is that cartoon noise of a car coming to a sudden halt, ERRRT!, and my vinyasa just dies. Instead, I have to touch my knees for a split-second to the floor in order to lift my feet and reposition my toes. I notice, too, that I drop my bandhas when I do this touch down, and lose heat. Weird. Rolling over the toes seems connected to bandhas. Oh, this is just maddening.

2- tapas

Where is the sweat? I was promised SWEAT. Once, last August, I think it was maybe 90 degrees outside, I had a single drop of sweat fall from my body and land on my mat. I thought, woo hoo! I’m purifying! But that’s it. One drop. This time of year, I do full primary in long pants, long sleeve shirt, and often a cashmere sweater, no kidding, and I do not sweat a drop. If I really focus on the bandhas (and work at not doing the aforementioned knee-touch) then I feel warmer. I usually can shed the sweater after the surys, and navasana warms me up a bit, but no inner fire. Instead I have inner slightly warmer. At this rate, I’ll never get that purification thing going. How can I burn off my samskaras if I’m this milquetoast yogi? I want some of this heat everyone is talking about. Especially during this cold spell.

3- driste

At least with this one, I understand driste, gaze point, intellectually. I get it, I do. But in practice, I can’t seem to do it. For one thing, I can’t see most of the proscribed gaze points from my position in the pose (for example, belly button in Down Dog, toes in face-to-shin forward bends, upper hand in standing revolved poses). And when I can see them, looking at them tends to throw me out of my inner experience and I lose my balance. Say, the thumb in Trikonasana. I just fall over if I really look at my thumb. I do better with a kind of unfocused, paying attention to my breath/bandhas thing, not looking at my thumb, not looking at anything. It seems like if I look OUT, I’m lost. Then there is the ‘tip of the nose’ driste—am I really supposed to cross my eyes? Again with the falling over. I’ve been interpreting ‘tip of the nose’ to mean something like ‘gaze down the nose so you can see its tip in your peripheral vision.’ That kind of works. I guess. Oh, who am I kidding.

Seeing as how driste is one of the tristhana of the ashtanga method (looking place, breathing, asana), I feel like I need to get this thing more nailed down. And I am sure that any minute now it will come to me. Along with the toes and the heat. Any…minute…now…. any….minute….

UPDATE (1/17/10): about driste, I have run across two things, advanced ashtangiis quoted by their students. One was that in driste you don’t LOOK so much as you ‘rest your gaze upon’ the spot. That helps. The second is, “The dristi is an eye exercise and helps focus the mind. We don’t actually need to see the toes.” So, my literal interpretation of “gazing point” gets softened a bit to be more of a mental technique for creating focus. Okay. I can work with that.