mula bandha magic

I’ve had the coolest thing happen lately in my yoga practice.  The whole mula bandha thing seems to be coming on-line.  Either the muscles are getting strong enough to actually do something, or I’m comfortable enough with the asanas that I have a few brain cells left to hold onto it long enough for it to do something.  Or both?  Or something else, like maybe some previous-yogini-life karma points accrued have announced, but wait!  You also get this awesome mula bandha….

Wouldn’t that be cool?

But hold on.  What the heck am I talking about?  Okay, for you non-yogis, the mula-bandha is like the invisible asana.  It’s the root lift, or root lock, and it is described in various ways from ‘a slight lifting around the area of the cervix’ to ‘try to crack a walnut with your anal sphincter.’  No, I am not kidding.  Yes, yogi-people do their asana while ‘tightening,’ ‘lifting,’ or ‘squeezing’ the pelvic floor, otherwise known as down there.

If this sounds strange, that’s because it is.

But damn if the whole root lock thing hasn’t been making good for me lately.  As I have mentioned, earlier in the summer I went to a David Williams workshop, and David, relaying Pattabhi Jois’s instructions—so, if you’re listening to me, you’re on the end of a serious game of yogi-telephone here—said the most important thing he had been taught to focus on, before breath, and way before asana, was the mula bandha.  Basically, he suggested cranking the heck out of it, and you’ll be getting it somewhere in there.  Also, it’s a two-fer, because if you really grab hold of your mula bandha, you’ll get the  the Uddianna bandha, the lower abdominal lock, at the same time.  Aaaand, you get more of the mental focus thing, too, the meditative state, because if you stop thinking about doing the mula bandha for a split second, it lets go.  You have to focus on it to keep it—that’s dharana, concentration.  Mula Bandha, it’s so much more than tightening your ass!

Um, anyway, along with many other things I shifted in my practice after the workshop, I began really focusing on this this summer, and perhaps it is paying off because—

Pow!

Chatarunga, with mula and uddianna bandhas locked and loaded, is like floating.  It does not feel like an arm/chest strength thing at all.  It feels effortless.

Balance poses feel rock steady.

Jumping slows down with greater control.

Sweat—finally, the promised sweat!—starts beading up on my skin.  Tapas!  Purification!  You will be mine!

Alignment is automatically improved.

And here’s the big one:  I don’t get tired.

Wtf?

I’m telling you, I don’t understand it…but it’s magic.

I no longer go for an occasionally remembered twinge of a subtle lift down there. No.  Now, I squeeze everything I can get ahold of (not contracting the glutes, of course), triple zipped, like some kind of freaky leather bondage corset, boom, sealed, and shazam, I swear to Shiva, I become Super-Yogini.

I mean, compared to my non-mula-bandha-sorta-pathetic-but-trying-hard-yogini-self, that is.

I don’t know why it works, but it does.  I do not lie.

Forget alignment, forget pushing, forget adjustments, for a while anyway, and spend three months or so focusing on this one thing like crazy and see what happens.  Just as an experiment.  Tell me how it goes.  I’ve only been at this ashtanga yoga gig for little over a year.  David said, hey, it takes a decade to really get a handle on the bandhas.  So…if I’m at 10% Bandha Strength now, I’ll be climbing freaking skyscrapers with my teeth by the time I hit 50.

Or, at the very least, I won’t be needing any adult diapers.