Transitions

For those of you who’ve been to a yoga class, have you ever noticed some of the amazingly beautiful, graceful, gorgeous transitions some women artfully express as they move from one posture to the next? If I wasn’t doing the practice myself, I imagine I would just watch with awe and wonder.

There’s a part of me that wishes my transitions had a similar quality, and I’m fully aware that what I see and admire is not my style. So I awkwardly play around with my transitions, hoping to surrender to what might want to reveal itself. To this point, I’m not terribly satisfied  with the changes from my pose to the pose.

Recently I asked Kirsten Werner about this. I made the same comment about the transitions, and how can I, as a man, express a transition in my own way, in a more masculine way. I loved her answer. What she said was that transitions were just as much a form of posture as the postures themselves. That they have their own alignment, their own intention. Just as every posture has a prescribed form with many variations, every transition is similar, but rarely spoken about. So she encouraged me to approach the transitions with a similar mindset as I do with the asanas.

Around the same time as I spoke with Kirsten, I was given an ‘assignment’ from Sofia Diaz – to notice every transition for 24 hours. Notice my own energy, notice the energy of the new environment, and notice how they blend together. And I did it. It was amazing to notice how many transitions there really are, that we rarely think about. Even as we walk about our own home, we transition from a kitchen into a hallway through a doorway, into a bedroom and so on. The transitions are endless, even down to every breath, every blink, every footstep. It was a remarkable exercise to notice all that.

As I’ve ruminated on transitions and yoga, I also remembered something about some very core energies of the masculine and feminine. An essential feminine energy is flow, movement – which is exactly what transitions are in yoga. They are the yoga between the yoga asanas themselves. It’s no wonder women are so naturally expressive in that space. A fundamental masculine energy is stillness and groundedness – which is exactly what the yoga asanas themselves usually are. I am much more comfortable with a yoga practice that involves holding poses longer, and in the very rare times I’ve been in a yoga class with all men, that’s what we do a lot of.

With these ideas I’ve been bringing more of the awareness and surrender I often feel in a pose into the transitions themselves. To feel them completely, to notice how my body naturally moves, to listen to the changing energies with the movement.

One of my favorite ideas is the more I know, the less I know. I’m not sure if that’s a quote from somewhere, but it always resonates with me. Each nugget of information I learn reveals dozens or hundreds of nuggets attached to that one bit, especially since knowledge is as interconnected and relationship as people are. I had some idea that yoga it a spacious body of knowledge, wisdom, and practice – and yet each new morsel reveals so much more that’s available. So it is with transitions as well.

On to something new, again!