Meditation on a the wheel 

Keeping the wheels turning while returning to my Yoga practice

Wheel-Pose (credit)

Returning to my Yoga practice after a rather long hiatus is not just a challenge but an opportunity to do things differently and relearn how to do performing certain asanas. One aspect of the practice is that changing teachers introduced new sequencing and new pose variation. I found that some of the new teachers bring new risks and that I need to take more care than ever to avoid injury while my body get stronger and learns to adjust. Another aspect of this is that the sessions are quite exhausting - the body seems to have forgotten efficient execution of vinyasas. Due to loss of strength, decreased flexibility and overall being less fit and having gained some weight. So my new goal are: avoid getting injured and to practice the vinyasas without minimal exertion.

One of the most lamented abilities during the Covid 19 epidemic is the ability to do
Wheel Pose (Urdva Dhanurasana). It feels like there is a loss of leverage in the arm needed to complete the push. But I found that all back bends are more challenging and prone to leave unpleasant sensation in the back for a day or two.

But when I discussed this with my instructor he suggested laying back on the stability ball relaxing and rolling back and forth. I realised that I used to do this quite frequently and since I have a stability ball at home I started to make use of one to regain the lost ability and in the process I observed a few things:

I found  had a spot in my spine that was not very happy with bending back perhaps due to recent overexertion  when attempting the wheel in class work. So at first I mostly lay back without any motion. Slowly over the next day or two the spot started to go away. Next  I noticed that my neck was very tight when it came to following the curvature of the ball down. This is something that bothered me to no end in Purvottanasana the Upward plank pose. This tightness is a protective reflex but it can be over protective. Again rolling gently back and forth on the ball allows the neck to learn to relax in this pose. Doing it without the ball is not the same but at least you learn greater degrees of control on relaxing the reflexive tightness. Finally I rolled back and started to push back rolling back and forth. Again I found my arms tight and surprisingly weak. But the muscle memory came back fairly quickly. With more flexibility came more power and less effort to hold the wheel. Eventually I started to feel that I could try again without the stability ball.

However I used to do any number of drills on the ball. My guess is that some could help with other asanas which have also become more challenging during Covid shutdowns. Perhaps I'll follow up on these in the future.