Crow Pose, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Arm Balance

...or A Portrait of the Yogi as a Young Girl
...or A Brief History of My Relationship With Bakasana
...or What I Didn't Do Over My Summer Vacation

That's yoga for you. Always helping you find your edge. Today it's the edge of your tolerance for cheesy titles.

Anyway. Crow Pose. Cool stuff, right? To me, it's a point of departure where yoga goes from an earnest practice to stupid human tricks. And that's not a bad thing whatsoever. But in my more formal yoga education, arm balances and inversions were never really part of the discipline. But they just look damn cool and, it turns out, have some amazing benefits, so I have sought out to learn them on my own.
In addition to the "whee I'm flying!" factor, crow pose does this other cool thing- it plugs right in to the deep transverse abdominus that crunches can't even dream about touching. So when someone says "I used muscles I never even knew I had," in this case they could actually mean it.

I won't throw a tidal wave of how-to's at you- there are plenty of ways to describe the "keys" to floating in this arm balance, and they're all pretty good. None of that will help you without getting onto your mat and trying, over and over, with a curiosity and a willingness to faceplant. I had once read that to get the "tough" yoga poses, one only needs to try every day. For years. But some schools of yoga consider this pose easy-mode, and I'm pretty good and pretty cocky, and Judith Hanson Lasater suggests trying something tough every day for a month as an exercise in discipline. So I committed to trying it every day for a month, convinced that I would be a pro by the end.

Hubris won out. By the end of that month, I had made no tangible progress. I would slowly bring one foot up, and start to lift the other, only to find myself calmly returning to the mat a second later. Or on my less focused, yogic days, my legs would slip off my triceps and I'd collapse onto the mat, embarrassed that my cat had seen my failure. At the end of the month, I was minorly disappointed, but had more pressing life and work concerns and quickly forgot about it.

A few weeks later, the pose came up in a class. And I teetered a little bit longer.

The next week, a little longer.

A few weeks after that, I could take a few breaths in the air before returning my feet to the ground.

The whole ordeal taught me a pretty valuable lesson, that I think applies to pretty much everything- effort and discipline are not everything. It's equal parts discipline and letting go. It's making your best effort and then detaching from the results. My month of effort, practice and learning definitely contributed to my finally "achieving" the pose, but so did loosening my chokehold on the idea that I would ever actually get there.

So today, in your practice (whatever that may be- we use the term loosely here at LBY), experiment with the idea of making your best effort but letting go of the end result. I'm sure this isn't a new concept to most of you, but it's always good to recommit.