The Joseph Yoga Blog

Bakasana (Crow Pose): A beginning Arm Balance Posture

This past week in class we have been focusing on Arm Balances. Arm
Balances to beginner students can feel overwhelming and almost
impossible. It’s important to remember that those students who continue to
practice their standing postures consistently and well find Arm Balances
becoming easier and easier. Standing postures are the foundation of your
whole practice. If your standing work is weak, so will everything else you
do in yoga. Until Arm Balances return to our class curriculum, continue to
practice your standing work, which is why every class consists of them. I
have never seen a student who performed a standing asana well who could
not do an arm balance. They come one in the same.

Virabhadrasana 1 - Warrior 1

Life is a war. What does this mean? In yoga we are familiar with
Virabhadrasana (Warrior Pose). What place does a warrior have in a
supposed calm peaceful practice of yoga? Well, yoga isn’t always
peaceful and calming — true yoga isn’t at any rate. Yoga can be calm and
relaxing, but if you continue your practice of yoga it will eventually lead you
into the dark forest of yourself that mostly likely will be anything but calm
and relaxing. Joseph Campbell says “Your jewel is in the cave.” He is
reminding us that life is work! We chose to be here on earth to work. But
what happens when we don’t work. What happens when just play and
play and play all day? Well I could list a few popular names, but I won’t.
You can fill in the blanks for yourself.

Yoga is work. It’s a journey. The warrior pose symbolises are battle with
the ego. The ego can be described as the part of you that wants to take
for yourself and yourself alone. It’s the part of you that says, “I don’t think I
can share with you because I won’t have enough for me.” If you are a bit
more evolved you may say “I don’t think I can share with you because I
won’t have enough for me and my own.” This force, this ego, is what we
are in battle with. The battle is with the body consciousness. And the
warrior pose represents our willingness to reveal the soul and its
voice over the will and voice of the body. Some of us spend our
whole lives never letting the soul speak and spend our days just letting the
body do whatever it pleases. This will always lead to chaos. I
promise you. Restrict the body now, or you will be forced to later on in an
unpleasant way. Yoga is one way we can begin to calm the body and its
voice down. And then we can find lasting joy and happiness that the
body always promised us but never delivered.

I will leave you today with an excerpt from the Kabbalistic Bible edited by
Rav Yehuda Berg:

We can’t give 100% of ourselves until we really know in our hearts that
this is a war. It’s not a physical war, but something much harder — a war
of consciousness, a war that tests how much we really want to be a better
person. It is not easy, but it is not supposed to be easy. The [ego]
doesn’t want us to see this. The [ego] wants us to lose focus on our
spiritual work. Once that work becomes secondary, we’ve lost the war.

Good Luck. Be Strong and Be Willing.