Conscious Choice: (Head) Standing Tall

July 2005 | Body & Mind Health

(Head) Standing Tall

by Darlene E. Paris

On July 23 I’ll be 42 years old. It’s a milestone birthday for me because I’m approaching my sixth set of sevens. According to Hindu philosophy, seven years represents the end of a stage of life and the beginning of another. So I’ve decided to do something spectacular to commemorate this new stage of my life: During my birthday celebration, I’ll unroll my yoga mat in the middle of the room and do a headstand.

I was inspired to learn how to do a headstand a couple of years ago after watching a video called “Embodying Spirit” that included a yoga demonstration by international yoga instructor Ana Forrest. Although she’s in her late 40s, Ana’s body is incredibly flexible, feminine, firm, and fit with hardly any body fat.

As I watched the video, I was mesmerized by her practice. She showcased some of the most challenging yoga postures in a continuous flow without getting tired. Her routine consisted of an array of arm balances, hip-openers, back bends, and inversions. But the asana, or yoga posture, that intrigued me the most was her signature pose, the handstand straddle.

In this posture, Ana’s arms became her legs as she held up the weight of her body using the strength of her arms, abdomen, and shoulders. She then lets her legs fall gracefully to her right and left sides so that her entire body forms the letter T.

The beauty of the pose made me want to learn how to do inversions. Someday, I’d like to duplicate Ana’s signature pose, but, for now, I’m content with learning how to do a headstand.

Recently, Ana, who has been practicing yoga since age 14, instructed classes at the Yoga Journal Grand Geneva Conference, a three-day yoga convention at the Lake Geneva Spa and Resort Center in Wisconsin.

I attended and I learned a lot more than how to do a headstand. I discovered that places on my body, such as in my neck, shoulders, belly, and hips, that contained stagnant energy, derived from long-held emotions, needed to be released for me to successfully perform any asana, including Salamba Sirsasana (Sanskrit for headstand.)

The founder of a studio in Santa Monica, Calif., called Forrest Yoga Circle, Ana created and teaches a style of yoga that took her 30 years to develop. This style emphasizes strengthening the body as well as releasing pent-up energies so that there’s more movement everywhere — not only in the practitioner’s body, but also in his or her life.

“We’ve learned how to take care of our physical body, but we know very little about how to handle our emotional body,” Ana said at the conference. “Our emotions have a physical component to them. We carry a tremendous backlog of pain and we do terrible damage to each other … because of it.”

One of the ways she creates an atmosphere for healing is by encouraging students to focus on an area, either physical or emotional, and then set an intention for that area during the session.

I decided to focus on my belly. My intention was to send that area of my body lots of love throughout my practice.

“In working this way, you learn to strengthen the quality of your intention. We also teach you how to stretch your breath. When you strengthen the quality of your intention, your whole quality of life improves … And when you stretch your breath, you’re bringing up your energy level to have more passion and more aliveness,” Ana said.

Although constriction in a particular area of the body can give us hints about what’s happening in our lives, Ana explained that if two people are tight in the hips, for example, it doesn’t mean they’re dealing with the same issue.

“One person may have been sexually abused, so they’re shut down in their hips. Another person may be a writer and dealing with writer’s block,” she said.

And our muscles constrict and become stiff for a variety of reasons, including things besides suppressed emotions.

“Sometimes it’s just the way people work. They’re sitting at a desk from 9 to 5, and these bodies are just not meant to sit still for all those hours … Inactivity shuts the body down because it doesn’t get the fluids moving enough for us to maintain the health of our joints and our muscles,” she said. “That’s painful in and of itself that we don’t live in a life that works with our natural flow.”

A victim of sexual abuse, Ana says yoga saved her from a life of emotional turmoil that included alcohol and drug abuse, sexual trauma, bulimia, epilepsy, many broken bones, ripped-up muscles, and terrible migraines.

Ana says, “Yoga gave me a reason to live, and gave me a way to give back to people.” She believes that her mission is to “mend the hoop of the people,” a phrase she borrowed from Black Elk, a great Native American sage.

“We live in a country where our children are raped; where wars go on, and where we poison our water and our air. We don’t know how to live in balance. This is where the hoop has been broken. My work is to do my part in helping mend that hoop by giving people the skills to heal their own pain and help them connect to their spirits so they can have the courage to ask their spirit what it is here to do, and then walk the path their spirit dictates,” she said.

Since my class with Ana, I’ve been practicing my headstand every day. I’ve invested in a piece of equipment called a yoga lift to steady me as I turn upside down. I’m noticing that my shoulders are stronger and my abdomen has become firmer. Even my digestion has improved.

I know that on my birthday, I’ll roll out my yoga mat and allow my legs to rise magically in the air. I’ll silently thank Ana for inspiring me. I’m confident I’ll be able to do a headstand without the support of the yoga lift or the wall. Doing a headstand on my birthday represents my new-found strength.

Ana Forrest and her husband, Jonathan Bowra, will conduct teacher training July 22 through Aug. 14, 2005, at Moksha Yoga Center, 7000 N. Carpenter St., Chicago. Call 312- 942-9642 or e-mail.

Darlene E. Paris is a Chicago-based writer specializing in spiritual matters.

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