No Wrists, No Worries

Ah yes, reggae rock. The anthem of lazy days and summer time. It’s also the anthem of this week’s practice, coming at you from Ancient Elephant. You can check out their jams on Soundcloud and iTunes. Huge thanks to those guys for giving me permission to use their tracks in this video.

These laid back grooves have me inspired to follow the Rastafarian edict “No Worries, Mon” and just get lost in a good flow. My favorite medicine for anxiety and feeling the weight of the world is to direct my attention elsewhere. My favorite place to direct my attention is towards movement. My mind starts focusing on what my body and my breath are doing, No major pose to work towards, no stress.

Well, there will be some challenging transitions for some of us — gotta keep us on our toes, right? — but there will definitely be no stress on the wrists.

That’s right — NO Chaturangas and NO Down Dogs in this practice! Because (contrary to popular belief) Vinyasa doesn’t mean “do push ups and stand on your hands till you’re ready to cry and ice your wrists”. It actually means that there is a flow of movement between poses, coordinating and connecting with the breath. Thankfully, there’s a whole lot of transitions and breathing that we can do without the hands on the floor, so I’ve got a lot of good stuff for you this week.

Now, if you do wanna add in some more upper body work by doing a couple sun salutations, I’m certainly not going to stop you. But make sure you’re taking care of yourself…

• Make sure you’re not collapsing into your joints and down into the floor. Activate the legs, arms and core, so that you can push down into the mat and feel the lift through the body that comes in response to that push.

• Use the whole hand! Don’t fall onto the heels of the hands, use your fingers too. Try to distribute the weight evenly towards your fingerprints and knuckles.

• Spread your fingers out so they take up more surface area and providing a steadier base.

• Speaking of knuckles, I find we’re often letting the index finger knuckle float off the floor as the weight in the hands rolls towards the pinky finger. Get that index knuckle down there, it’s a strong finger, use it!

Agh! I should totally just post a video about all this, shouldn’t I? You’re right! Look for that next week. I’ll spend a little time breaking down hand/arm positioning so that maybe you’ll have some more resources for building up strength to ease back on wrist pressure.

In the mean time, let’s get off those wrists, get lost in the movement, and practice a little “Haku-namaste.” (It means no worries… You got the rest, right 😉 ? )

Oh, and when you’re done, go ahead and fire off some comments to me and let me know what you think of this flow, and any other requests for future focus or concerns about your practice.

AND ALSO TO LET ME KNOW ABOUT YOUR BAND! Because I wanna put your music in a future episode. Let’s talk tune-age.

Cheers, yo! -*- Namaste -*- April