Bird Yoga

I had been avoiding this class because one of my regular teachers told me that they do full arm balance in it every week, and I felt like an ass needing help to get my legs up.

Thanks to stamina practice, I can now get up there and hold arm balance for 13 breaths, so it seemed like it was time to try Continuing.

Class focused on coiling the back armpits to the front armpits (the kind of classic Iyengar action description that sometimes makes me want to object “my armpits cannot move!”)

By universal acclimation, the evening’s best application of this principle was to urdhva danurasana, where we paused on top of the head to allow the arm bones to settle into the arm sockets (toward the floor) before lifting up.

I’m wondering where in the Iyengar pedagogy the really advanced asanas come in—the ones at the back of Light on Yoga. I am not ready for any of these but I’m interested in knowing when and how they are taught.