Supine Friday

Friday has always been Primary series Ashtanga. It's a thing, in Ashtanga, no matter what series you practice, Primary Intermediate or Advanced you still do Primary on Friday. It's nice, practicing at home knowing that people all over the country, all over Europe are practicing it with you, that a couple of time zones over they are just finishing and, depending where you are, as you get to finishing yourself you know that a couple of zones ahead they are just starting.

It's been quite a surprise then the last couple of weeks finding I've stopped practicing Primary on a Friday, Last week, this week, no big drama I just got on the mat and practiced Vinyasa Krama instead.

Ever since Ramaswami's Newsletter came out I've been practicing the spinal exercises outlined in  my last post. There's a lot of Supine in there and over the last week I've added a little more each day. This morning I ended up just practising Supine sequence after Standing ( tadasana, surys, some triangle and On one leg subroutines).

Supine was the hardest sequence to come around to coming from Ashtanga, the other VK sequences tend to have bits of Ashtanga in them, Asymmetric and Seated is close to primary, Bow and Meditative a little similar to Intermediate and we do large chunks of the Standing sequences at the start of ashtanga and always finish with Inversions and Lotus. But Supine, very little of that in the Ashtanga syllabus.... in fact flicking through my Mathew Sweeney Ashtanga as it is book I can't see a single Dwipadapitam (table pose ).

And that's odd because practicing this morning lifting my hips of the mat and sticking them out I thought it was excellent prep for kapootasana and drop backs, key to those postures is getting the hips forward. In fact if you look at one of the more advanced Dwipadapitam postures where your holding your ankles and then imagine rotating it 90 degrees you get a kind of Ustrasana but where your more able to work at shifting the hips further and further forward.

Another posture I'm loving at the moment is the leg raise in table pose, trying to get the leg higher and higher, straighter and straighter.

Other highlights in the series for me, Tatkamudra ( Pond gesture) of course, try it before any paschimottanasana if your feeling a little stiff ( see link to previous post on this.

And also the arms and legs lift which for some reason is excellent after deep backbends. After drop backs I tend to do the arm and leg lifts then tatkamudra and only the move into paschimottanasana.

Not the best screenshot that one, sorry.

So there you have it Supine Friday, may well become a fixture. here's the complete sequence speeded up. feel free to capture it from Youtube using Realplayer Download and use your media player to slow it back down.