January 23-24, 2016

On the flight from Los Angeles to SE Asia, I reflected a bit on my goals for the month in Thailand. One wish was that I have some time to work on inversions, headstand (sirsasana), forearm stand (pincha-mayurasana), and handstand (ado mukha vrksasana) maybe before or after yoga classes. During my short time in Bangkok, the highly-touted yoga studio near my hotel was closed for the holidays, so I only did a short yoga practice in my room. When I got to Chiang Mai and went to Wild Rose Yoga, I saw that there was to be a yoga inversion workshop with Gernot Huber on January 23 and 24. Better than what I had hoped for! Like a gift! I signed up immediately.

I met Gernot Huber four years ago at the yoga workshop when we were in Chiang Mai. Gernot is from Germany, spent part of his life in the United States, and now lives in Chiang Mai with his wife and young son. He has been studying yoga since 1996, and has studied Anusara, Iyengar, Kripalu, and Vinyasa Flow yoga styles. His teaching emphasizes alignment and breath in a practice while encouraging you to engage your edge mindfully and safely. I cannot think of a better teacher for an inversion workshop! As I just said, it seemed like a gift!

With my weekend focusing on the inversion workshop in the afternoons, I did not want to do too much walking in the morning, so I went about much of my now familiar routine: morning meditation at Wat Chedi Luang, breakfast at 3-Sis, a shorter, less deliberate walk around part of the old city, and some work on the computer, catching up on e-mail.

Then it was off to the workshop at Wild Rose Yoga. There were about 20 people attending, so it was pretty full. Gernot started with a good discussion about the alignment, center of gravity, and many other fundamentals and problems.  Good information. When we started practicing, that information was helpful. We started with headstand, which, for me, anyway, is easier becasuse you are closer to the ground.

Here is a photo of an exercise we did to help open our shoulders a bit. That is me the farthest from the camera.

Gernot took a lot of pictures so he could then review with us what he saw. It is really helpful (and at first a little embarrassing) to see yourself in the pictures. And a little intimidating while the whole group reviews what was wrong with the pose or alignment.

Then we worked on supported shoulder stand (salamba sarvangasana), This picture shows my first attempt at shoulder stand, and while pretty decent, by moving my elbows in more and aligning my torso better, I did better the next couple of times. The pictures definitely helped.

On the second day, we worked on handstand (ado mukha vrksasana), Here are a couple of photos of Gernot helping me balance while instructing the group.

He is having me push up into my feet (notice my right foot is higher than my left). (And I am balancing without touching the wall, although the wall is there for my own mental security.)

Here Gernot is having me tuck in my ribcage (front body short) and push my feet into his hand to align better. Still balancing away from the wall.

And finally, with just the hand reminding me to push up, I am balancing, alignment not too bad.

During the middle of the afternoon session on Sunday, the skies opened up with a very dramatic, loud, thundering tropical rain. The rain was impressively hard for about 20-30 minutes, then eased and stopped after about an hour. We wrapped up the inversion workshop doing forearm stand (pincha mayaruasana), and I have no pictures of that. It was a very good workshop. While I cannot do handstand in the middle of the room by myself, I am better at all of the inversions we worked on. Excellent!

Being Sunday and raining off and on, I wondered about the effect of the Sunday Night Market. Rain is not that unusual, and the vendors adapt, having plastic covers for their areas – the Sunday Night Market goes on rain or shine! So without much problem, I was able to get my usual Sunday Night Market foot massage with Nam.

Even with the rain, another good day in Chiang Mai.

Next: A last walk around Chiang Mai