At some point in time I had to think about why one does the hand balancing poses. I mean, of the groupings of poses (i.e. standing poses, standing balancing poses, seated poses, etc.) it has at times seemed to me that you could wipe away a majority of the hand balances and you wouldn't do a disservice to that many practitioners. You can get a lot of the shoulder strengthening and opening initially from using the holding of the arms in the standing poses, to the poses where weight is on the hands (plank, chatturanga, up-dog, down dog...) and the way the arms are used in backbends and inversions. So what's going on when you're just on the hands? (Though it's important to note that I think of the one hand/one foot poses, Vasisthasana, Visvamitrasana, and, if you can get your leg behind your head comfortably, Chakorasana as hand balances too.)
Yeah, what's going on there? The hands heal. The gateway to the hands is through the heart, and, if you think about playing most musical instruments, it's also in a sense through the throat. As in the voice expressed through the hands. Have you ever listened to the Errol Garner live album "Concert by the Sea?" Virtuosic improvised piano playing on a level I would call transcendent. To connect the dots, yes, I'm saying Errol Garner is doing arm balances (or I'm saying there's a 4th and 5th chakra relationship to this sort of expression with the hands). Have I ever told you about my pet peeve of yoga instructors who say things that don't make sense? Hmm. So chew on that for a few.
In other news, once we've gotten to the stage in practice that balancing on the hands is fairly normal, the poses bring a lot of strength and mobility to the shoulders and chest, they require the use of the core and integrity through the core when something relatively heavy, i.e. the legs (even if you have little stick legs they're still a significant proportion of your body weight), are hanging off it. And some of the poses are great places to work openings in the hips.
What else? Arm balances pretty much force you to have awareness of the whole body in the practice. I think that's one of the goals in asana practice anyway, so it's nice to be able to step into a place where it's pretty much necessary.
What to expect at Yoga Lab: Enough vinyasa practice to warm up, some key points to focus on internally to help with the balance and the lift, some experimenting, some encouragement. And if you're bringing fear, because let's face it, that's what's holding as many people back as are strength or mobility limitations, we'll try and turn the corner to exhilaration...in a way that's way more empowering and healthy than, for example, driving your car 80 m.p.h. down the freeway.
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