My Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana Journey

This Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana has been 26 years in the making. I’m not a natural backbender by any means. Every centimeter of this pose has come through struggle, and deep waves of healing.

I began exploring yoga in the mid-1990s as a young mother of 3. I thought yoga might help me with balance and flexibility as a dancer, and classes fit in well with my youngest child’s kindergarten schedule. Little did I know the impact of yoga, particularly Iyengar Yoga, on the entire trajectory of my life.

I remember the first time I learned Dwipāda Viparīta Daṇḍāsana on a bench with my first serious Iyengar Yoga teacher, Maria Luisa Basualdo, it just about killed me. I had no idea my spine was so resistant to movement. All this time, I had gotten around just fine, and in fact, was otherwise quite mobile. It was a strong message from my body to my mind: hey, pay attention to this.

In retrospect, when I started yoga at age 33, I had just completed a 10-year nonstop streak of birthing and breastfeeding. I was depleted literally to my bones. My children had literally sucked me dry, but I didn’t know it. I was young enough to be fully functional, in fact more than functional, but your typical supermom. I parented long days and nights while my husband worked late. I chauffeured my children back and forth from Waldorf school, extracurricular activities, and playdates. I cooked constantly, tended a garden, and ran a household, while nurturing a life as a writer, writing teacher, and a part time job as the education coordinator at Woodland Pattern, a poetry center.

At the same time I lived as an extreme racial minority in one of the most racially divided cities in the USA, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It would be many more years before I would awaken to the ways I had allowed myself to live a marginalized life, and begin to reverse those inner and outer conditions.

In fact I cannot discuss Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana without discussing race. My stiff, resistant dorsal spine was the armor I didn’t even realize I had put on. Apparently, I had developed a habit of bracing. It probably started as a young teen, when our family moved from Honolulu, Hawai`i to a suburb of Buffalo, New York, when I went from a pan-APIA culture to almost white-out conditions. Not only is the region notable for the piles of snowfall, but my school and neighborhood were a brutal experience of immersion into white supremacy.

Of course, my readers know I’m not referring to KKK, but to ordinary, everyday global white supremacy, in which white culture undergirds every institution from banking to education to food systems to religion and more. All of a sudden I was in an ocean of whiteness and in a state of culture shock from which I never fully recovered.

However, out of survival, I did assimilate. I learned to talk like a white girl. I learned to make fun of myself and my people. Through my teens and twenties, I learned to ally myself and identify with whiteness. I married into white culture, and gave birth to three half-white children.

That first Dwipāda Viparīta Daṇḍāsana gave an inkling that something was off. Why did this particular part of my body present stiffness and resistance? What was being communicated to me?

I cannot discuss Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana without also discussing grief. My father died in 1999, at age 71. My mother died two years later, in 2001, at age 65. I served as a caregiver for both my parents as they were dying, and sat with them as they took their final breaths. As difficult and painful as the dying process can be, these were some of the richest days of my life which I treasure more each passing year.

After my mother died, I developed asthma. The annoying post-nasal drip and nagging allergies of my twenties—symptoms of the autoimmune conditions I had inherited—bloomed into more serious forms of eczema, asthma, and digestive issues. It took another 10 years of working intensely with alternative and complementary health providers to understand and tame these conditions of chronic illness. Since then I have also come to understand autoimmunity through a psycho/social/political lens, and come to grips with illness as a socially manufactured condition. Covid-19 made this abundantly clear, as we watched those with high social status, like POTUS, sail through largely unscathed, with state-of-the-art medical care and drugs unavailable to others, while many Black and Brown folks, in places like my former home city of Detroit, fell through huge chasms of care, and lost their lives to the virus. We also witnessed how marginalized communities suffer disproportionately from chronic illnesses that make them especially vulnerable to Covid-19.

I carried all of this knowledge unconsciously in my dorsal spine, and in anahata chakra, the heart chakra. The combination of grief manifesting in my heart and lungs, depletion from motherhood, and the allostatic load of racism showed up in my struggle with backbends.
 

One day, I attended class at the New York Iyengar Yoga Institute, with the illustrious Lara Warren Brunn. I believe we were walking our hands down the wall from Taḍāsana to Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana and back up. As I stood back up, Lara startled me when she pounded my sternum twice with her palm and said, “LIVE HERE!” I will never forget that moment, in which I recognized that, in fact, I had not been living there. Instead, I had been armoring, protecting, defending, and grieving.

These days, most yoga practitioners in the USA agree that āsana itself does not constitute a yoga practice, and that all 8 limbs must be practiced. The Iyengar Yoga tradition embraces this, and teaches us to cultivate all 8 limbs. However, Iyengar Yoga famously emphasizes and prioritizes āsana practice as the primary gateway to aṣtadala yoga (the 8 petals of yoga). For me, this emphasis works. As a youngster, I would not have been able to stick with a practice that did not include vigorous physicality and a huge does of tapas. The subtle practices came much, much later.

I turn 59 this year, and I appreciate the physical practices even more. What sense does it make that my Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana now is so much more profound, quiet, lifted, and aligned than when I was in my 30s? Believe me, it’s still a struggle, and I need to call up everything within me to do the āsana.

But now I’m back in my childhood home, Honolulu, Hawai`i, in a pan-APIA community. Everywhere I go, I see myself and my children and grandchildren reflected back to me. My feet are back on the `aina that nurtured me as a child. Year-round I am warmed by the sun and warm ocean waves. The protective mountains surround me. The currents and breezes flow all around the island I inhabit. I’ve promised myself I will go hiking at least once a week, and to the beach at least once a week, even if it’s just for an hour. I see my children and grandchildren at least once a week. I’m also committing to having friends over for dinner weekly. I’m experiencing a harmony and ease in my life that is completely novel. It’s a good life, which is the understatement of the year, and has been nearly 60 years in the making. And it’s from this deep well of healing that my Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana emerges.

Deep pranams to my teachers, who never gave up, and kept pushing and challenging me, and infused me with their tapas and wisdom when I felt I could do no more, especially Lois Steinberg, Gulnaaz Dashti, Laurie Blakeney, and of course, Geeta Iyengar. Deep pranams to all my students, who provide bottomless wells of inspiration and motivation.