Hi Anthony,
I want to give you my 2 cents. My perspective is a bit different perhaps.
Headstand is not dangerous. That is like the old wives tale that if you cross your eyes they will stay stuck that way so don’t do it.
Compression from the headstand is very good for the neck. The disc can only receive nutrition and remove waste thru compression and distraction. It receives its blood flow from the vertebrae above and below thru the sponging action of motion. Of course, hatha poses are hugely beneficial in this respect.
An asana routine should include forward bend, backward bend, turn left, turn right, tilt left, tilt right in order to be complete. This will sponge the spine completely. The oxygenated blood from breathing deep is the soapy water. This helps to purify the nervous system and prepare it for spinal breathing and deep meditation.
Headstand gives tremendous direct compressive stimulus to the disc promoting the removal of waste products thus cleansing it. When you come down from the headstand and rest for a minute the discs expand and fresh nutrition is automatically sucked in from the bone above and below.
If you are healthy and have no medical problems you can practice asanas without any hesitation at all. If not, you need a competent teacher.
A teacher can give you some pointers but if you are already doing the headstand, geez, why would you want to stop if it feels comfortable? Just come down when you instinctively feel like you have had enough. You are a young guy, right Anthony? And you take good care of yourself, right? No health problems?
I learned the head stand when I was 6 years old in gym class and have been doing it ever since. That is over 40 years ago. When I was seven I was doing it for 10 minutes watching NFL football with my Dad on Sunday afternoons. He would time me. I learned poses from books until I was about 20. No teachers til I was in my early 20s. Of course, I would have gladly welcomed some expert guidance but I didn’t run into any until that time.
Iyengar gives the simple headstand a difficulty rating of 4 on a scale of 60. That is not much.
The number one rule is
"Stay within your comfortable capacity." The tortoise wins the race, not the hare. Make haste slowly with sequences and poses.
Feel the pose. It should be enjoyable. Back off a little if it is not. Breathe easy. The body knows how to breathe. You don’t have to tell it what to do when you are running or sleeping or in asanas for that matter. Don’t hold the breath.
Let it flow.
Feel the pose.
Breathe easy.
Stay within your comfortable capacity. Never force.
It should be
pleasurable effort.Learn the rules, follow the rules, become the rules. The three stages in the cultivation of art. So it is good to learn sequences and specifics in the performance of particular postures from books and teachers. Once you have familiarity with the basics you can explore more with your curiosity where ever it takes you. You can go on a riff.
First your attention is occupied with the performance of the pose and the sequence. When this has become a habit like tying your shoe laces, you can start to feel what is going on in your body and breath. Let your breath flow. Then after that you will have good communication with your body and know what is right and wrong for your unique situation. Instinctively. The body is different every day and so are the postures as a result.
Communication with the body is the key. Feel it. If the body feels obtuse in the beginning and you don’t think you can feel it that is OK. It will come. When you are lying in the dead man's pose you can cultivate this more and gradually marry it to your posture performance.
Postures are very pleasurable to me. I do them because they feel really good and my meditation is better when I do some before hand. They are just a habit that I do now. But if I have no time they are the first thing I leave out of my routine.
I love to laze my way thru the sequence, whatever it may be. I don’t care if the pose is “perfect.” A perfect posture is the marriage of attention, breath and position, your best effort in that direction really, not a pretty pose. I fit the pose to my body and my body to the pose. The ideal and the reality have to meet half way. If not, you have injury. The body will adapt over time with steady, intelligent practice just as it does to any other stress and the pose will become “prettier.”
There is athletic yoga and there is a more subtle way to do it that is not so strenuous. Yogani’s asana book is plenty if your purpose is to help prepare the nervous system for spinal breathing and deep meditation.
If you want more, Jim’s recommendations are great. Meenarashid’s comments in general and in particular regarding counter poses are great to. I am assuming Anthony that you are like Etherfish and have some athletic ability.
Shoulder stand gives extreme compression to the front part of your disc and tension (stretching) to the back part of the disc and posterior joints and muscles so to follow that up immediately with Headstand wouldn’t make a lot of sense and you should be able to feel that. The opposite stretching would have to be done in order to create balance to the disc before subjecting it to the uniformly compressive forces generated in the disc by the headstand (theoretically speaking). Doing some supine poses that don’t involve the neck so much after shoulderstand or performing it's classic counter pose, the fish will allow the discs and neck structures in general to equilibrate.
You should rest for at least a minute after shoulderstand. Let go of your breath and every muscle.
Simple awareness. Feel them. They will equilibrate automatically. The body is automatically programmed to strive for balance. Alot of posture sequences are based on facillitating this tendency.
A great time to do headstand is first thing in your asana routine according to your comfortable capacity. Then standing poses which generally speaking don’t put much stress on the neck and allow it to decompress and normalize. Then sitting poses ending in forward bend, plow and shoulderstand followed by fish or some other type of back bending and lying down poses. This would give the neck a break between two intensive stresses. More sponging action, too.
Victor, I would humbly, very humbly, disagree with Mr. Iyengar that doing the shoulder stand directly after the headstand is a good idea for most people. The shoulderstand gives compression to the anterior disc and distraction to the posterior part. I would rather wait for a while to let the disc fully decompress from headstand before doing it.
But what do I know? It is in his book that way and he has been doing it that way for a long time. It is just my common sense. Let the disc expand for a bit before doing the shoulderstand.
In fact, Iyengar introduces shoulderstand after headstand after 18 weeks of practice in a manner approximating the sequence that I just laid out.
To me, hatha yoga is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The deeper practices of hatha give you more bang for your buck. Which of course are mudras, bandhas and pranayamas.
But it is different for everybody.
Vivekananda and Yogananda were not hatha yogis. They were both kinda of plump. Guess they needed more insulation to handle all that high voltage in their nervous systems.
![[:)]](http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/Smileys/akyhne/icon_smile.gif "Smile")
You can probably do postures better than them or at least as good.
Hatha yoga poses are on par with rhythmic gymnastics, ballet or acrobatics when it becomes an end in itself. It is a horizontal development. The acrobats in cirq du soliel have a lot more strength and flexibility than a lot of hatha yogis.
There is a Chinese yogini who does Bikram yoga beautifully, but not because she did postures all her life. She has been doing ballet.
So you can be very flexible with postures and not be much with deep meditation or vice versa. Or you could be good at both.
So common sense, moderation and respect for our bodies’ limitations are good rules of thumb when approaching poses.
I give a thumbs up to headstand, Anthony, if you are inclined towards it, have some athletic ability and no health conditions. If you feel you need a teacher, so be it. Nothing wrong with that.
That’s my 2 cents. More like 2 bits, I guess.
I hope you or anyone else finds at least one idea of benefit to you from this hodge podge of hatha yoga basics.
Best wishes, yb.
