ten miles before the sensation has even walked over the horizon. That is their practice: satisfied just to be bending something, oblivious to the pain beyond. On the rare day they get to the whisper, they typically back off, rub their back a lot in the locker room, and talk about pushing their edge. And that’s sensible . But that’s not Backbending Club. To really backbend, you have to become intimate with pain, not as an informational entity that raises awareness, not as a warning, but as a phenomenon, a presence you can dialogue with. You have to engage the phenomenon every time it comes up, and ultimately move through it while it screams in your face.
To put this in perspective, before I had ever heard of yoga competitions or Backbending Club, but while I was still quite serious about yoga practice, I used to do exactly three wall-walks a week. These came every Tuesday during the advanced class offered at my home studio. And those three were a feared highlight of the whole three-hour class. Actually, I feared them all week. The minute and a half it took to complete them would grow all out of proportion in my mind. Often, I would stall out in class just before we got to them, lie on my side, watching other people move on toward them. Other times, I would complete one, then lie down dizzy and decide thatthis week, I’d save my energy for the postures that came later. One wall-walk was enough.
At Backbending, we never do fewer than sixty a day. Learning to manage, breathe through, and control the sensations that come up is an essential part of the work. It is a combination of managing fear, managing pain, and detaching from sensory perception. As Esak explains: “When you do a posture, you must choose to remain in it. You must choose to ignore the pain, choose to continue to explore your body. The pain is a phantom; ignoring it is a choice. Yoga makes us confront that choice. It makes us free to choose.”
The ultimate extension of this training in choice is learning to control your imagination. At their most extreme, backbends look bizarre, completely improbable. People stare at them with the same weirded curiosity usually reserved for the edges of the animal kingdom: puffed-out marine creatures, the yawning dislocated jaws of snakes. It’s not that backbends are ugly exactly—they’re just anti-human. Staring at a reversible spine is a double-take moment, an instance where the eyes legitimately can’t believe what they see.
To inhabit these postures requires changing your belief system. A middle-aged man walks into a yoga studio convinced he can never touch his toes again. To transform himself into the asana of Standing Bow—a posture where in ultimate extension, he is not just touching his toes, but fully in the standing splits, one arm stretching forward like an arrow, the other stretching upward to grab his extended foot—he must learn to do the impossible. He must enlarge the boundaries of his imagination. He must know that at fifty-one, body banged up by age, brain occluded by expectations, he can choose to embody Standing Bow. The postures are both a metaphor and a means for that process. They are tools for creating a connection between the imagination and the physical world. Realizing this connection—this union between body and mind—could be called yoga.
Of course, it also could not.
If you were raised like me, yoga probably conjures up a healthy set of associations: the YMCA; leggings; practitioners with a little paunch; gurus with visible ribs; closed eyes; crossed legs—a big, calm, relaxing pretzel. Ifyou have a little more experience than I ever had, maybe it also conjures up ideas of nonattachment, nonjudgment, Himalayan caves, internal heat, and righteous breathing. And if you’ve actually picked up some texts and studied, maybe you can recite some dos and don’ts, point to the appropriate glands that correspond to the various chakras, and explain to bored, trapped people at cocktail
To put this in perspective, before I had ever heard of yoga competitions or Backbending Club, but while I was still quite serious about yoga practice, I used to do exactly three wall-walks a week. These came every Tuesday during the advanced class offered at my home studio. And those three were a feared highlight of the whole three-hour class. Actually, I feared them all week. The minute and a half it took to complete them would grow all out of proportion in my mind. Often, I would stall out in class just before we got to them, lie on my side, watching other people move on toward them. Other times, I would complete one, then lie down dizzy and decide thatthis week, I’d save my energy for the postures that came later. One wall-walk was enough.
At Backbending, we never do fewer than sixty a day. Learning to manage, breathe through, and control the sensations that come up is an essential part of the work. It is a combination of managing fear, managing pain, and detaching from sensory perception. As Esak explains: “When you do a posture, you must choose to remain in it. You must choose to ignore the pain, choose to continue to explore your body. The pain is a phantom; ignoring it is a choice. Yoga makes us confront that choice. It makes us free to choose.”
The ultimate extension of this training in choice is learning to control your imagination. At their most extreme, backbends look bizarre, completely improbable. People stare at them with the same weirded curiosity usually reserved for the edges of the animal kingdom: puffed-out marine creatures, the yawning dislocated jaws of snakes. It’s not that backbends are ugly exactly—they’re just anti-human. Staring at a reversible spine is a double-take moment, an instance where the eyes legitimately can’t believe what they see.
To inhabit these postures requires changing your belief system. A middle-aged man walks into a yoga studio convinced he can never touch his toes again. To transform himself into the asana of Standing Bow—a posture where in ultimate extension, he is not just touching his toes, but fully in the standing splits, one arm stretching forward like an arrow, the other stretching upward to grab his extended foot—he must learn to do the impossible. He must enlarge the boundaries of his imagination. He must know that at fifty-one, body banged up by age, brain occluded by expectations, he can choose to embody Standing Bow. The postures are both a metaphor and a means for that process. They are tools for creating a connection between the imagination and the physical world. Realizing this connection—this union between body and mind—could be called yoga.
Of course, it also could not.
If you were raised like me, yoga probably conjures up a healthy set of associations: the YMCA; leggings; practitioners with a little paunch; gurus with visible ribs; closed eyes; crossed legs—a big, calm, relaxing pretzel. Ifyou have a little more experience than I ever had, maybe it also conjures up ideas of nonattachment, nonjudgment, Himalayan caves, internal heat, and righteous breathing. And if you’ve actually picked up some texts and studied, maybe you can recite some dos and don’ts, point to the appropriate glands that correspond to the various chakras, and explain to bored, trapped people at cocktail
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