Playing the edge

This week my beginner students asked me to review wild thing, a pose I introduced last week as a way to experience Organic Energy. It's a funky pose, which I've always found gives me a lot of freedom to express myself.

You need a few things to get to this place of expression: a melting heart, ability to move the head of your armbones back, power in your feet and legs and the willingness to go somewhat into the unknown.
To get a feeling you can build up a sequence with some shoulderopeners, funky downward facing dogs and backbends. All good, fun poses in their own right.

Where it really gets interesting though is building up a theme around this pose. My theme on this occasion was given to me through Chris Chavez, at a teacher's practice he led last week (THANK YOU CHRIS!) He was talking about "playing the edge", a phrase we use a lot in yoga. When you break it down, to it's consituent parts: play and edge (or boundary is a word I like to describe the heart quality) you get an idea of how it's possible to face a challenge with a sense of childlike enthusiasm and inhibition. We are contained within out body, yet this gives us a way to feel our experience even more profoundly.

So thinking about my own challenging situations of late, I find that by approaching these challenges with an enquiry mind rather than one of aversion I begin to find where the lesson is and what I'm meant to learn from any situation.

What we're really talking about here is what we refer to in Anusara Yoga as the "Optimal Blueprint". This is the place where you're aligned perfectly, where you'll find new openings and from there it just keeps on expanding.