Toes, meet head; mind, meet brain

Last night in yoga class we did a transition that felt simply magical: moving from eagle pose to half moon pose without putting the other foot down. I can't quite explain why. Something about all that unfurling, unfolding, uncurling and finally stretching out through space. I want to do that over and over and over. :)

I've felt over-energized all week, so today I did my usual weight workout and then tried to tire myself out with yoga stuff. (I even thought of nevers and did a couple of handstands along with my other inverted poses. I am still no good, but I'm getting better at kicking up to the wall even when I'm tired, which means I'm at least starting to get the move grooved into my brain.) The body part that's really on the march right now is my spine, so after warming up I tried a few advanced camel variations. For the first time I could pretty comfortably creep my fingers back to my toes, on both sides (!), and let my fingertips rest on my toes -- like this picture but not nearly so far into it. My elbows don't touch down yet. After that I slid my toes together and tried, successfully, to put my forehead down on both big toes at once. It's an amazing feeling the first time you touch two body parts together in an unfamiliar way -- and this was the first time for the left toe, and certainly for both at once -- you can almost FEEL the neural connections forming in your brain as your sensory system realizes that sometimes the feet can be found up and back of the head, rather than always being down and forward. Zzzzzzap! I love it.

Of course, this is coming from me, the right-handed neural-development junkie who also writes things (random babble, the alphabet, scraps of memorized poetry) left-handed during boring meetings just to beef up the right side of my brain.

Brain, brain, nearly everything is conspiring to make me think about the brain lately, so there will doubtless be more on this later. In the meantime, for an absolutely awesome post/discussion about sensory integration, the vestibular system and attention, go read this post by nevers right now. I commented saying that this is LJ at its best, and I meant it -- people coming together to share patterns and ways of living that work. We are not taught this stuff in school, though we should be. And now I have a new friend, so say hi to witch_kat and, if you like, her new community smallwishes. :)