I'm back with perhaps much less eloquent posts. Not that anyone actually reads this besides myself. I digress.
The new focus of this blog is going to be the yogic healing of my f'ed up hip, shoulder and back. I need a record of my progress. I practice Anusara yoga, and will be using Anusara terms fairly often....like inner spiral, outer spiral, etc.
So where am I at? Well, I've figured out how to engage my left groin and left outer hip. In the Anusara world, we call this inner and outer spiral, respectively. Of course, there are MORE muscles that play into inner and outer spiral than these two, but these are certainly the major players. Of course the hamstrings and quads fit in inner/outer spiral too, but I don't have any issues engaging those guys on either side.
Also, I've figured out that I need to pull my left shoulder on the back, but pull my right shoulder slightly (and I mean slightly) forward, and then wrap around/back. Engaging my left rhomboid muscle properly is a gigantic mystery to me. So is the whole idea of kidney loop, but that's a matza ball for another day. For some reason, I like to over-engage my right rhomboid/trap, even if I'm only working on the left side. When this happens while doing Vathi on the leftside, I can't help but crack up. It's fun to fool myself.
So, the major kicker to at least getting my pelvis stabilized is to first get inner spiral on left -> outer spiral on left. At this point, I can now move both sides of my pelvis autonomously. This goes for relatively simple poses with feet facing in the same direction (i.e. NOT Warrior 2).
