Wednesday, December 30, 2009

3 loaves later

My kitchenaid died! LOL, my overexuberant usage was too much for it...it threw sparks, the motor quit and we had to take it back. Right in the middle of making pizza dough, damn!

The replacement is on order but won't arrive for a couple weeks. Very unusual for a Kitchenaid I'm told, they are very well made...anyhow, I'm excited for the new one to arrive so I can test out recipes in the new book I got yesterday, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day per Karen's suggestion...haven't delved into reading it yet (Maehle owns my nightstand for the moment) but it sounds like it's going to save me time, which I love!

Speaking of Maehle, I'm enjoying the book a lot. I find it difficult to isolate parts of my body in the way he instructs but I think it is learnable so I'm trying hard...the first thing I'm tackling is femur rotation. That is visual-spatial/obvious/tangible enough that I can handle it and make changes. My reward was a full day of totally cooked hammies...I spent one practice just gently rotating my thighs inward in all my forward folds and it was enough of a change from a routine movement that my body has grown used to that I felt it, super-felt it, every.step.i.took, in my hamstrings the next day. And not an owie, hurty feeling, but a "Hi we're your legs, did you forget about us? We're still here." kind of way.

Another small change: I've been wondering how my back-rounding upbringing has been affecting my practice. Part of the femur rotation is to bring the fold a bit deeper, and to help me take some of the roundness out of my back. I want to train my spinal extensors and core to be alive in this movement so that they can withstand the pressure of LBH. I'm pretty sure this goes against what I've been taught which is a little confusing to me. Because of the back-rounding, I don't have that floppy forward fold where the belly touches the thighs. None of us do in the studio. I'd like to experience that range of motion and see what it does for Supta K, LBH and all folds really. I'm going to pay a lot of attention to what Nancy Gilgoff has to say about this - she teaches hips back, and back rounded so I can't wait to hear her take.

Another comment on Maehle - "excess adipose tissue", lol. A few others have mentioned this and I think it is pretty funny...he says it several times! I don't have the resolve to diet in the name of asana. Period! I'll live with my adipose tissue, I don't think there's too much of it anyways.

Sacrum nutation. How?? I arch back, ask myself if I'm nutated, and I have no idea. Is it something you can tell from the outside...can I tactile-ly press my hand on my sacrum and know it is nutated? Lost!

2 comments:

karen said...

Gosh, that IS weird (the KitchenAid blow-up). I've never heard of such a thing.

A way to think about the nutation question is this: think of pulling your hipbones closer together and your sit bones apart at the same time. Then think about pushing your hip bones apart and pulling your sit bones together at the same time. That'll give you some info about the movement from the inside.

KMB said...

I know! I want to bake!

Do you think the shift is really subtle, or is it something you could see or feel from the outside too (if you really pressed the hand to the SI joint)? I haven't been able to feel it on the outside to be sure I'm doing it correctly, but perhaps I should focus more on the internal feeling of spreading the sitbones and bringing the ilia in...

I just want to see it! :-)

The relation of ilia to sitbones makes sense to me though...I've got to have faith that if the sitbones are apart the sacrum ends up where it is supposed to be whether I can confirm it with my hand or not.

Prior to the sparks debacle, I was explaining to my husband that the mixer is so powerful because it has 325 horsepower.

"Watts, Katie. It's watts....not horsepower."