The force is with me…. Headstand (Salamba Sirsasana) balance is near… for a tiny 2 seconds interval I managed to balance.
This time I tried to go up without the wall with the single leg up first. But fear creeped in and my body refused to synchronize with my mind. All the time, my mind was like, “can do it”, “nothing to worry, to fall is not going to hurt”, “no biggie”, “go half way, no problem one”…. erm… But they did not work… HAH…
So I immediately shifted my mat to the wall. This time, I started to visualize myself lifting up and balancing on my head.
The Actions :
1. Lift up the first leg up as high as possible (walk both legs as close as possible to the head before lifting up).
2. At the same time, as Bo says, we must root down or “make the base” heavy. So I pressed really hard down on my elbow and extend my neck ( throat opening slightly ) with the head pressing down.
3. Then I breathe in and “hugged” the muscles of the inner thighs of both legs ( the lifted leg as well as the leg still on the floor ). I guess to me hugging means engaging the thighs and spreading the toes ( press the balls of the foot out – I sometimes get cramps in my leg while engaging the muscles so I tend to soften a bit… )
4. At this point when the muscles are engaged, I do feel the legs are light and the lift of the bottom leg is much in control by me. Then slowly lift the bottom leg up. Quite unlike the usual method of going into headstand where I often feel that I lose control of the leg when I go up and I do not know where are they or what they are doing. Hence I often have my legs sort of like “loose” and “floppy”. But using this method, I feel more in control and I can concentrate more finding the balance.
5. Here I can balance for a few seconds like 2-3 seconds. After that, I just slightly wobbled and the legs fall back a bit and touched the wall. The next step will be to move further from the wall and try to balance.
One thing I observed was that headstand takes up really alot of strength for me.
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