A friend recently started teaching her first formal yoga classes, at Cactus Flower (south of Rudasill on Oracle, in Tucson, AZ), and I already noticed/learned an interesting thing from just one of her sessions. That is, she had us do several poses where we were reaching around ourselves, outside of our field of vision, to grasp specific points (arch of the foot or top of the thigh, for example).

The trick is, that seems all well and easy to reach around and say, clasp your hands behind your back; but trying to catch your foot with your diagonally opposite hand over your back while on one hand and one knee puts you in an entirely different mental space. For me, anyway, it was like my sense of vision had to practically shut down for a moment to be able to devote my attention to my balance and body-in-space senses to perform the twin tasks of finding my foot in the first place, and then maintaining that posture. It wasn't really a blindness, but such a dramatic shift of attention that it practically seemed so. At any rate, it was interesting.

In other news, twice now I've done these quiz thingies to determine my dosha, or my body type according to ayurvedic thought; and twice, I turned out to be 'tri-doshic,' or pretty much equally balanced between the three types. So, from one angle, I would think damn straight - I should hope I'm balanced, for the amount of effort I put into being so; but I don't really know whether that's a result of any effort on my part or simply the way my body is constructed. From another angle, where I might get the benefits of the good sides of each body/mind type, rather than just one, that means I might also run into the quandaries of all three types, so I have to be extra sure to maintain the balance, as there's more landmines to step on, as it were.