My arms don't straighten. The left WAY more so than the right. I know you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I'll bet they actually do and she just has them twisted around or something. But indeed they do not! I've never had an injury that I can recall, and I do remember getting all kinds of x-rays and the doctor finally concluding something like "golly that's odd." It just decided to grow crooked. Thank you to whichever ancestor gave me THAT latent gene. In the course of living life, this is not a problem. Most people don't even know it, because you can't really tell unless I'm doing cheerleading moves (and BOY did my coaches have a grand time with me--fantastic jumps, arms for shit).
In yoga, it's pretty much everything. It makes my down dog go a little itsy tiny bit to the right side. It means my right shoulder usually hits the ground first at the bottom of my pushup. It means that both halves of my body are so uneven that my ability to do the same pose on both sides can vary from Killed It to Almost Got Killed. And it has created for me an arch-nemesis: Handstand.
If you're anywhere but a first-day beginner's yoga class, you're going to encounter handstand. It's very important, as are all inversions. Because, you're never upside down! Well, duh, right? Yeah, actually being upside down while not strapped in to a roller coaster messes with your psyche. Your brain has no idea what your relationship to the Earth is. And it's all the way down at the bottom of you! How is it supposed to control the other parts, flailing above it? Handstand is deeply humbling, and you can learn lots about a person just by watching how they attempt it: do they try little kicks first, to kind of see where the edge is, or do the hurl their feet into the air and back towards the wall? To paraphrase Shun Yu (by way of Firefly): "you can live with a man for fifty years and think you know him, but ask him to do a handstand and on that day you will truly meet the man. If you are also holding him over a volcano when you ask."
If you're a physics/mechanics nut you know where this is going: my crazy-bandy-arm creates all kind of force vectors that are not straight up and down, sending the force to the side instead of to the floor and making the elbow fly out to the side. Curtains.
Handstand is The Big Bad. The Final Boss at the end of the last level. And I get turned away at the boss door, not told to come back with x or y item or after having completed z quest. Nope, I just get told it's Game Over, no Crooked-Arm Girls Allowed.
I am not used to not being good at things (see, Sunday). I'm a member of the Straight-A's forever club. I have the same number of professional achievement awards as I have years at my job. One day my dentist told me I was the best mouth he'd seen all day and I asked him to write that on a card so I could hang it on my fridge. If I was a knight, my shield would say Adapt Evolve Achieve. When I have a problem, I kick it in the ass.
How do you kick your left arm in the ass?
I did attempt Handstand once, and I fell on my head. Something a later teacher would joke to the class is impossible; your body won't even LET you do that! I'm sure my whole body was smirking. It totally let me do that. It turned on me. So now I have to explain how my arms don't straighten, especially leftie look at him he's practically a half-moon! and usually teachers look at my arm in disbelief and say, oh, um, yeah, I would avoid Handstand altogether. Which sometimes means I get to do a headstand instead, but some teachers are fundamentalists, so since I can't do Handstand I end up lying there with my legs against the wall, rolling my eyes. Because it's just the complete abdication of doing anything at all, and don't pity me and tell me I'm getting the same benefit because I'm not.
There's lots I can't do YET in yoga. Crow pose is going to be my new Half Moon, I can tell--one day I'll just be able to do it and LOOK OUT! But man, Handstand is killing me, because there's nothing I can do about it. My body will probably (oh god shred of hope) never be able to do it. And there's nothing I can do to work up to it, short of breaking my arm and resetting it straight, and even then?
It's an interesting thing, to be truly helpless in your own body.
Further misadventures at the 30 Day Yoga Challenge page.
Image via Yoga Journal.
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