Crow Pose: my bête noire
I’ve also been trying to recover from being bullied out of my academic career, by a vicious female head of department, for the simple misdemeanour of having a baby, even longer. Since 2004, as it happens.
Yes, I’m ashamed, both by the ousting, and by how long it takes to recover from bullying. Move on! I hear you cry. Let go of the past! She can’t hurt you now! What are you waiting for?
Would that it ’twere so simple, dear reader.
‘Recovering from being bullied’ doesn’t mean lying in a darkened room for fourteen years, fanning yourself. No, there’s been a living to earn, children to raise, a husband to support, sometimes financially, and a few other choice life events I won’t bore you with here. So ‘getting on with it’ hasn’t been my problem. Recovery, on the other hand, healing… well, that’s a very different murder of crows.
All through that time, I have actively been trying to ‘put my behind in my past’, as Pumbaa conveniently expresses it in The Lion King. Does my bum look big in this trauma?
I’ve done a LOT of thinking, had therapy (more than once), been prescribed anti-depressants, (more than once), taken up exercise, and eventually come to training as a yoga teacher. Turns out that one of the greatest helps has not been the yoga, but the impetus that starting to train gave me to lose weight through fasting. Fasting may well be the ultimate answer, but that’s another story for another day. You don’t need my entire self-excavation in one go.
‘Crow pose’ was, to my surprise (and horror), on the Level 1 Syllabus of poses established by my training centre. There isn’t time here to go into just how many yoga postures there are, or indeed the history of āsana, which is much more recent than we often imagine, but I’m expected to know over 100 of them, and be able to teach them with variations and modifications. Being able to physically do all of them myself does feel like a prerequisite for transmitting them to others.
‘Bakāsana’ probably goes back to around the 17th century, when physical postures in yoga began to be documented. It’s quite hard to know exactly what’s meant by the pose, though: authorities like B.K.S Iyengar point out that ‘Bakāsana’ means ‘Crane’ not ‘Crow’, and his ‘technique for beginners’ involves resting the shins on the back of the upper arms, then (somehow) ‘swinging’ the body forward, lifting the toes off the floor, and (unbelievably) straightening the arms. He then, incidentally, goes on into a whole series of ever more impossible-looking poses, which involve crossing the legs or stretching them out to the side. While balancing on your hands. The photographs make me feel unwell.
The Sanskrit word for ‘crow’ is Kāka, which seems onomatopoeic, referring to the cawing of the Corvid family. I learnt the word kaka when I was a toddler in Tehran, but then my infant coprophilia took me towards the meaning of poo. In a way, my false etymology is nevertheless pertinent, because, here I am today, still trying to learn how to deal with my own shit.
In the world of ‘Modern Postural Yoga’ – i.e. the development of the global phenomenon of yoga, which is very much a twentieth and twenty-first century dimension of the practice, ‘Bakāsana’ is usually translated as ‘Crow Pose’, which leaves us with a definitional problem. Is ‘Crow Pose’ one in which you balance your shins on the backs of your arms, or one in which you extend your arms straight? Iyengar, in effect, resolves the problem by making the version close to the ground the one for beginners, with arm straightening belonging to adepts.
And that’s all fine. My problem is that I can’t even balance on the backs of my own arms, let alone straighten the buggers, without face-planting.
And I’m supposed to be training to call myself a teacher of yoga. So that’s not imposter syndrome, that’s being an imposter. Or an im-poser, in my case. Crow is my nemesis.
Anyway, this week it all came to a head. Sitting there in Lockdown 3, homeschooling a reluctant fourteen-year-old son, unable to get on with any of my own work, certainly unable to balance in Crow Pose, even though I was due to practise it with my study group at the end of the week, I found myself going through all my usual responses to difficulty:
1. I am fat (default position; hangover from eating disorder in youth)2. I am stupid (phd would seem to disprove that, but whatever, you go right ahead there, Mrs Fixed Mindset)
3. I will never do this pose, and therefore I cannot become a yoga teacher (hmmm)
4. I am old (new one to add to the list — I have, of course, never been older than I am today)
5. Everyone else thinks I’m fat, stupid and old (and the source of your data is…?)
6. I failed long ago, despite everything I worked so hard to achieve, despite all my privilege, despite all my parents hoped for from me, I have amounted to nothing (see bullying above).
I trained and I trained all week. I fell on my face all week. My kids laughed at me. They christened it ‘Flobadāsana’. The backs of my arms were rubbed red. I hated myself.
On Friday, I watched the marvellous Adriene have a go at Crow Pose on YouTube. I watched, as she stood lightly on a block, as she lifted her sitbones high into the air, as she daintily lifted one set of toes towards her butt after the other, as she laughed at herself for stopped breathing while she was trying to balance.
And finally the penny dropped.
For years, I have looked at Crow Pose as an act of pecking the hard ground for survival.
When it is a skybound intention to fly.
I was so focused on what was right in front of me, and how much it would hurt if I fell on my face, that I had completely overlooked the equal but opposite dimension of this pose. It is aimed at the air. Crows peck, but they also soar.
When I was in therapy after submitting my doctorate, exhausted, and unable to see the next step I should take in my life, wanting to leave academia and become a full-time writer, I tried to articulate what I felt when women in my life were critical towards me. I said that it felt like crows pecking at me. I can still remember the therapist leaning forward excitedly, and asking me to explain exactly what I meant – and my confusion. He clearly saw something in my simile that I was completely blind to.
After being bullied for three years by my head of department, always behind closed doors where no one else could protect me, I finally quit my lectureship, gave up my research and writing career, and did not take her to the tribunal she deserved. It was like being disembowelled, decapitated, defenestrated. There has been no justice. She pecked at me until she had picked me clean off.
Ever since, I have had serious problems with women – the women at the school gates who had so much to say about every decision I made, about work, about raising children, about my baking, my house, my cleaning, my decisions on how my children should be educated, dressed, fed… And I had serious issues with any woman in a position of authority over me. At one particularly salient point, I bullied my own bully, much to both our surprises.
It was not that I was a misogynist. Until being bullied, it had never occurred to me to dislike or fear women. After being bullied, however, I could nevermore see women in the same way. I felt, for years, as if I had no skin.
When I signed up to the yoga teaching diploma, I knew very well that I was taking a major risk. I had had an eating disorder between the ages of 17 and 21, which commuted into a smoking habit until my first pregnancy at 34. The pregnancy began just as my head of department was getting her claws into me – for having the temerity to approach her for support with promotion (a promotion the university was later simply to give every officer at my level). While I was lucky enough to have two healthy pregnancies, my abdominal muscles were permanently separated by them. What with the bulimia, the smoking, the babies and the bullying, the front side of my body was a bit of a mess, inside and out – heart, lungs and belly felt rather shot.
My physical capacity, however, wasn’t the real risk I was running with taking on the yoga course. No, the risk was that I simply did not know whether I had it in me any longer to learn. To be corrected. To receive feedback, to be judged and criticised in public. Especially by women. Modern yoga (unlike its historical past) is completely dominated by women. I just did not know whether I could stomach it.
What actually happened was that the yoga training went online within four months, as the world went into Covid lockdown. Not only was there no feedback from my tutors, there was no normal connection to the outside world at all. I was left, as we all were, to my own devices. To stare into the magnifying mirror of my own failures, and take stock for a year. Yogis call it ‘self-practice’. I call it staring at the wall.
Yet, somehow, watching Adriene, coming up to performing Crow Pose in front of my coursemates, it finally dawned on me.
It is not my job to perform Crow Pose to admiring fans. It is my job to understand the pose from the inside out, so that others can continue their journey towards it. My job is to help others fly, as safely as possible. My job is to teach others how to play safely with their bodies.
And laugh as I do it.
IT SIMPLY DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER I CAN DO THE POSE. One day I may teach it from a wheelchair. From a bed. Via a podcast. What matters is that I can hold and support my students with my own understanding and intention, so that they can hop forward in their own. What matters is not what is visibly in front of them, but how I live in relation to what is invisibly behind me.
It does not matter what I look like doing the pose. But it does matter that I understand how to position my feet, my tailbone, my shoulders, knees, palms and triceps, in relation to the ground and to space, and how I breathe and engage my abdominal muscles. And that I can tell a beginner exactly how to do the same thing. Not so that they can slavishly copy me, but so that they can start to align themselves internally, as I have done, and start to play.
And on Saturday morning, I got up, and showed my coursemates, via our silly Muppet Show zoom screens, exactly how to do Crow Pose. I did it with a light heart, and a block in front of my nose. Some of them can do it without thinking. Others are, like me, still lifting up their toes. Maybe my bum looked big to some of them. Maybe my bum is big. My bum has nothing to do with my one day flying into Crow Pose.
That depends on my own caw strength.
I owe a great deal to Corvid-19.
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