Crane Pose: Triumph and a Mighty Caboosh

No, not caboose. I am not talking about my ass. Todd came up with the word, or at least we think he did, to mean falling down. It originated with Alexandra: if she fell, instead of us freaking out and freaking her out, we'd just say "Caboosh!" like, "Woosh! You fell, no biggie." But now, naturally, it has seeped into our everyday lives with the end result of Todd and me talking like a couple of morons, especially when you throw in all the other Alexisms that have crept into our once sophisticated vocabulary. Anyways, moving on.

So! Several posts ago I talked about yoga, and how I've achieved some stuff. Half moon pose, sugar cane bow pose, side plank, dancer, all this other shit that is super difficult (for me). Well, the culmination of all my efforts seems to have funneled into the crane pose. Or at least, that is what I, a lowly noob yogi, consider to be the culmination. Here is a recap:

Well, before yesterday afternoon, I had achieved this pose but for mere seconds at a time. I'm talking like... two seconds. But YESTERDAY, I achieved it for at least four and better yet, I started to really comprehend the pose, and started to understand what it was asking of me. It asked for more confidence in the strength of my hands and arms, specifically, weirdly, my fingers. I flexed my fingers, pressing the tips of them hard into the mat like roots, and I trusted myself, tipping my body more forward than I had in previous classes, which of course allowed my feet to stay up for longer than the aforementioned two seconds.

I held it for as long as possible and then recognized fatigue so I sat back on my haunches, looking around the room again with my exulted "DID YOU JUST SEE THAT?!" face on again. But everyone else was still working in the pose, attempting and/or achieving the perfect balance. So I was like "Hey, I am a Professional Crane now so let's do it again." I ignored all that tiredness that 45 minutes of continuous, non-stop fucking flow yoga of hard-ass sun salutations. So I get back into crane, tipping forward more because I understand crane now, I trust my fingers and hands and arms.

I fall flat on the top of my head with, as you can imagine against a hardwood floor, an enormous thud. My knee slams into the floor too to desperately try to rescue my poor head from the majority of the impact. Luckily I was not alone; a man in the front did the exact same tumble, and later on a few people fell out of the one-legged downward dog to plank pose so I felt better, having some fellow yogis who are just as over-enthusiastic as I am. There's no photo of me in my crash pose but here is an idea: