My standing foot has the habit of turning slightly inwards when I move into a half moon. It’s for balance I guess, some instinct angling the foot slightly across the fore and aft line of the now horizontal and elevated body to give a grain or two of increased steadiness. That said, I do also have a slight tendency to walk and stand like a duck, feet splayed the other way, so maybe that’s it, though as far as I know ‘inward footed duck’ is not a recognised part of the yoga asana.
Ardha Chandrasana is. If you don’t know the shape, it’s a one-legged balance, with the non-supporting leg raised to the horizontal behind you as you bend at the hip forming a T, the raised foot turned to point out from the rotated body, the upper arm lifted straight to the perpendicular, the chest turned with it to hold the body sideways in space as the lower arm reaches, or hovers just above, the floor. It’s a modern creation, not one of the 15 classic yoga poses described in the 16th century by the yogi Svatmarama in his book of teachings The Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Maybe none of us need to know that. Or that this is a part of the practice of Hatha yoga, a system of movement aimed to find a balance between ‘Ha’, the sun, and ‘Tha’, the moon.
Svatmarama’s 15 poses are designed to channel life energy, prana, in the central energetic channel of the body between the ‘sun’ channel on the right side of the spine, and the ‘moon’ channel on the left. Hatha. The end point, as you writhe in your sweaty Lululemons, is the yogi’s transformation into an immortal being of light. Which sounds nothing if not complex.
Yoga is a peeling of layers, in body, in breath, in spirit, in the cultural history of an old and evolving mystery of mind and body.
There is room for almost infinite finesse in the movement practice. Alignment ... the little nips and tucks that make a ballet of inches. To the more learned practitioner it probably has a great deal to do with the optimal flow of energy. For me it just feels like part of a process of refinement. So I turn my standing foot back to the front, in line with the rest of my body and feel for the softness of breath and diluted focus that brings balance.
The more awkward part is not so much the shape itself, not so much finding the quiet breath of stillness within it, but in moving to the next and flowing to what might be after that, in either a led or intuitive flow. The energy must lie within that. And it lingers; chipped away by the external bustle and thought-centred life of the day to day, but somewhere, somewhere quiet and centred in you, is a constant reserve of that deep stillness. Is that the point of connection between us as we move together in a group class: that still, deep, inner pool that is both complete and beyond expression? Just setting down these words my mind slips to that place of calm mingled with effort; yoga teaches an ease with duality, a familiarity with apparently conflicting paradox.
The point of course is not to have too great a consciousness of any of this, to let the mechanics of the body be and find a simplicity and stillness that is outside the thought-formed pulse of the day to day. To achieve that consciousness, first abandon consciousness. Simple. The ultimate point is perhaps to touch the great connection of all things that lies in a certain cultivated emptiness. The infinity of the constant present. A glimpsing of oneness.