Kapotasana: my first big challenge in the second series

Over the years kapotasana has had different flavors in my practice and there have been many lessons learned with this posture.

My wanderings with kapotasana began in early 2013. At that time I had already been practicing ashtanga for a couple of years, and to be honest, it wasn't until I came to this magnificent extension of the second series that I really had to start “working” on a posture.

The challenge of the pelvis in Kapotasana

Personally, the movements related to the pelvis are movements that I had a very, but very hard time unlocking. And you'll know why I'm telling you this in a moment.

Just as I learned the first series in one year, the second series took me 12 years and I am still refining it today. According to my constitution and the nature of the movements of the first series, I never had much trouble progressing through the postures of this first sequence.

After a year practicing ashtanga, I regained 70% of the hip rotations and flexibility I had when I was a kid thanks to my years doing Taekwondo.

And since I have relatively long arms and legs, tying myself in Marichyasana D, for example, was not a big deal either.

Maybe supta kurmasana would be the first posture where I could have a little problem, but as you can understand, there are suptas kurmasanas of first series practitioners, suptas kurmasanas of second series, etc... and the range required to do supta kurmasana practicing first series, well, what can I say, I had it.

So as I say, the first series of ashtanga was not really where I did real work, and my first posture where I had to work on was kapotasana.

And I had to work on it a lot.

In retrospect

A lot of people say, “great lessons with kapotasana...I spent a year and a half to grab my heels.”

I have to laugh.

Look.

I've been practicing kapotasana for 12 years, and I have never, I repeat, never been able to grab my heels by myself. I mean, whenever I grabbed them, someone adjusted me.

Let's see... I also tell you that the last 3 years have been very relaxed with my kapotasana practice (I will explain this in another article).

Let's say in 2020 I was in my prime with kapotasana, and as I told you... with no adjustments, my toes were touching my heels but couldn’t grab.

I used to torture myself if I didn't grab them but I gave up that vice some time ago.

But let's start at the beginning, because it was (and still is) a great journey.

Kapotasana and the Spanish Inquisition

As I was telling you, in 2013 Rolf gives me kapotasana.

The first few weeks everything was rosy, unicorns and food for the ego (look how cool I am, I'm in kapotasana), etc....

But it didn't last long.

Soon I started working with Marcy's “openers”, which Edita and I called “the Spanish Inquisition”.

After a while of doing these openers, things started to stir inside me to the point that I felt the need to cry like a baby all the time for the next 2 months.

I would have a chai, I would cry.

I would go to the “Joe Banana” for a tali, I would cry.

On the motorbike, I cried.

At the beach, I also cried.

I cried from laughing, but from crying and laughing at the same time, not just laughing.

That may have been the first symptoms of my wanderings with kapotasana.

A common problem: not understanding the posture and forcing the external shape.

As I hinted a moment ago, the situation in my pelvis was very cemented. The psoas, an internal muscle that connects the leg to the spine, was very stiff, and that restricted a lot of pelvic movements.

So it put a lot of load on my lower back.

Typical.

Besides, I didn't understand the posture.

Nobody explained it. And when they did explain something, I was not able to get anything clear.

Legs of steel, key element in kapotasana

I spent many years practicing this posture without having any idea what it was all about. And yes, it is possible, in case you are wondering.

I did my “Spanish Inquisition” openings religiously and in fact I practiced it up to 4 times in each session... but nothing... it was like being constipated: it came out very little by little.

Rolf used to work with me with the posture before kapotasana, laghu vajrasana, and he also made me work it 3 times a day to get power in my legs.

In fact, I remember in that season the room where I lived was on the second floor. And many mornings when I came home after practicing, my legs were shaking like a newborn deer, and I had to climb the stairs “on all fours”.

I kept practicing and my lumbars kept getting loaded, because I was still clueless. The process of opening the front of the body was slow.

Eventually, I realized that the “Spanish Inquisition” openers were not helping me because they were not directing my energy to the points to be worked. In my case: psoas, shoulders, leg strength.

So I stopped doing them and I decided to do the posture directly. Working the posture in the posture itself. So… doing the posture.

This may seem obvious, but many times we derive too much with mental mambo jumbo and in the end the essence get lost.

In retrospect, in this way it seemed that the work was being done little by little... well, very little by little, but it was being done.

The trauma of kapotasana

I went on like that for a few years, and it seemed, as I said, that things were moving. But I still had no idea what I was doing.

All I knew was that kapotasana brought out the worst in me.

You know when you wring a kitchen cloth dry? Well, kapotasana was doing that with my bad mood.

Another commonality with many people is that I was also traumatized by this pose for a while.

It was literally putting me on the edge of a cliff and throwing myself off every morning.

Except on moon days and Saturdays.

I was starting the intermediate series and already shaking at the thought of kapotasana.

Look at the degree of dread that I had, that practicing with my ashtanga teacher, Dena, something curious happened to me.

December 2015 and I was in Purple Valley practicing with Dena. At that time I was practicing the series with “full vinyasa”, that is, between posture and posture, I finished the vinyasa in samastitih. To give you an idea, it was like doing a sun salutation between postures.

Right.

I was in samastitih, and my next posture was kapotasana. And I was so much into my movie, spinning it like a washing machine, and the fear... and suddenly I hear Dena almost talking in my ear:

“Dani, are you taking a little holidays?”

Of course, she knew how to read very well what was going on in my head and wanted to cut it off.

And she cut it off.

End of this story.

The seed of change: understanding

Everything started to change when I began my studies with Dona Holleman in 2016. She really helped me to break the very rigid and dogmatic view I had, and she also taught me the universal principles of the practice.

It took me years to learn and understand them... and to this day I am still integrating them. They are very powerful concepts that require work, but once you begin to understand them, it's like a clear in the clouds.

Literally.

And that's what happened with kapotasana. The posture stopped being a noisy stump and started to have some light.

Only once I understood kapotasana, and after years of opening the whole pelvic area, I was able to direct my energy and effort to start moving forward in this posture.

Okay... backbends are the most “intellectual” of all the groups of postures there are.

It is the group of postures where you have to understand a greater number of concepts, use proprioception to the maximum and after all that... throw it all away and do the posture from the silence.

Bruce Lee sums it up very well when he said:

“Before I studied the art, for me a punch was the same as a punch, a kick the same as a kick. After learning the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick was no longer a kick. Now that I have understood the art, a punch is the same as a punch, a kick the same as a kick. The pinnacle of cultivation is nothing special. It's just simplicity; the ability to express the maximum with the minimum.

It's the same here.

You need to understand the posture and its details on the physical level, and then do it from the energy body.

But without using the thinking brain, but using the pre-linguistic brain.

You have to integrate the knowledge of that posture and do it from a place where there are no words.

It has to be done from the feeling.

This has been some of my adventures with this posture that leaves no one indifferent.

They are years of practice, sweat, tears, transformation, pain and “tapas”. You know that the point is not to grab the heels, but to try without losing your calm, and of course with a total detachment to the result.

Do it for the sake of it.

If you practice this posture, some of this will ring a bell. Let me know in the comments.

Share it with your friends who are in the process, maybe they will find inspiration in this article!

Hugs and great day,

Dani

Ashtanga, Kapotasana & the Spanish Inquisition