Practice

I'm thinking a lot lately about compensatory poses. In yoga, we take on challenging poses of some sort, and then resting poses that deliberately reverse the strain on those muscles. My practice partner and I had both been doing strenuous outdoorsy work on Saturday, so going into this Sunday's Rope SIG, I was thinking about ropework that would at best help with easing those muscles and at worst not hurt.

I've had hogties on the brain, and he's a meditative type, so we started with a gyaku ebi - a "reverse shrimp," or Japanese hogtie, in which the ankles are anchored to a chest harness. I left him in just long enough for a short meditative rest. He mentioned later he could have gone much longer and probably if we'd been working in my studio we would have. But I wanted to check out my theory, and so brought him up to sitting and changed him into the Ebi, or "shrimp", attaching the chest harness forward to the legs, which are folded and tied in a simple cross. Ebi can be very difficult on the legs and neck after a while, but for this short while the poses seemed to do what I wanted -- compensating for each other's stretches, and putting some ease on overworked muscles.

Later, I did some "rope jazz" (read: Miriam making stuff up) in which I anchored his ankles to an ottoman's legs, created a spread two column tie between the ankles in front, put his arms in niwatori, then anchored the niwatori forward to the two column tie. Great fun, and a perfect position for a nice flogging with my rope floggers.

All this, and I got to finally try a cupcake chest harness on a lovely rope virgin, which turned out beautifully.

Sadly no pictures. I really do need to do more pictures soon, not least because I find I'm a lot more precise with a camera around.