Leg cycling in the scorpion: a new high

Now that a few of my advanced students are learning the scorpion, I realise the same issues that concern beginners to headstand  -- of isolating awareness -- comes in the way in their progress. It is interesting that you can never completely learn this skill -- u keep struggling with it. For me as a teacher, this is where I become humble -- because I realise how intense and refined awareness needs to be and that where we have all learnt to function from an auto mode, we are now having to unlearn that, and relearn awareness.  So this keeps me very much a student and it is only incidental that I am a teacher, more in the mode of sharing than teaching from a perch.

So, yes, I am also trying what is deceptively called the `relaxing scorpion' and that seems a big far away in the future yet.. But other things in the scorpion excite me now. So revisited the leg cycling and found it is not as tough as it was for me earlier, though I am not at all happy with how close down the head drops when I do this variation..

What you need for this pose:

• Obviously an extreme comfort level with leg cycling in the basic and unsupported headstand. 
• A super strong scorpion. 
• And of course, no fear of falling back (which, apparently, is a very primitive fear).  And interestingly, stragglers in headstand who have no scope for falling back-- since out of fear they keep the legs ahead of the body all the time-- they will still fall back, as if with a perverse desire to prove themselves wrong!! That is amazing for me -- why people should fall when there is scope just because the mind is so petrified of it that it seems to use that as a ruse to prevent them from doing the pose, at all!! This is a wonder to me -- how we all end up doing what we do not like.. Whether it is overeating, gossiping, hyperventilating and all that stuff we don't want to do..

So, yes, lots of things to learn. I like being engaged with such mundane things as physical awareness because it prevents the mind from negative loops that we can knot ourselves over..

Something meditative about this engagement of the mind, a certain withdrawal that is playful, isolated and involuted.