Hippy Twist
I’ve recently been introduced to acroyoga, which, as
you might infer, combines acrobatics with yoga. No trapeze or safety net
required, though: to fly you have only to ask a partner to lie on her back,
place her feet at your pelvic bones, hold your hands, and push you up. If you
can plank, staying parallel to the ground—and she can maintain stability,
keeping her torso and legs at a right angle—then you’re in Bird. Maybe you
tried this as a kid; my sister and I did, and were mostly unsuccessful. It’s
tricky at first, but with a few tries you’ll get the hang of it.
From there, the poses are an exploration of the many
ways the base can use her feet and hands to hold the flyer up by her hips,
hands, belly, butt, armpit, or shoulders: pretty much any and all body parts
are recruited for the endeavor. You can move from relatively stationary poses
to flow series, in which the flyer might spin, twist, rock, roll, or turn
upside down, from one pose to another, in a continuous movement for as many
times as you want. The generic name for these is washing machines—I suppose
because they function as a cycle and the movements might resemble agitation.
Part of the analogy is lost on me, however, because what washing machine can
both spin your clothes around and simultaneously rotisserie them? The London
Spin, for example, involves the flyer rotating on a plane parallel to the
ground and rolling from face down to
face up—all while shifting around on someone else’s feet. Also, some acro
washing machines include the flyer standing on the base’s hands, or the two
players might stack hand-to-hand or foot-to-foot. Try that, Maytag.
When I was in elementary school, girls were not
allowed to wear pants, until the rules changed in my sixth grade. Pants were
then permitted, but my mother—a woman who coordinated her pumps and purse to
match her outfit and had boxes of hats on the top shelf of her closet—limited
pants to only once a week. An image of me in jeans and a striped t-shirt,
playing four-square and being every bit as good as the boys, shimmers in the recess
of my mind.
Oh,
yes. Even in a dress, in those days I modestly dominated the playground. I
could blast around the bases, pivot nimbly on the handball court, power my way
through a tetherball contest, fly over monkey bars, and catch the kickball in
the outfield. I was often team captain or one of the first to be picked. All of
this active play (and the possibility that some boy might try to lift up my
skirt) meant that I always wore a pair of shorts underneath.
Don’t get me wrong: I loved those dresses, many of
which my mom made. These early memories would be lackluster without them. One
of my favorites was a long-sleeved dress that zipped up the front and featured
a mod Nehru collar, in a dusty purple fabric with subtle blue stripes. Mom used
that same fabric to make my Barbie a dress, and the same pattern for an Easter
dress, white with stripes of flowers. A tweed skirt and vest set, in purple
plaid with a yellow accent thread, was too dressy for school, so I could only
wear it to church. But purple plaid! What
could be cooler? Mom also sewed for my two older sisters until they learned to
do it themselves, as I would soon enough. A photo of the three of us shows our
matching short-sleeved dresses with big patch pockets. The photo is in black
and white, but I know the fabric was spot-on sixties, with a pattern of bright
pink, yellow, green and orange diamond shapes. I was probably eight, and at the
time I would have said that dress was boss.
Because for me the sixties were all about color: The Yellow Submarine, psychedelic Peter
Max posters, the groovy set on Laugh-In.
I had some vague notion that the hippies were responsible for coloring our
world, spreading rainbow love and day-glo peace symbols, and so I naturally aspired
to hippiedom. In suburban Los Angeles, I didn’t come across actual hippies, so my
oldest sister, Nancy, was my closest role model. She qualified because she painted
her room apple green, had a clear plastic inflatable chair, and wore her long, straight
hair parted in the middle. She collected piles of soda-can tabs (which was
quite a feat since we hardly ever had soda in our house) and hooked them
together, hanging six or eight long strands over her doorway: a do-it-yourself
bead curtain. I think she even burned incense, or maybe that was just once to
mask the cigarette she was sneaking when my parents were out. Me? I had
flower-power stickers on the walls of my backyard playhouse and doodled happy-faces
on my Pee-Chee folders. (Before emojis, it need hardly be said.)
Once I got to junior high, the bright yellow happy
faces lost their charm. I, the Queen of the Monkey Bars, became just another
hunched-over naked girl in the locker room, calling out a number to get credit
for taking a shower. We were issued scratchy little towels that smelled
inexplicably like graham crackers, and I went through creative contortions to
use mine as a cover-up, putting on my clothes with a minimum of exposure. I had
to ask my mom to buy me a training bra. How could she not know I needed it,
even if I didn’t need it? And what
exactly was that bra training me to be? The humiliations of growing up were
small but persistent.
Most of my junior high memories have retreated into
a repressed past, but one in particular marks a defining shift from adept girl
to untethered soul. It involves a pretty dress my mother made me, brown with
white flowers and big red ladybugs; it had puffy sleeves and was complemented
by a bright yellow pinafore that buttoned at the bodice. As if she hadn’t
worked hard enough, Mom had even taken one of the ladybugs from the dress
fabric and appliquéd it onto a patch pocket. White knee socks, perhaps held up
by an elastic band adorned with a yellow fringy thing, would have completed the
ensemble.
That day a boy I didn’t know said something to me
that I knew was crudely sexual, even if I wasn’t clear on the details. I
ignored him but was mortified. Suddenly the bright yellow pinafore was
ludicrous. Puffy sleeves. Ladybugs. How had I not realized this before? My
sense of self was already precarious, and now my timid sense of fashion was
turned upside-down. From then on, I wore Mom’s dresses less and less often. I
managed to add a pair of hip-huggers to my wardrobe—even though, regrettably, I
had no hips. I was growing taller, too, so invariably my pants, hip or not,
became high-waters.
In junior high, girls took home ec classes. Did you
know there’s a protocol for washing dishes? Or that a peanut
butter-mayonnaise-and-relish sandwich breaks the monotony of pb&j? By the
year I graduated junior high, a few brave girls had chosen shop classes over
sewing. Title IX became law in 1972; Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs fought
“The Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. (She won, famously, against that “chauvinist
pig,” although there have been recent accusations that Riggs threw the match to
cover his gambling debts.) Sometimes I’d go to school on the weekends to hit
the tennis ball against the wall, but besides regular PE I didn’t play any
sports in high school. My participation on the drill team is yet another
experience better left with the litter under the bleachers. If you don’t count
my grad school stint on an intramural volleyball team that won the B Division
championship, thereby earning me a too-small t-shirt, my exercise routines have
been consistent but unremarkable.
Hatha yoga—whether Iyengar, Astanga, or other style—encourages
the practitioner to pay attention to her body, its capabilities and limitations,
its muscles working discretely and in concert, its response to conscious
breathing. You might practice in a roomful of people and share a common purpose,
but you are essentially responsible for your own sweet self. In fact, if you’re
like me, reining in your ego—training yourself not to observe others and make
comparisons—is a continuous process.
In contrast, the core number of acroyogis is three—the
base, the flyer, and the spotter—and they are all responsible for one another.
Three is a community; three dimensions create depth; and three contributes to a
dynamic exchange. As acroyogi extraordinaire
Daniel Scott says, he enjoys “moving and being moved.” He describes acro as
being “not about basing and flying, but giving and
receiving.” The base receives the flyer’s weight and trust; the flyer contributes
her strength and focus. The spotter is the intermediary, the support service,
because he can see what the other two can’t. He can make suggestions for a
different foot placement, say, or direct the flyer to either engage or relax.
Acro isn’t meant to take the place of a regular yoga
practice but to offer new territory for physical expression and personal
interaction. When
you practice yoga as an individual, you have a pretty good sense of where you
are in space. But in acro, directions and the ability to move effectively can
get squirrelly. For instance, as the base, your right is often the flyer’s
left. You press up with your hands; she presses down. You might feel pretty
confident basing a light and bony flyer, and then your success is challenged by
a heavier or floppier one. As a flyer, you might need your base to shift a toe
that’s poking you in the gut. Or perhaps you simply have to trust that his feet
are there to catch you when you pop from Throne to Bird. As a spotter, you closely
observe alignment, maybe narrate the movement, and stay stable enough to nudge
a wayward pose back to rights. Communication—physical, visual, and verbal—ensures
you work as a unit.
Lacking the opportunity to fly you myself, let me
walk you through a pose as an example. Let’s start with Star. The base, as
usual, lies on his back, and you, the flyer, stand facing him with your feet on
either side of his head. He tucks his feet up, and you round your shoulders
down so that the top of your shoulders rest on the bottoms of his feet. You
grasp his hands, jump up in a tuck, and, hup! You’re upside-down, your
shoulders held up by his feet and your position steadied by his hands. When you
arrive, you transition to a straddle pike to make the pose more stable. You’re
in a kind of floating tripod headstand, except that the head isn’t standing.
But then the spotter says, Move your hips move back so they’re stacked over the base’s hips.
What do you mean, back? Where are his hips? this way?
Yes, but now you’re
leaning left. You’re losing the pike And now your balance. Try not to step on
his face as you land.
Wonderfully, there’s a word that explains this
spatial disconnect: proprioception. That’s an easy word to dismantle: proprio, or the self, combined with
perception. This is not a psychological term, but a physiological one: it refers
to sensory receptors in the muscles and tendons that send the central nervous
system feedback on how far your muscles are extending, how quickly, and with
how much force. Whereas a sense of balance is regulated by the vestibular
system (fluids in the inner ear), proprioception keeps track of your joints and
limbs in space. It’s what allows us to walk or drive a car without having to watch
how our feet are performing. It’s what enables you to close your eyes and touch
your nose to prove you’re sober. It’s how figure skaters train themselves to stay
upright after completing their dizzying spins. Part of learning acroyoga, then,
is exercising and developing proprioceptive awareness. Each new pose begins
with uncertainty and progresses to a heightened sensitivity not only to how you
move but how you move in relation to someone else. Eventually you may feel a
subtle “aha”—a click, like tumblers in a combination lock, and the safe is cracked,
the limbs are aligned. The pose finds its own integrity, though you may not be
fully aware of how it got there.
To warm up for acro we sometimes do the Hippie
Twist. Whereas the more active poses require you to maintain core strength as
the flyer, this is a therapeutic pose where you let go and let the base do the
work. From Bird, flop forward and straddle your legs, letting them be heavy. The
soles of your feet come together (a suspended baddha konasana, if you will),
and forearms stack behind you at your lower back. Pushing up on your shoulders,
the base bends her right leg and left elbow (and yes, we beginner bases still
have to consciously say that to ourselves), pushing your hip away with the
straight leg and pushing your shoulder away with her straight arm. It’s a dishrag
effect, basically, and you get a deep, freeing spinal twist.
The names of the poses are imaginative, almost
silly—like Hangle Dangle, Straddle Bat, and Flying Whale. The name Hippie Twist
seemed appropriate, I thought, because not only does it feel good, it also
embodies the hippie ethos of freedom of movement, of stretching yourself beyond
self-imposed limitations. It was only recently that something clicked, and I suddenly
realized that the name refers to hips.
The pelvic area. It’s spelled, in fact, “Hippy Twist.” This is something else I
appreciate about acro: the reminder that a simple twist in our perception can
reveal how our expectations and assumptions affect our understanding, whether
of a word, the self, or another person.
When I first tried acro with a small group of
people, I came away thinking it was fun. For some reason “fun” was a rusty
sensation to me, faintly disorienting. That might be a function of age since I’m
older than others in the group by as much as twenty years, or simply because
I’m not usually one to jump into collective activities with both feet,
literally or figuratively. Also, I wondered just what was fun about this. It’s
awkward and clumsy. Like any contact sport, it can hurt, and you fall more
often than not. You find yourself in overly intimate positions with people you
scarcely know. But the general consensus among the players is that “fun” is the
motivating factor. Recently a new recruit joined us, and from the get-go she
was thrilled. “This is so fun!” she exclaimed repeatedly. As her name was also
Michelle, I couldn’t help but feel she represented my alter ego: young,
enthusiastic, athletic, game for trying anything.
Fun is a part of why acroyoga appeals to me, but there’s
more to it. I think I do it because I can.
The opportunity is available. As Daniel Scott says, “Live forever or die
trying.” So I try. And even though the practice stirs up self-doubts about my
capabilities and my place in the group, when the flow of poses works, there is
strength and satisfaction.
In elementary school we had a set of rings, maybe
ten of them hanging in a circle around a pole. You jumped up to grab the first
ring, maybe got a push from the next person in line. Then you learned to fall
back in order to swing forward to catch the next ring or even—if you were good
at it (and I was)—skip past one ring to reach for the next. Drop back, swing
forward, one hand after another, building momentum. I was on the rings a lot
because it was fun, and since I wore shorts under my dress, I had no reason to
hesitate, and every reason to fly.
