Embodied Thinking
Bakasana: The Crow Pose
October 25, 2020
My arms are noodles.
Gaining the strength to hold up
My sturdy body.
My arms head to ground.
Feeling hard like solid rocks
Nervous as can be.
What if I tumble?
Or fall over from failure?
It’s hard to succeed.
My legs come up high.
Placing each knee on elbows
Body is shaking.
My feet are statues
Solid as can be on ground
Ready to fly high.
I pick each foot up.
Nervously, legs are balanced
Feeling scared, I fall.
Try again, take two
All my courage to not fall.
Picking up my legs
My eyes find their place
Finding a balancing point
Intended to stay.
I have the courage
And all of my mighty strength.
Finally, success!
Stable as a rock
Looking for quite the balance
Legs are on the top
Head is now focused
Arms now have the crazy strength.
To hold myself up.
Knees moving from elbow.
They head to the highest point
Now, in a handstand
All of the worry
For absolutely nothing.
I did it! Success!
I did the crow pose.
With courage and mighty strength
I’m happy and proud.
Embodied Thinking is the idea that we can think using our sense of muscle movement, posture, balance, and touch. In, Sparks of Genius, it mentions that, “ Hindu yogis, would learn with ever-greater clarity how to sense and control every aspect of bodily feeling and function,” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 181) which shows that it takes great practice and balance to control how we move our bodies and what that represents.
For this week, I wanted to connect the idea of poetry to my topic: Courage. To do that, I thought about something that leads me to need courage when using my body and that is yoga. Yoga requires breath, balance, posture, and movement. Within yoga, there are a multitude of poses that take great strength and balance. These poses make me nervous about falling, especially when I try Bakasana or the crow pose. With recreating embodied thinking, I decided to write a couple sets of Haikus, describing the process of crow pose from beginning to end. Using this process, made me realize that this pose has a lot more than just balancing and getting into a handstand. It requires great strength, posture, and breath.
Embodied thinking showed a different side to my topic: Courage. It made me wonder how the human body shows courage within embodied thinking. In Root-Bernstein’s Sparks of Genius (1999), it says, “Monkey around, you might just find yourself solving problems only your body knows how to answer (p.181).” This stood out to me as I focused on a yoga pose. I do yoga weekly and struggle to complete balancing poses because I need courage to balance without holding on to the wall or someone else. Our bodies fight through the, “I can’t do it,” syndrome every single day and somehow manage to twist and turn in the way we want. When I am able to put myself in a pose where I can do a handstand, I feel that I conquer something that needs incredible focus and that is courage. Courage is seen all around us in movement.