🧘🐢 FLT
(🚧 book is going through major reorganization right now)
A comprehensive guide to sitting meditation postures
As a memory device for the nomenclature (
7🐘), FLT is a pun on FTL (faster than light). Turtles are not known for being fast.
The turtle reference is to a set of turtle (animal known for longevity, living even 200 years) qigong exercises ostensibly for the neck, but really when done correctly with the whole body, the undulating motion adjusts, massages every single vertebrae in the spine.
🦵🦶Kicks for hips: Kicking drills to open up hips and give them full range of motion.
🐢 around the world
a. sun salutation warmups
b. various angle leg and bound angle
c. plough variations
d. updog medusa and turtle
e. gorilla crouching jazz doens’t need yoga mat
f. turtle was a guest host, then a permanent partner
The move I do most frequently helpful for full lotus seated
under the video /silk reeling / silk neck brian
starting at 6 min mark, this is the turtle movement.
Ostensibly, it's to loosen the neck joints. But if you do it right, it lengthens and expands every vertebrae in the spine.
The radical gorilla enhancement is not just doing it in that one front-to-back plane of motion demonstrated in the video, but take it off the rails and “go around the world” (you should be able to sweep about a 180 range from left to right)
Some examples:
1. Do a 180 sweep from left to right side
2. from a starting backbend, with arms held forward in whatever way to counterbalance and help you feel stable, do the turtle with a 180 sweep. I call this around the world turtle
3. This can be done from a sitting posture, cross legged, legs spread out, whatever.
4. From a standing, forward bend (your torso is inverted, upside down), do "around the turtle". It feels really trippy and it releases your lower vertebrae from the inversion.
Nowadays, at least a few minutes before and after every sit, I do "around the world turtle" combined with various sitting postures (lotus, double pigeon, kneeling, bound angle), and especially the seated angle as shown in the video
/yoga/iyengar/iyengar-instructor-seated-angle
Over time (months, years), gradually spread your legs farther apart.