Flying Free : My Aerial Yoga Experience

Sometimes you need to let life turn you upside down so that you can learn how to live right side up.
-Proverb

I walk into Palm Beach Yoga and see beautiful wooden floors and colorful cloth hammocks hanging from the ceiling. A large mirror covers the wall at the front of the room. The instructor ,Kristen , pulls down a hammock to my hips and then gets on a ladder to adjust it from the ceiling. She gets down, pulls the hammock to my hips again and says “ perfect”.

Kristen has us sit back against the hammock and  swing back and forth . Soon our bodies become elastic, folding forward, backward, and sideways. For the “bat pose” we wrap the hammock snugly around our hips  with our hands gripping overhead and slide our legs up straight towards the ceiling. She tells us to and let go  “Trust that your body can go upside down and that the hammock will hold you.”    I surrendered and flipped upside down. I lose orientation and all sense of time and space. I felt as if I was walking on the ceiling. Kristine said to look at the front of the room to regain orientation. The weight of the world had left me.  I was flying.

We come down from the pose and sit in the hammock then drop our head forward. Floating child’s pose helps center and calm the body after an inversion.

Kristen instructs us to  step into the hammock with the silk supporting under our knee cap. We bend our front leg as the back leg stretches back , as we grip each side of the hammock overhead.

We use the hammock to stretch deeper , supporting our body  while performing back bends and splits.  When we perform inversions, we can help cleanse the lymphatic system , take pressure off the joints ,and help circulation return to the body .

When we are sitting with the hammock wrapped around our thighs the silk feels tight and a little painful against the skin. Kristen explains that as we move and the silk slides across the back of our thighs, we are giving ourself a massage.

We end  the session in a cocoon pose. I sit  in the hammock then lay  back , letting my head fall back and my body relax. The hammock is  holding me tight and safe. Kristine came and gave me a small push so the hammock swayed gently. After several minutes she had us slowly open our eyes and step out. She looked at each of us as we stood in front of our hammocks. “May you bring this sense of peace and tranquility with you into your day." Hands folded, we bow and lean slightly forward.  "Namaste.”