Yoga Single arm balance: 7 years in the making

I've been working on a new yoga pose to add to my practice for awhile now and just recently got confident enough to do it on a single hand balancing cane. This is the finished product of months of working to learn this and years of refining my practice. The most difficult 2 points of the pose aside from having the strength and balance to do it are

1. Keeping my body stable / keeping from rotating about my wrist

2. Supporting 160 lbs on a single wrist bent back at a 90 degree angle...I can only do this pose a few times a day before my wrist is worn out. When I was learning it there were times when I'd fall out of the pose and feel like I was lucky to not have sprained or broken anything in my hand or wrist

When I first started learning this I didn't do it on the hand balancing canes. The single hand version of this (pungu mayurasana / wounded peacock) is a much more difficult variation of mayurasana (peacock pose) which is done on two hands and is pictured below.

Mayurasana is hard enough as it is. You have to have strong, stable wrists, a strong core, and be able to get your elbows even with your hip bones so they don't press into your stomach. If you don't get your elbows far enough back you can't balance because your center of gravity is off and your feet won't get off the ground for very long. It took me a year or so to perfect the two handed version of this pose (I'd been practicing about 3 years at the time I learned it) and now I have seven years experience doing yoga. It took me 3 months to learn this and it's still very hard for me most days.

When I first started learning wounded peacock pose (one hand), I'd fall on my chin or rotate out of the pose and my wrist would twist sometimes quite painfully. I started learning it on my mat only inches off the floor and today was the first day I tried it on the balancing cane and I was thankfully able to nail it. BOOM!

I also could only do it on my right arm but have in the past 2 weeks become stable enough to do it on my weaker side (my left hand / wrist / arm). After doing it on the right side on the cane I decided to throw caution out the window and go for it on the left side and I was able to hold it for about ten seconds which was quite an achievement. Below are pics of me doing this on my mat...much less scary when you're on the floor already.

right side

Left side

I have a lot more stuff like this That I need to post on here. I'll be showing some new stuff that I haven't posted on steemit yet in the near future so stay tuned!