Posture Clinic: Mountain Pose (Tadasana)

In either the beginning or in the midst of any yoga class or Sun Salutation, yogis will find themselves being asked to stand at the top of their mat for a posture called Tadasana, or Mountain Pose. Many beginning practitioners asked to perform this posture for any amount of time will begin to wonder why. After all, most people find themselves standing all day. You stand while you make your coffee. You stand while you wait for the train or the bus. Maybe you have a job that requires you to stand all day. When you come to yoga, you may expect something different than simply standing and allow your mind to wander as you wait for the next posture.

However, the type of engagement found in a standing yogic posture is incredibly different, stronger, and more powerful than any other type of standing you may do during your day.

Recently, I went through an additional teacher training at my studio. During one of our posture clinics, we called up a teacher to demonstrate Mountain Pose. Although she was a dedicated and strong yogi and only held this posture for a few minutes, she was so physically engaged during it that afterwards, she said she was exhausted. Although Mountain Pose is simple, it is not easy.

Mountain Pose (Tadasana):


Mountain Pose is a symmetrical standing posture. This means that both sides of the body are more or less equal to the other side. The foundation of this posture is in the feet. The arches of your feet connect with the support of your pelvic floor, lower abdomen, rib cage and crown of the head. Because of this, many yogis consider Tadasana to be the starting point for any physical asana practice.

Find your way there:

1). Come to standing at the top of your mat, or wherever you are. Bring your big toes together to touch, and find a slightly sliver of space between the heels. If you are pregnant or feel tension in your hips, slightly separate your feet to about hips width distance. Ground down through your feet, distributing your weight evenly through the three weight bearing parts of your feet (see photograph at right). Gently rock your weight forward and back until you find the sweet spot right in the center where you feel completely grounded. In order to fully activate your feet, fan your toes up and off the mat and then slowly settle them back down. This simple movement will help to active your inner arches. Just like the foundation of a house must be strong if the house will stand through all weather, all postures are built from the ground up. Create a strong foundation. Start with your feet. Feel the full support of the ground underneath you.

2). Firm your lower limbs. Engage your quadriceps so much that they lift off of your knees, and then soften your knees. Point your tailbone straight down to the ground to engage your core. Lift your chest and heart up toward the ceiling. Feel the motion of your belly button drawing into your spine as your core firms and holds you strong.

3). Lift your arms high overhead. Soften your shoulders away from your ears. Gently rotate your pinkies inward so that your palms turn to face one another. Activate every part of your arm, from your biceps all the way to the tips of each finger. 

4). Allow breath to move through your body. It is common in exploring postures to become engrossed and to hold your breath. But remember, more than any other posture, your breath is your yoga. 

Benefits:

The practice of standing postures in general and Tadasana in particular is one of the best ways to restore vitality, strength and adaptability to the feet. 

This posture helps to firm and strengthen the thighs, knees and ankles as well as your core and your glutes.

Because this posture encourage a lengthened spine and an upright stance, it can help to improve posture in all areas of your life. One of the biggest reasons to practice yoga is to increase your sense of body awareness. If you train yourself to consciously relax your shoulders away from your ears in Tadasana, you will be amazed how many other times of the day you remind yourself to do the same thing, whether it is standing at the bus or hunched over a computer at work. 

Additionally, Mountain Pose creates space in your vertebral column, calms your mind, and balances your nervous system. 

A Note on Breath

There is research indicating that animals who breathe slowly tend to live longer, while animals that breathe rapidly tend to live shorter lives. Elephants, whales and tortoises tend to have long lives- the breath of these animals is also slow and sustained. Contrarily, the lives of animals with rabid breath (dogs, rabbits) tend to be short. Studies from the National Institute on Aging suggests that in humans, slow breath (defined as 6 breaths per minute) can help to lower blood pressure, relieve mental stress and anxiety, increase circulation and break down salt in the body. This recent study is backed by hundreds of years of breath work and meditation. For centuries, human beings have been working with the natural rhythms of their breath to explore the mind-body connection.

Tantra and yoga and many other ancient Indian systems measure life in breath rather than in years. Perhaps you have heard old mythology suggesting that your life contains a certain number or measure of breaths, and when you run out of breaths, you reach death. Although there is no way to know how many breaths have been allotted to your life, the quality of your life can greatly be improved by dedicating attention to the quality of each of your breaths.

As you read this right now, you are breathing. It is necessarily so that if you live, you are breathing. Breath is more than a habit. It is completely embedded in your body. From the moment you exited your mother's womb, you have been breathing. So although breath is more or less involuntary, there are habits about your breath that can be changed. For example, when people are asked to turn their attention to their breath, it is the ordinary habit of most human beings to emphasize the incoming breath rather than the outgoing breath. Perhaps psychologically, human beings have an inclination to live. The incoming breath indicates life, oxygen and consumption, while the outgoing breath indicates emptiness, loss and death.

Yoga and many other philosophies emphasize a cycle of life. In order for birth and newness, there must be death and the end of the old. In your body, the clearing way for the new is represented in your exhale.

Try it. On your next exhale, fully empty your lungs. Press the air out of your body. Slightly constrict the back of your throat and exhale through your nose to slow the process of the exhale. Only once you have fully reached the bottom of your exhale, allow a new inhale to create itself from the emptiness of the old.

More than any physical shape or posture you can discover with your body, your breath is your yoga. Although there will be much more time devoted to studying breath here, I wanted to briefly share with you the meaning of my website's title. It is out of the old that the new is born. Only when you clear away what no longer serves you can you create your new potential. First, exhale. Out of the exhale, find your new breath.

Exhale. Inhale. Yoga.

Posture Clinic: Downward Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana)

Several weeks ago, I found myself at a friend's house catching up after an absence of several months from each other's company. Inevitably, as he asked me what I had been up to, I mentioned yoga. He listened while I talked about my experiences in training, as a yogi, and as a yoga teacher. At the end of my piece, he mentioned that he had very much been wanting to try yoga but didn't know where to begin. He even went into his room and brought back his still-in-plastic-wrap yoga mat that his mom had gotten him to show me the extent of his potential dedication. 

Yoga is huge, guys. The yogic meditations and philosophies have been around for thousands of years (even longer than the physical postures we now associate with yoga). It is extremely, extremely easy to feel overwhelmed walking into an advanced or even foundational yoga class. 

What I did for my friend was to introduce him to just a few blueprint postures. In essence, I taught him how to "stand up" as he moved from Child's Pose into tabletop, and then from tabletop into a posture called Downward Facing Dog. From Downward Facing Dog, he traveled to the top of his mat and found his way to standing. It is this posture, Downward Facing Dog, that is the topic of this discussion.

(By the way, you guys! My friend texted me a week later and told me he had been practicing the postures I taught him in his room every morning and was already falling in love. You can too.)

Downward Facing Dog

In advance, this posture is in effect a posture supported by your arms. If you know in advance that you carry tension in your wrists or if you would like to warm up your wrists and arms to prevent tension, gently rotate your wrists full their full range of circular motion, repeatedly changing direction, and then gently shake out your wrists for 15-30 seconds. 

Anatomical drawing from YOGA ANATOMY by LESLIE KAMINOFF and AMY MATTHEWS

Find your way there:

1). Come to a table top position on your mat (or on comfortable ground, if you are still waiting to unwrap your very own mat). Place your hands underneath your shoulders, about shoulder width distance, and your knees underneath your hips, about hips width distance. Spread your fingers comfortably so that the webbing in-between your fingers is slightly stretched. Turn your toes under (P.S. This is tabletop position!).

2). Exhale as you lift your knees off the floor and press your hips back and up, to where the wall and the ceiling meet behind you. Lengthen your spine, draw your tailbone up toward the ceiling, and maintain a gentle bend in your knees as you feel this out. Eventually, start to press your thighs to the back of the room as you straighten your legs. Lengthen your heels down toward the mat. It's not important whether your heels actually touch the ground or not; rather, this movement creates the intention of length in the back line of your legs. Feel free to peddle out your legs, bending into one knee and then the other, to get the feel of this posture and encourage some juicy warmth into your calves and hamstrings. Eventually, find your way to stillness. 

3). Press the "L" and "J" shape of your hands firmly into the ground. Line your index finger with your wrist. Distribute weight evenly through all ten finger pads. Kiss your shoulder blades together behind your back, and then soften your shoulder blades down to your tailbone as you draw your shoulders away from your ears. 

4) Take the weight out of your hands by engaging your core. Draw your belly button to your spine. Press the ground away from you. Allow your neck to be neutral as you gaze softly behind you, at the space between your ankles. 

5). Finally, breath. Your breath is the most important yoga posture of all. 

Benefits:

This posture decompresses the spinal column, helping you to find length in your spine.

Even if only held for a few breaths, this posture will help to strengthen the arms, shoulders and legs.

Downward Dog opens the shoulder girdle and the trapezius.

This posture brings fresh oxygen to your central nervous system.

Finally, because I know how hard it is to read something and try to practice yoga at the same time, I am including a link to the wonderful Esther Ekhart's Youtube channel. She has a wonderful video that is extremely accessible to all levels of practice, in which she addresses many of the points of anatomy listed above. As she mentions at the end of this video, even if all the yoga you do today is to do Downward Facing Dog for two minutes when you wake up, you will offer yourself a world of difference. 

Exhale Inhale Yoga: An Introduction

Although I had practiced yoga on and off for years (in the basement of my parent's house while watching my mom's yoga and Pilates videos, or in the morning sometimes in the gym at college), it wasn't until the summer of 2011 that my practice became serious. I had just graduated from college and, in the midst of deciding what I should do with my life, signed up for a triathlon. It turned out to be a good random decision, cultivating strength and discipline in my body and structure for my very unstructured post college life.

During this time, I saw an advertisement in the window of a yoga studio down the street offering a free week of yoga. I, with my roommate at the time, decided to take advantage of it. She was training for the Chicago Marathon at the time, and we both desperately needed a low impact physical activity for our off-days. We went together to a class that was far above our level of knowledge and bumbled our way through an hour of class. I was sweaty, shaking with the acknowledgement of my non-existent upper body strength, and strangely intrigued by what had just happened.

So of course, I went back.

Months later, I ended up grabbing a yoga-for-trade gig at a studio of the same brand in a different location. For a mere three hours a week of mopping studio floors, washing windows and folding towels, I had unadulterated access to as many yoga classes as I could manage to attend.

Boom. World changed.It was at this time that my yoga practice became a Practice. Rather than "doing" yoga sometimes, I became a Yoga Practitioner. A practice indicates a habit. A habit implies repetition. Yoga, ladies and gentlemen, became something like an addiction. I was hooked.

Months later, with my new friend from the studio, I signed up for Yoga Teacher Training. Teacher Training programs in yoga are usually 200 hour commitments. The contents of mine ranged from lectures on Sanskrit and yoga history, posture clinics and practice teaching, anatomy lessons and cadaver labs (seriously) and a dedicated, daily practice. Months later, I was certified. A year later, I was teaching at the same studio that had changed my life 16 short months earlier.

One thing I have learned through my yoga practice is the importance of intention. With that in mind, here are my intentions for this blog:

1) This blog is intended as a point of continuing education. Research for yoga classes is an endless activity. Here, I hope to formulate my research into something more closely resembling accessible information. This benefits me, as I untangle my research notes and strive to become an ever more knowledgeable and learned yoga instructor, and it also benefts...

2) ... You. The student. The fellow teacher. The budding yogi. The dedicated practitioner. The reader. It was not long ago that I know very little about yoga. This blog intends to share what I know, and demystify the experience for those of you hungering for more information. Blogs will include posture breakdowns, tutorials, sequencing tips and sequences, meditations, snippets and thoughts, photographs and drawings. All designed to draw the practitioner closer to their practice, the curious yogi to their yoga.

3) Community. There is a saying at the studio that if you have learned, you have a responsibility to teach. I have learned from so many great sources and studios and teachers and fellow yogis over the last many months, that it is part of my karma and my responsibility to put some good stuff back out there into the world. This is that attempt.

Thanks for joining me on the journey,

H.