Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana...

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy Topic Timestamp Page # Asana Analysis: Introduction 00:01:14 1 Asana Analysis: Benefits of a Pose 00:11:40 4 Asana Analysis: Starting with the Breath 00:21:35 6 Asana Analysis: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:24:05 7 Tadasana: Starting with the Breath 00:26:15 8 Tadasana: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:30:19 9 Tadasana: Workshop 00:33:36 10 Virabhadrasana I: Starting with the Breath 00:49:29 13 Virabhadrasana I: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:54:35 14 Virabhadrasana I: Workshop 01:00:36 16 Virabhadrasana II: Starting with the Breath 01:17:30 20 Virabhadrasana II: Joint & Muscle Actions 01:22:18 21 Virabhadrasana II: Workshop 01:27:42 23 Virabhadrasana III: Starting with the Breath 01:39:25 26 Virabhadrasana III: Joint & Muscle Actions 01:43:33 27 Virabhadrasana III: Workshop 01:49:33 28

Transcript of Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana...

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

Topic Timestamp Page #

Asana Analysis: Introduction 00:01:14 1

Asana Analysis: Benefits of a Pose 00:11:40 4

Asana Analysis: Starting with the Breath 00:21:35 6

Asana Analysis: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:24:05 7

Tadasana: Starting with the Breath 00:26:15 8

Tadasana: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:30:19 9

Tadasana: Workshop 00:33:36 10

Virabhadrasana I: Starting with the Breath 00:49:29 13

Virabhadrasana I: Joint & Muscle Actions 00:54:35 14

Virabhadrasana I: Workshop 01:00:36 16

Virabhadrasana II: Starting with the Breath 01:17:30 20

Virabhadrasana II: Joint & Muscle Actions 01:22:18 21

Virabhadrasana II: Workshop 01:27:42 23

Virabhadrasana III: Starting with the Breath 01:39:25 26

Virabhadrasana III: Joint & Muscle Actions 01:43:33 27

Virabhadrasana III: Workshop 01:49:33 28

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

[Timestamp 00:00:00]

Narrator: Welcome back to YogaAnatomy.net Fundamentals. This is Unit 7, Anatomy in Asana and Asana Philosophy. We'll begin this unit with an in-depth look at how Amy & Leslie approach asana in their own practices and teaching lives. Then we'll set up how we'll approach the poses in the Asana Library.

Leslie will explain why he looks at each pose from a breath-centered perspective, and Amy will share why she prefers to start with joint and muscle actions. You'll have the benefit of looking at the poses from both of these perspectives.

Every pose in the Asana Library will finish up with a workshop. Each one is a little different, but you can expect to examine how different traditions might approach each asana, experiment with strategies to make the poses accessible for different body types, and pick up some of Amy & Leslie's favorite cues.

In this unit, we'll start exploring standing poses. We'll begin with tadasana, then move through all 3 warriors and see how they relate to each other and what's unique about each one.

But first, here are Amy and Leslie with their philosophy on asana.

[00:01:14] Asana Analysis: Introduction

Amy: We have picked 20 poses to explore in varying degrees of depth. These poses may or may not be part of your regular practice. If they are not part of your regular practice or if we don't explore the particular approach you take to the pose, we hope that you’ll take the inquiry and the questions that we bring to it into your own practice.

Leslie: I am frequently reminded of a story that my teacher loves to tell about how he would observe his father, Krishnamacharya, teaching his students individually. Occasionally Desikachar would see his father clearly invent something on the spot that he had never seen before. He would ask him afterwards, "Father, what was that? Where did that come from?” He would always say, "I learned it from my teacher," when clearly he had invented it in the moment. I believe, though, that the truth to that statement other than deflecting credit and trying to be humble was really that the principles that he had learned from his teacher allowed him to invent something on the spot when it was needed.

So the spirit of inquiry and some of the principles behind the way we look at things and analyze them, hopefully, will allow you to draw from what you see into the specific situations that you find yourself in as a teacher.

Amy: So what are we doing in asana, Leslie?

Leslie: What are we doing in asana? Well, it's interesting because you’ll hear us using the term asana and yoga interchangeably for a lot of the course. When we're doing yoga, what we're really saying is when we're practicing asana. So I think it might be useful just to take a moment to talk about the relationship and perhaps distinction between the two terms.

So asana is a tool of yoga, according to the teachings. It's one aspect of yoga. It's one that's very popular, obviously, and that we all have relatively easy access to. But in order for asana to be a tool of yoga, I go to the teachings about what constitutes yoga practice. This we find in Patanjali, in The Yoga Sutra, where he describes yoga practice as having these three parts of tapas, svadhyaya and ishvara pranidhana. How that plays out in asana practice is really quite interesting.

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

The very first class you take and the very first group of people you're surrounded by when you're taking an asana class, what shows up immediately is, "Wow, there's a lot of things I can't do with my body that these other people can do.” Maybe there's also, "Wow, this isn't so hard. I can do this," and then you see other people struggling with the thing that you can do easily.

So already we're gathering information about the similarities and differences between ourselves and other people, and the question arises, how much of this is changeable? How much of what I can't do now will I be able to do if I pursue this practice. That's the tapas conversation. That's the creating change in the system.

What we'll also run into, and this is where anatomy can be very useful is, “Are there unique things about the way my body is put together or how it's developed that makes certain things not so changeable – maybe not so changeable right now or changeable very slowly or not changeable at all?”

The attitude that we can cultivate towards those things that we discover about ourselves and our own anatomy through asana practice would be surrender, and that's encompassed by this term of ishvara pranidhana, of surrendering to the things that are greater or larger, or more permanent, than ourselves, the things that don't change so easily.

Of course, the connecting principle is svadhyaya. This is the idea that we can have this attitude of self-study, which is really what this process is about. It helps us to distinguish the things that we can work on changing and the things to which we should surrender or at least put aside for now, because they’ll change very slowly, if at all.

So this, to me, is how asana practice becomes a tool of yoga, when we take our experiences on and then off the mat and organize them in this way of thinking. What's going to change? What's not going to change? What can I work at? What do I need to work at surrendering to? Sometimes learning to surrender to something is the hardest work of all.

Amy: Yes.

Leslie: The svadhyaya, of course, is what allows us to know where to direct our efforts at either changing or surrendering.

Amy: Yeah, definitely. I think there's also a part of that self-inquiry about what the asana is actually about and why am I setting out to change. What am I changing to move towards in terms of, have I not accomplished the asana if I can't get my head to my knee? Maybe the point is a question. Maybe the point is to get my head to my knee, and inside of that I have to examine what I can change and what I can't change, and I can't do that and my frustration about not being able to do that, and how I negotiate the frustration of not doing the task, which is to get my head to my knee.

But there's this question about knowing what an asana is about, also, I think, that becomes part of that inquiry. Either we're told what the asana is about by our teacher, or the style, and they might say, "This is what you do. You get your hand to your foot and you do whatever you have to to do that. Either you bend your knee or you adjust your body or you do whatever."

At some point early in my study of asana in New York, I went to a lot of different yoga studios. They all had these different approaches to asana. Each one highlighted or emphasized a different aspect. In one style of trikonasana, the feet are further apart. In another style the feet are closer together. In another style

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

you get your hand to your toe. There's one approach where your front knee is bent. All of those are called trikonasana, so we run into that naming question as well.

Leslie: Right.

Amy: But I think there's also this question, then, about is there a right way or is there something different that arises in each approach? I think that each approach or each style of yoga, it can have its own integrity. That this trikonasana connected to this, connected to this down dog, that they can create a wholeness that isn't right in an absolute way, but it is what has been determined to be that approach to yoga. I can go to another school. I can go to another studio and do a whole different thing, and the question becomes not, can I do that task because I'll be a better yogi if I get my head on the floor? But the svadhyaya, the way I engage with the question of having my feet wide, of having my feet narrow, of having my knee bent, of not having my knee bent, becomes another kind of yoga, I think, and another way to engage with the asana.

I came out of that experience hearing people really convinced that this is the way to do an asana, or this is the way to do an asana, and they would say with absolute heartfelt determination completely opposite things. It made me think, "What is this about?” Maybe it is about getting inside the style. But for me, it became a question about, if there's not an absolute platonic ideal of an asana out there, what arises when I do it this way? What could it be about and what happens when I make it about getting both sit bones on the floor? What happens when I make it about finding spinal rotation? What happens when I make it an inquiry about the articulation at the knee or a sense of the whole body connection, or the pathways of weight, that I can bring any kind of question to the form of the asana and I can make it about that, and then within that, inquire.

One of the things I like about that idea is that, if we make the form a vehicle for exploration, there might be more ways to have everybody feel successful. The way of succeeding might not be getting your head to your knee, but engaging in the question. Then again, it might be about getting your head to the knee.

[Timestamp 00:10:00]

Leslie: But I think as teachers, a concern I know I have is, as you said, to have everyone in the room feel successful. Not necessarily complacent…

Amy: No, right.

Leslie: ...about not needing to change something they have uncovered about themselves, but to feel successful at what they're doing in that moment, even if it's recognizing that they are confused or that they are having trouble feeling what they think they should be feeling in that moment.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite sayings of my teacher, that the recognition of confusion, that's a form of clarity. If you can be clear that you're confused about something, that's a very powerful starting place for an inquiry. The nonrecognition of confusion, that's a whole other problem. That's what we call avidya, and that's the source of all the kleshas and all of the suffering that yoga hopefully can help to relieve us from.

Amy: Yeah. It reminds me of something that my teacher Mark also says, which is that we are already perfect. Which I think feeds into this question about the inquiry. Why are we doing yoga, maybe, or why are we doing asana? Right? Is it because I am insufficient and I need to get better at something, or because I am engaged in some kind of question about myself?

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

Leslie: Maybe I'm not perfect at recognizing how perfect I am already, and I need to practice that.

Amy: Well, that's entirely possible.

[00:11:40] Asana Analysis: Benefits of a Pose

Leslie: So building on this idea of how important context is, I'm reminded of my teacher, TKV Desikachar, always saying that yoga is relationship. What he meant by that is that, first of all, the primary vehicle for the transmission of yoga was always a direct relationship between the teacher and the student. A relationship in which they could understand each other's context and come up with a common language, or a common story, in which the teachings and the benefits could be communicated from one to the other.

So that story is unique, though, to that relationship. And each and every relationship he had with every one of his students had a different context and a different story that went along with it, and a different way of interpreting the teachings that would be beneficial for that particular student.

Amy: The way he chose the asana, then, was based on that relationship also. Right?

Leslie: Both the asana and how it would be taught, and what would be emphasized in the asana. Sometimes, for example, and I've learned this in my work, if someone comes to me with a breathing issue, occasionally the last thing you want to bring their attention to is their breathing, because it makes them very anxious. You have to just get their body moving and understand that movement is breath, and that, eventually, it will help them.

Amy: Yeah. Because of this variety of responses that happen in asana, we don't attribute certain qualities to an asana. We don't say that an asana will necessarily have a certain effect on someone. Instead, we're interested in dialogue with people in that relationship in finding out how the asana and the person's story, appearance, context, environment, being intersects, to see what arises in that moment.

Leslie: It may seem like you can only apply this in the context of a one on one session with the student, but actually, in the context of teaching groups of students, even large groups of students, it's as simple as, on the one hand, suggesting that they try this, try this, within certain parameters that you set up for their experience. But not going the extra step of saying, "But this is the benefit you will get," or, "This is what you will feel," or, "That is where you will feel it."

So even in a group of whatever size, there's a possibility of empowering each and every student to understand that whatever they are experiencing is theirs and valid and useful.

Amy: Can you hand me that?

Leslie: This?

Amy: Yes. So in the Yoga Anatomy book, you won't find a description of the properties of a pose. We won't say, we don't say in it, what effect any pose will have. So you can explore the poses from the anatomical ideas that we have to share, but we don't try to say, "This is the affect you should go looking for or you should necessarily have."

Leslie: So that brings up the question of, how did all of these properties originally get ascribed to asana practice? You go even to some of the ancient texts when they list whatever asanas they do list. They will

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

say, "Oh, this does that. This will banish this disease or this will make that thing disappear.” Or, to not use more of a western anatomical thing about the effects on the glands or the organs, some of them will say, "This one will clear out your 72,000 nadis."

So these descriptions actually are in some of the traditional yoga texts. How does this arise in the first place, where these properties do get ascribed to the asanas?

Amy: Well, I don't know because I wasn't there. But I suspect that what happened was that someone explored them and said, "Oh, I had this experience! You will have the same experience," maybe from some assumption that we both respond the same way to things. But you and I, we don't have the same bodies. We don't have the same sensation when we do a forward bend. So it's an interesting question about why we assume other people have the same experience, and I think there's a lot of really kind and helpful impulse behind that wanting to help you, and this helped me, so if you do this, this will help you. But it takes away sometimes someone else's agency.

Leslie: Sure.

Amy: I think it's also a question about translation, and an attempt to say, "I had this experience and I'm going to describe in anatomical language what happened," when in fact it might fit better in a different paradigm that isn't anatomically described.

Leslie: Sure. Some people really don't relate to anatomical imagery or information in terms of organizing what they're feeling in their bodies. For some people, it makes more sense to say, "My orange chakra is blocked."

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: That really is a valid way of language-ing or mapping an inner experience. That's of an evocative model for them.

Amy: Yeah, and it's not any more or less real than the anatomical model, which is something I find interesting. When we try to map chakras onto anatomy or bandhas onto anatomy, it's making the anatomy the most real thing.

Leslie: It's just a story.

Amy: Exactly. It tries to make that kind of language more right. So everything gets more validity if it's got an anatomical base, and I think that leaves aside the understanding, or doesn't acknowledge that anatomy is a story. Anatomy is a way of framing our experience that is also very context driven. It's very Western. It assumes a foundation of Latin and Greek and it actually has embedded in it a model of the body as being able to be divided into separate parts. Where, some other models, some other approaches or some other maps, like Ayurveda or Chinese medicine don't take into account that same division of parts.

Another thing that happens when we make the anatomical model the most important is that sometimes people try to fit their experience into the anatomical model when it's not the one that makes the most sense to them. If we make it most right, then there's this forcing our experience into a certain way, when it might make more sense for them to look to another model. If whatever we have been told to do to help us in terms of bones and joints and muscles doesn't solve it, it might be that looking at the nadis or the chakras or some other model would be more helpful. That ability to try different things out, because we

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

have so many different ways of experiencing ourselves, is really important, and to not make one right and make one wrong.

Leslie: I would add to that that perhaps your model is one that nobody else has thought of yet. In workshop, sometimes we will just put people down with crayons and big pieces of paper and say, "Draw your inner landscape.” See what comes up. Maybe there's a green field and a sky and a cave somewhere, and when you go inside, don't let the models that everyone else has thought of limit you. It's an infinite range of possibilities that you can experience and express by going inside with as few pre-digested assumptions as possible. There is such a temptation to just lay these maps on top of each other. I have this image of, you know those books, like in certain encyclopedias...

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: ...They had these transparent overlays, which are so beautiful, where you can see different layers of something. That's fine if you're saying, "Oh, here's the skeletal system, and here's the circulatory system and here's the nervous system.” Then you're kind of seeing through the body. But those are all maps from a singular story. But then if you take that transparency of the skeletal system or the neuroendocrine system and then you lay the chakras on top of that and you go,

[Timestamp 00:20:00]

"Oh, where do those connect?"

Amy: If we try to connect them. I think if we left them separate and went, "Here is this and here is this, and they coexist," that might be interesting. But when we go and we have to put them in the same paradigm, then we start limiting them both.

Leslie: Sure. Yeah. I think the last thing I would like to say, maybe it's not the last thing. The last thing I'll say about it is that we get this so much when we're teaching. I know Amy does too, so I hopefully can speak for the both of us. That the questions that arise so often are a reflection of how we were taught our practice and our anatomy, leaving out the context of the individual. I would go so far as to say that asana, the concept of asana, really only arises in reality when an individual, living, breathing, human being puts their body in a shape in a certain relationship to gravity in that moment. That's asana.

To then take the concept of asana out of that context and describe it as some disembodied platonic ideal, to go back to philosophy, that has these properties, and our practice is somehow to aspire to achieving that ideal, I think that's when we can get into a lot of trouble.

Amy: Right. Then we're making ourselves fit the asana, instead of having the asana and the yoga serve the individual.

Leslie: Fantastic.

[00:21:35] Asana Analysis: Starting with the Breath

Leslie: In a breath-centered approach to asana, the primary focus is the relationship of the active inhaling and exhaling to what the spine is doing, to certain alignment objectives, and to the overall internal

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

experience of what we're trying to accomplish. It's a way of making sure that the form of the practice is serving the function of the practice.

And what I'm going to try to illuminate by exploring a variety of asanas from a breath-centered perspective, is that you can't really affect what's going on in the spine without affecting the breathing, and you can't affect the processes of breathing without in some way changing what's going on in the spine.

Because they're really one in the same. If our definition of breathing as "shape-change in the cavities" is at all useful, one of the fundamental aspects of that definition is that the back of that cavities is actually the spine. So, by definition, the act of inhaling and exhaling, which changes the shape of the cavities, is changing the shape of the spine. It's certainly changing the way we can support and mobilize the spine.

So as we go through a variety of standing, and seated, and lying down poses, what we're going to look at is how to find a neutral, comfortable place for the spine and the breathing, and use that as a starting point for exploring certain ranges of motion or movements that take us from that starting point into the shape of the asana.

So I hope you enjoy the exploration. And I hope you feel free to experiment with some of these things. It's really about showing all the different questions we can raise, as much as it is providing certain answers or tricks or techniques. One of the questions we would raise is, "Do you always have to inhale when you're going into a backbend, or can you exhale?" "Do you always have to inhale in the belly, or can you inhale in the chest?"

So being free to explore these different ways of approaching the relationship of breath and movement, or spinal actions and breathing, is one of the things I hope to emphasize. So, enjoy!

[00:24:05] Asana Analysis: Joint & Muscle Actions

Amy: When I start to try to understand what is happening anatomically and kinesiologically in an asana, I look at what joints are moving and then what muscles are lengthening and shortening in terms of being the agonist, in terms of being the main mover as a concentric or as an eccentric contraction.

I look at how it would be to come into that position, more than what it is to be in the position. Once we're in a position and holding it, that action in the muscles is isometric, aside from the adjustments we make for our breathing. I think this is a really interesting starting place. A lot of times, where we feel the most movement or what we feel moving through space is not where the articulation is actually happening. Or there might be an articulation happening in several different joints and we put our intention only on one. That understanding of what the joint action is and what the relationship is to gravity, and then of what muscle is controlling it, I think, is a good starting place to then dive into the sensation that each individual person is having.

So we can compare the analysis, the information from the shape of the pose, with where the sensation is. Then we can set out to see what we think it might be about, or how to help someone have a different experience or deepen their experience in it.

Now, as much as we look at what muscle might be controlling a movement or describe the movement in that way, it's also important to realize that all of our muscles might be participating in the conversation.

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There are whole other sets of muscles that are stabilizing or supporting or orienting themselves around where the joint articulation is happening.

So where the sensation is may or may not match up to what muscle we would describe as controlling or being the agonist in that particular joint action. That analysis of muscles as a starting place for further exploration, rather than the end of the question.

[00:26:15] Tadasana: Starting with the Breath

Leslie: Okay, we're going to look at simple standing, usually referred to as tadasana from a breath-centered perspective. Just a note about terminology, tadasana is generally understood to be this pose where your feet are close and your arms are by your side, and you're actively lengthening your spine. But just a note on the terminology, it's not the same in all systems. For example, my teacher Desikachar, tadasana you're up on the balls of your feet and you're reaching your arms over your head. That's tadasana from his perspective, and also this is known as samasthiti, from the Ashtanga perspective, whereas samasthiti for Desikachar is with the feet apart and frequently in this posture here. And they all have the same teacher, Krishnamacharya, but they use terminology differently.

So I'd like to ask for some help. Thank you. So line yourself up facing that way, okay? So I'd like you just to stand, your feet are comfortably apart, heels under your sitting bones, that kind of lines your bones up a bit, and without doing anything particularly active, just standing with a neutral spine.

The distinction between a neutral spine and an axial extended spine is going to be very important, particularly as you go through some of the other postures, because it really changes things from a breath perspective.

So in a neutral spine, you're not doing anything particularly intense, you're just letting your bones in your spine stack up on each other. The curve of the lumbar spine is supporting the curve of the thoracic spine, which is supporting the curve of the cervical spine, which in turn is supporting the weight of the head and the shoulder girdle.

So if you were to actively lengthen the crown of your head towards the sky, notice that immediately shifts the breathing, right? Did you feel like you had to do something in your rib cage, right? Something happens in the lower abdominals.

So when you're actively flattening the curves of your spine, we call this axial extension. It's not the same thing as a neutral spine, and it has an affect on the breathing structures, because, even if you simply think of pressing your feet more strongly down into the earth, that's going to affect your breathing. Because in order for the feet to be pressing down, something else has to be coming up, and that's here in the region of the lower belly. This is where that lower bandha would be arising. But if you're squeezing into the lower belly, it's going to cause a bulge in the top of your abdominal cavity, which lives inside the base of your rib cage. So you have to open the base of your rib cage, and this is the region here what we call the uddiyana region here.

And then, if you're thinking of lengthening, or flattening slightly, the curve in your cervical spine, you're actually doing the beginnings of what we refer to as the jalandhara bandha or the chin lock, which is actually much more about the sternum rising up towards the chin than driving the chin down towards the sternum.

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Unit 7: Anatomy in Asana & Asana Philosophy

Now this is a great example of how this action of bandha arises naturally when we're doing things with the spine. Okay? Just the idea of lengthening the crown of your head up or pressing the feet down is going to cause these bandhas to arise. You don't have to do anything extra, really, when you're lengthening the spine. The actions that lengthen the spine are the bandhas.

So now just let all that go. It's a little more relaxed. You got a little shorter, that's fine, okay? It's nice to be able to make yourself longer when you need to, but you don't need to be doing it all the time, right?

A neutral spine is actually a more relaxed, responsive spine.

[Timestamp 00:30:00]

An axial extended spine, it is longer, it is more engaged, it is more energetic, but it's actually a little stiffer. It's not quite as adaptable as a neutral spine.

So that's tadasana, standing samasthiti, whatever from a breath-centered perspective. Thank you.

[00:30:19] Tadasana: Joint & Muscle Actions

Amy: In tadasana, when we look at the joint actions and the muscles that are engaged, the joint actions don't change very much, except for the movement of the ribs relative to the breathing and whatever the spine moves to accommodate the movement of the breath.

So whatever position your tadasana is set up in, there's not an articulation that is necessary in any joint to do the pose. With that in mind, though, tadasana is not without muscle activity.

So instead of being a question about concentric and eccentric engagement, a question of muscles lengthening and shortening, maintaining tadasana is a question of isometric engagement, and as someone stands in tadasana for a period of time, different muscles might engage to help maintain this alignment of the bones.

It's not always the same muscles, and the same person won't use the same sets of muscles in any given moment. Then, over time, the same person may change which muscles they're using.

But some of the places where people end up feeling that muscle activity is at the back of the head to balance the weight of the head. But it could be distributed around the whole circumference of the neck area, around the thoracic spine, with the movement of the breath, how to also find the weight. What muscles to engage that allow the weight to travel through the spine without restricting too much movement there. Then, in the abdomen and in the pelvis, what we use to keep the weight traveling through into the legs.

Often in the legs the front of the legs get very active in maintaining this. It's possible to also use the back of the legs. Then, in the lower limbs, down at the forelegs and the feet, there's certainly a lot of shifting activity to maintain balance.

Depending on what the base of support is, how wide it is, in this case a wider position might ask less balancing effort in the muscles than a narrower position. A narrower position might recruit more in the feet and the lower legs, but still in an isometric sense. It's interesting to maintain a pose without actually articulating in any joints and realize that we still might use a lot of different muscles.

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So as you hold a pose, you might acknowledge or explore the idea that even though the joints aren't changing, aren't articulating, the bones aren't changing their position, what muscle we use can change to maintain that position.

So from the feet to the legs to the pelvis to the spine, the torso, the head and neck, even into the arms, we can use different muscles to maintain this position. Tadasana is a great place to explore that.

[00:33:36] Tadasana: Workshop

Amy: If we take a look at what tadasana might mean, as simple as it is, there are many ways to explore it. So it's a standing pose. Happens often at the beginning or in the middle of a pose, or as a transition between things.

One of the things I'm really interested in exploring in something like tadasana is what happens in our awareness.

So stand up. Take a few steps forward. Take a few steps back. End up at the front of your mat on two feet, and then don't fix your feet. Don't fix them. Watch the impulse to fix or adjust or correct. Just watch it. You can close your eyes. You don't have to look at me. You can look at me. You can look straight ahead. You can look down.

See what arises in standing.

Now, if you find you're in excruciating discomfort, go ahead and make an adjustment. But if you're intolerable discomfort or just interesting something, see if you can hang with it. What is it about being here that you want to adjust? How do you experience yourself in this moment when you aren't doing anything else with your limbs but standing here?

There is still an enormous amount going on in your body. Your heart is beating. Your blood is moving. Your breath is moving. Whatever meal you last ate is getting digested. Your kidneys are processing your blood. Your cells are breathing. Your brain is taking in messages, processing them, deciding what you think and feel about things. See what kind of sensations arise here and where the impulse to change something comes, and what happens if you don't change it.

Now, sometimes when this happens, when you ask this question, real discomfort does start to arise somewhere. If it does start to arise, see if it's a kind of pressure or in a kind of accumulation of energy somewhere. Can you disperse that? Can you adjust how the weight travels through your bones?

Can you inquire now about how the weight of your legs gets into your feet? Can you feel or imagine where your sacrum is? Specifically, the front of your sacrum, receiving the weight of your spine.

From the front of your sacrum, can you find your way through your pelvis halves to your femurs, to the bones in your thighs. Can you find your way from your sacrum through the right pelvic half to the right leg, and then down through the right lower leg into your right foot.

Can you find your way from your sacrum through your left pelvic half into your left leg, all the way down through the lower leg into your foot?

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Now, as you ask that question about the pathway of weight, about the passage of weight, you may feel different muscles engage to help organize the sensation or the pathway. See now as you do that if you're also engaging anything that you do not need.

So how little can you do and have a clear pathway of weight from your sacrum to your feet.

So if you have a habit of engaging the muscles of your legs, see what happens if you don't do that. Now, if you let go of everything, your legs won't hold you up. Probably. Maybe you get them stacked just so, that no effort is needed. But chances are good the movement of your breath, the beating of your heart, the movement of your fluids is shifting you just enough that you do need to continually adjust. But it does not take very much, in theory, to be here. It might take so little as to be imperceptible.

So could you imagine that the amount of activity that you use to be here is maybe 1% of what's available to you, that you might not even notice it? And that, if you're looking for a sensation of muscle activity, to know that you're standing here. Can you listen for maybe some other feedback? Can you listen for the weight traveling through your bones?

Then bring that question to your spine. How do the curves of your spine arrive,

[Timestamp 00:40:00]

in your sacrum, in the sense that they are transmitting the weight of your head through their curves to the sacrum, to the legs, to the feet?

How do you feel the weight of the ribs hanging from the spine?

How do you feel the movement of the breath affecting the resilience of the ribs or the rebound of the ribs? How do you sense the weight of your arms?

In this position, can you feel or imagine the pathway through your bones from your sternum to your collarbones, to your scapula, to your arm bones, upper arms, lower arms, to your fingertips?

Now, in tracing those pathways through the bones, see if you have accumulated any pressure anywhere, or if the accumulation of energy that you might have felt before is still there.

Now, if you would like to change something, if you would like to adjust your feet, you have permission to. But if you don't need to, see if you're going to. So if you want to, you can. But make it a choice.

Then come back to that sense of the weight traveling through your bones into the floor.

See what your experience now is of the space around you if you simply open your eyes. How do you feel yourself in the room that you're in? How is your inner awareness in relationship to your outer awareness?

Does this feel familiar? Does it feel unfamiliar? Does it feel like something you would call tadasana? The answer might be no. I'm going to invite us to add something to this.

So now, then, register that experience and bring a different kind of sense to your feet of engaging your feet with the floor, of pressing your feet into the floor and drawing energy up through your feet.

Imagine that the soles of your feet are like a diaphragm. So the pelvic floor is a muscular diaphragm. The thoracic diaphragm is a diaphragm. We can consider other horizontal layers of muscle or layers of

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multiple muscle as diaphragms. So how would it be now if you oriented the soles of your feet as a kind of diaphragm where you're relating to the energy going down and the energy coming up? From the soles of your feet, can you find the floor of your pelvis and the relationship between them?

From the floor of your pelvis, can you find a relationship to your thoracic diaphragm?

From your thoracic diaphragm, the floor of your pelvis and your feet?

Your feet to the floor of your pelvis, your thoracic diaphragm, and let's say your soft palette? The soft palette is the back of the roof of your mouth where the bone becomes soft tissue and muscle. Can you find your soft palette in relationship some how?

That's a pretty broad term, relationship. So, in relationship, the soft palette, the thoracic diaphragm, the pelvis floor and the soles of your feet.

Can you feel in that relationship between the diaphragms both energy moving downward? Maybe the weight of your bones moving down into the floor? And now also energy moving upward from the floor.

Then you could see if you want to feel something at the top of your head or even above your head, so that you begin to connect to the space above you as well as to the floor below you.

See, in this place, if you open your eyes and feel or see the space around you, how do you experience the relationship between your inner awareness and your outer awareness?

Does this, perhaps, feel like tadasana?

Keep your eyes open and looking forward and try one more possibility. There are many more, but we're going to try one more.

Which is to, from the top of your head now, reach up. Imagine that the top of your head is reaching for the heavens and let that draw the curves out of your spine. Can you increase the distance between your head and the floor by extending your spine along its axis, axial extension?

See what you want to do in response to that in your arms. Bring a little energy into your fingertips to match the energy of your head reaching up.

See what this does to your attention and the balance of your inner and outer awareness in the room.

Then, for yourself then, see what feels like tadasana. Or, if you've learned a set of instructions about tadasana, take again, for a moment, your own tadasana, or what you've been taught, and see if it's different than what you have already done, or if it expresses something else about what it is to stand and be present.

Then release that. Bring your attention inwards in some way and find your way down to the floor.

So even a pose as fundamental as tadasana can play many roles in a practice, many roles in how we balance our inner and outer experiences, and different traditions have different ideas about what it is about. It can be a profound experience.

It's one of the most interesting things I find to do, to simply stand and see what comes up. Also, in my own ideas about what I think should be happening, as opposed to what arises when I am, in a similar way

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to being in savasana, but in this other relationship to gravity that might also be about being outward or inward, or in some balance of the two.

Thank you.

[00:49:29] Virabhadrasana I: Starting with the Breath

Leslie: So continuing to look at standing asana from a breath-centered perspective, I'm going to talk about warrior pose, virabhadrasana.

Now there's a variety of opinions on where exactly the stance should be. We're not going to necessarily get into that right now. All I'm going to do is I'm going to take a comfortable stance that maintains the spacing of the sitting bone distance between my heels.

[Timestamp 00:50:00]

In other words, I'm not going to narrow my stance as a step forward, okay?

And the main distinction I want to make is the same distinction I made for the difference between a neutral spine and an axial extended spine when we're in tadasana. So the idea that the axial extended spine should always be a part of the alignment of the pose would lead to the commonly given cue of squaring hips to the front to create this shape, right? So the idea is that the spine is lengthened and that that lengthened spine maintains its shape and its engagement as everything turns from the pelvis. Now that has a certain implication for the breath. In other words, we're engaging bandhas and keeping the spine lengthened.

Now this is actually, the full pose is actually bit of a back bend, right? So you can't fully keep axial extension as you go in to a back bend. But to take a step back and say, "What if the neutral spine were the starting point and we didn't necessarily have to square the hips to get to the front?

What if what turned us to the front actually originated in the breathing structures? What if we allowed the spine to twist as part of coming to the front?" Now that allows the movement in the pelvis to participate, but it doesn't require you all of it to come from the pelvis. That has, actually, a different affect on the breathing and you can try it and see.

Actually, why don't you guys try it and see. Stand up and try it. Because if we're sensitive to the effect of what we're doing with our alignment, on our breathing structure, or if we're sensitive to how we breathe is going to affect our alignment, it brings a whole other level of dialogue to what we're doing. So think of, first of all, engage axial extension first, keep your spine lengthened, and turn now from the pelvis, and rise into the pose.

And notice how that feels in the shoulder girdle, how it feels in the rib cage and the spine and in your breathing. And then release it, kind of let go of that. And now don't think of turning from the pelvis, but think of your sternum turning to the front, your ribs turning, your organs turning. The contents of your body are turning and twisting as well, and that twist can arrive in the pelvis but it doesn't have to originate there.

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And then having done it that way, rise up and get a sense of how your shoulders feel, how your breathing feels, and release. Good. Come on back. You should probably try that on the other side. Sometimes we notice that we twist more easily to one side than the other and that's an interesting thing to find out about ourselves.

So again axial extension, notice that there's a breathing engagement even before you come in to the pose. It actually reduces the ability of the spine to twist a little bit when you're axially extended. So the most, more of it needs to come from the pelvis and see how that feels, take a few breaths. And then release, let it go. Find the neutral spine, keep the spine relaxed and neutral and start that turn from your sternum, from the ribcage, from your organs, from your belly, and it arrives in the pelvis. And then take a few breaths and see how that how feels.

Does it feel different when you do it that way?

Student: Absolutely.

Leslie: Yeah, yeah, it usually does. And step back, good, just take a few breaths there with the neutral spine.

So I'm not suggesting there's a right and a wrong way to do this. I'm just saying that the way we initiate movement matters, whether we're thinking of keeping our spine lengthened at all times or starting from a neutral spine matters. It has an effect on our breathing and the breathing, of course, has an effect on the alignment.

So that's warrior one.

[00:54:35] Virabhadrasana I: Joint & Muscle Actions

Amy: When we look at the joint actions and muscle actions that happen in coming into virabhadrasana I, different actions get emphasized and different muscles engage concentrically and eccentrically depending on what our starting point is.

So if we start from a position at the back of a mat like this, and if you turn one foot out, if we take this as the starting position, in the transition from here to stepping forward, and step one foot forward please. Bend your front knee so that you're in virabhadrasana I. Leave your foot where it is. Just bend your knee. Yep.

What happened in that transition on the back leg, the main articulation was in this joint, the hip joint, and she extended this hip joint. The knee did not change so much. The ankle changed its position and articulated in that step.

So this movement of stepping forward from that starting position asks something to articulate in the hip joint and in the ankle joint.

In the front leg, then, she articulated in her hip joint, her knee joint and her ankle joint to take that change of weight. Yes.

So what happened then in that stepping forward is that this hip flexed, but to receive the weight of the hip flexing in the front leg and the knee bending, there's an eccentric action in the back of the leg to receive

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the weight, and also an eccentric action over the front of the knee to keep the knee from bending further than she wants it to.

So it is not necessarily concentric here. Even though the knee is bent, the back of the knee does not have to actively shorten. Because in this relationship to gravity, gravity is pulling her down and resisting going further into gravity would call for an eccentric action here and an eccentric action in the back of the leg here.

In the back leg, then, with that shift of weight, there would also be an eccentric action, thank you. In the back leg, then, there would also be an eccentric action in the front of the hip to keep from going further forward than she wanted to, though she might also feel some activity shortening concentrically in the back of the leg to have shifted her weight forward.

Once that base is established, then, a whole different set of muscles might be involved in lifting the arms up. And release them down.

So from this starting position, then, step your right leg back and place your foot down as if it were in warrior I. Now stay there for a moment.

In this weight shift, a different set of actions need to happen to come into a similar position of hip extension in the back leg, hip flexion and knee flexion in the front leg. But, now, instead of the coming forward, focusing on the eccentric action of the back leg, to take her leg back, there was a shortening activity in the back of the hip.

It might have been more concentric to step back, though to maintain it now will involve both the front and the back.

In the front leg, then, it's still eccentric in the back of the front leg and eccentric on the front knee to come into this position. But then, to come up from here, she will have to do a concentric action through the back of the body to bring herself up to standing. So go ahead and come up to standing.

These muscles reorganize to bring herself up, leaving out what happens in the arms for the moment.

An interesting thing about coming into warrior I from this position is that it emphasizes a slightly different part of the joint action that happens coming into virabhadrasana I.

This starting position has, as its starting point, abduction of the legs. So the legs are separated from each other in this starting position away from the midline.

What we'll see as she comes into warrior I, then—please come into warrior I—is that we add to it what's often called rotation. This turning of her pelvis inside of the position involves both a switch from the legs being separate to the legs drawing towards midline, adduction, and a sense, perhaps, of rotation in the back leg or in the front leg.

Interestingly enough, though, that movement, though it rotated the pelvis through space, is not actually creating external rotation of the front leg,

[Timestamp 01:00:00]

and may or may not create a sense of external rotation in the back leg.

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In doing that movement, though, muscles that are called rotators might slide short in the front area, might slide long, eccentrically engage, or just lengthen, in the back of the front hip, and might concentrically contract in the back of the back hip and lengthen either eccentrically or just as a response to the back action in the front hip.

Thank you. You can come out of that.

[01:00:36] Virabhadrasana I: Workshop

Amy: We’re going to take a look now at virabhadrasana I, or warrior I.

So would you all take what you know as being warrior I. Whichever leg. Put your right leg forward.

Right leg forward. Other right leg forward. What do you usually do with your arms? Great.

So as we look around the room we see everybody has their arms up, varying lengths of the pose and, to some degree, a variety of angles in the back foot and then some variety of choices. The arms are up, but about how narrow or how wide they are.

So I want to talk about some of those different choices that come up. You can come out of the pose. I'm going to say some things. You can sit down or you can explore it with me as we go.

The first thing I want to talk about is the difference in the length of this stance.

So two different things happen. Well, many different things happen. But if we start from the back of a space and step forward, or, if you start from the front and step back, and take a stance that is short enough to easily step into and out of, you may also find that it's a stance where it's easier to square the hips and to have both hip bones pointing forward.

It might be within the range of your hip joints to have your whole pelvis pointing forward. The longer we make the stance, the more that the two pelvic halves have to articulate separately from each other and the more likely it is that we will need to call on the movement that's available in the pelvic halves to create that pose, or to create that width of the stance.

For each person, that will arise at a different moment depending on how much movement they have in their hip joints, and for each person it will get interesting at a different moment.

So if the question in doing vira I is about how we organize the lower leg or the lower legs in relationship to the sacrum, and you want to play with this, play with, for a moment, seeing at what point do you feel like your front hip starts to get pulled back, say—not your front hip, but the hip of the back leg.

Instead of trying to pull it forward, can you orient your back leg sit bone to your back leg heel and your front leg sit bone to your front leg heel? What's the difference in your experience between trying to bring both hip bones forward and letting your hip bones be an expression of what the legs are doing and, say, bringing your sacrum forward? How does that change your experience?

If the goal, if the point of doing virabhadrasana I for you is to have the whole pelvis facing forward, then shorten your stance until you can do that.

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If instead you're interested in playing with a different question, you could lengthen your stance. One of the longest stances we have is one where, if I start, for example, with my hands by my feet and I step my leg back as if I were going to be in a plank and I come up from there, I think it's the longest we ever end up in warrior I. Maybe I'm wrong.

This becomes really interesting. There's kind of a form to the organization of it. I have measured in terms of my own body proportions, something. I set my own kind of rule. Then, how do I fill it within that? So I really enjoy this question of, like, "Okay. So there's the length of my body. How do I organize this?"

Clearly I can’t get both of my hips facing forward. I can't, and I don't think it's just a question of getting more flexible in my legs.

Oh, I want to pull that back leg in. But I'm not going to. I'm going to stay in this question, right? Then I'm just going to be, like, "Okay."

So I could also do this. It happens sometimes that we could hang out in our flexibility. I can drop right into this leg.

But maybe the point isn't to get the front leg at a right angle, but instead to find that front sit bone to the front leg, back sit bone to the back leg, can I orient my sacrum forward?

Maybe my sacrum doesn't come forward and I stay in line with my sacrum, which would open me up a little bit so that the front of my legs is there, but my spine is facing this way.

Or maybe I turn my chest to face this way and I say what's front is where my sternum is, or I say what's front is where my head is. We have a lot of choices about deciding what's front. And maybe you don't decide. Maybe the style of yoga you're in decides. But facing front can mean lots of different things, right?

If the question is about being in a right angle in the front leg, then we have a whole other set of things to ask, like, "Is it essential in warrior I to have a right angle in the front leg?"

It's a position that asks a lot of our muscles to be long. So when I'm in this deep of hip flexion here and this deep of knee flexion, this muscle over my knee is fairly long, but working eccentrically. This muscle over the back of my hip is fairly long, but active. It's keeping me from dropping further, and this muscle in the front of my back hip is long and active, all of which is to keep me from dropping down.

So having muscles be that long and yet be active is fatiguing, right? You can come out of it if you need to. But it's interesting staying and going, "Oh, this is what this fatigue is. These muscles are long, and yet they are keeping me from going plop into the floor."

The question of what my spine is doing within that, then, is also interesting. Yeah. Come out of it.

So if I'm going to be in something that long and ask a question about it, then the question comes up, why? Why do I want to do it? Is it of value to work that hard? Maybe it is. Maybe it is. It's interesting to me. I'm going to do the other side. Measure it out.

Maybe it's interesting to be here and say, "Okay. Looking for right angledness. Inquiring about the length of this.” Is it sustainable? Can I breathe? If I can't breathe, if I'm holding my breath, if I'm gritting my

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teeth, if all I'm doing is hanging on for dear life, maybe not learning something. Right? But if I can inquire in here, maybe there's something interesting to be learned.

But the question is, what are we going after? Right? If I'm going after just holding on for dear life, maybe that's a lesson I need to learn. But if I'm going after, there's something being better about working that hard in the muscles of the legs and having a little more ease in the legs, maybe I don't need to work that hard.

It could be that, in a warrior pose, one of the questions might be, I have heard this, that it's about having a really strong base and a really free upper body.

It's a question of distinguishing upper and lower.

So that might be a reason to find the very edge of where the challenge is in the lower body. How much can I do and sustain?

So here's a question for you all. Find the place in your legs, if that's the question you want to explore, find the place in your legs where it's not so easy that you could do it forever, but not so hard that you can't spend any time there.

So can you find the distance in your legs where it's interesting and where maybe you can negotiate? This would be a question I would want to ask, where I could negotiate between the muscle effort needed and also feel a pathway of weight through my bones.

That's a question I want to ask. Someone else might ask a different question.

Then, within that, what's happening in your spine, in your breath, but in the capacity for movement in your spine? So could you look up and extend your spine? Could you come forward and release your spine? Could you also, if you come back up, roll through your spine? Could you release your head, and this is going to be a different question. If you release your head and close your eyes,

[Timestamp 01:10:00]

it might also be a balance question. Now, you don't have to close your eyes if releasing your head is challenging enough. You release your head. Can you roll down and can you bring your forehead to your knee?

So this is not going to be about relaxing your spine so much. Not your nose to your knee or your forehead to your knee, if it's possible. Can you do that deep flexion in your spine and keep what's going on in your legs clear for you? Maybe. Maybe not. If you can't where's the challenge?

The point is not so much to get your head to your knee, but to see where the question comes up. Then, if you have it in you from there to come back up, and can you find maybe the same extension?

So in your virabhadrasana I, how would it be to explore a back bend in the upper body with or without your arms and to feel the relationship between your legs and your arms? If you make the asana about that question, what arises?

Then come back. Stand for a moment.

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We're going to look at another question that comes up in here, which could be another way to explore this. I'm going to change sides again and talk about what happens in the back leg for a moment.

Because here is another place where I hear a lot of different things get said about how turned the back foot should be. I hear 45 degrees. You hear almost straight—sorry, almost parallel, almost the same as the front foot, almost 90 degrees to the front foot.

What I'm going to say, suggest, right now to explore, is not taking your longest stance with what would be your front leg. But, in your back foot, see where you can find that heel foot, your outer foot, before it gets very challenging. Right? Let's see if we can sort out the back leg.

Can you find the outer edge of your heel and your little toe and fourth toes and your big toe in relationship to the floor. Then, just with that much, not really worrying about what you're doing with the rest of your body, come forward and bend your front knee and see at what point you lose that organization in your foot.

Now, this could apply in warrior II. This could apply in all kinds of things. Just exploring in the foot what's possible.

There's some point past which either I drop my inner foot and I lose that spiral through the foot, or the outer edge of my foot lifts up, or all kinds of other things can happen. Right? So can you find the point at which you're right at the edge of what you can do, keeping that organization in your back foot.

Then play with how much rotation there is in terms of how far back your heel is. You might find, for you, that your heel further back lets you keep the spiral longer. You might feel that your heel not so far back lets you keep the spiral longer. Then the question becomes in your inquiry or in your school's approach to this pose, is how the foot is angled set? Like, if it' supposed to be 90 degrees, then it can be really interesting to say, "Okay. Back foot is 90 degrees. This is what I do from there.” Or is there an approach that says, "Put your back foot wherever it needs to go," because this also happens. Then maybe I can let the back foot express what my body, in that moment, wants to do.

So it can be really interesting to have an outside container about what the pose is and then see how I fill it, or to find my own version of it. They both can be really interesting ways to explore.

So I'm going to say, choose for yourself what spiral you want to have—what angle you want to have in your back foot and then see, from your back foot now, can you find your way up to your sacrum? The back hip joint is placed where sometimes we kind of push forward or we push back or things get congested. So shorten the pose up enough to start with, that you can feel what the back foot is doing in relationship to your sacrum.

Then feel what the front foot is doing in relationship to your sacrum.

Can you feel then foot to sacrum, can you find your way from your sacrum to both feet and then maybe deepen the pose as far as that connection can remain?

From the clarity of whatever you found in your legs, how would your spine express a balancing kind of movement, which might be extending. It might be arms to the side. What does your upper body want to do to express this relationship?

From there, I'm going to suggest folding forward and stepping your feet together. Then come up to stand.

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So one of the interesting things I think that can happen when we inquire about a pose in this way is that what becomes the so-called fullest expression of a pose can mean different things. So in this question of form, the fullest expression of a pose might be something that we're told.

So it might be that we're told, "You're not in the pose until your leg is at 90 degrees and your arms are overhead," in which case there's some outside definition of form that determines it. Then we know, according to that form I'm not doing it until that has happened.

But there is another way that we can explore that we might have the opportunity to do to say, "What do I think this is about?"

If I say it's about feeling the weight into both of my legs, the fullest expression of that pose might be this distance between my feet and my hands right here, because here’s where I understand something about my legs and my spine.

Or it might be some curiosity I have about something we haven't talked about.

So that question of what the fullest expression of a pose is, is one that really varies person to person and then teacher to teacher and school to school.

Thanks.

[01:17:30] Virabhadrasana II: Starting with the Breath

Leslie: So exploring a breath-centered perspective on standing poses, we're going to look at warrior 2, virabhadrasana II.

Now, again, I'm not going to go too much into the details, the minutia of the stance and where the feet are in relation to each other. I'm just going to take a comfortable stance here that actually is going to maintain the width of my sitting bones in my feet.

Now, there is a strong case that can be made for having the front foot more centered when we're doing virabhadrasana II because the pelvis is turning sideways in this pose and the hip joints, rather then being side by side, are more lined up with each other.

But this is going to depend, really, on how your individual pelvis is structured and the angle at which your leg bones enter your pelvis and the angle at which your hip sockets are facing. That's really something we need to find based on our own individual body. And actually, let me take this stance because I can turn towards the camera a bit more.

So this is going to be very similar, in theory, to what we talked about with virabhadrasana I. Where are you turning from? And is your starting point for entering into this pose going to be a neutral spine or an axial extended spine? So I'm going to start with a neutral spine, not engaging and lifting too much. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the same thing turning towards my back leg in warrior 2 that I did turning towards my front leg in warrior 1.

In other words, I'm going to start with my sternum, and I am going to feel my ribs turning and twisting and my belly twisting. And that turning action will arrive in my pelvis and my pelvic structures. It will arrive in the breathing structures in my pelvis because all of this turning does have to engage a lot of the

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action across my abdominals, across my obliques. And that has an effect on the shape of my abdominal cavity. And that actually makes me want to make a little bit more room here.

But I'm letting that happen as a result of the turning. I'm not engaging it first and then turning, which would be doing it with that sense of lengthened or axial extended spine first. So it's something that arises out of the action of turning into the pose.

[Timestamp 01:20:00]

Now, the other thing that's interesting here in warrior 2 is what happens with the arms, right, because there's actually what I would call a double spiral in the arms in warrior 2. There's this component, this spiral here, which we can think of as this opening, lifting of the top ribs and dropping of the shoulder girdle onto the top ribs. But then from the elbows down, there's another spiral that happens. And if you are able to experience those separately and then in relation to each other, it's actually a very interesting feeling in the arms. You can play with that even if you're not in the stance. You can do it from standing or sitting. You guys can try just the arm part.

Just feel the breath doing this. This would be inhale. This would be the exhale.

Then you take that deep inhale. Keep everything spiraled open from the sternum out to your elbows. And then as you exhale, just spin your forearms and hands that way.

Just take a few breaths with your arms there. There's your warrior 2 arms. It's a double spiral and is a breath spiral. This is the inhale spiral. That's the exhale spiral. Just something to play with, and release.

An additional footnote, there's no law of the universe that says that this has to be done on an inhale. This has to be done on the exhale. Try it one more time. This might feel a little weird, but try exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. And now, keep all of that in place and then inhale. Hmm. Maybe it works better for you, maybe not. But for some people, its going to work better, and release.

So inhaling when you do this, it actually opens up the back of your rib cage cage a little more than your front. So if that needs opening, you might try that.

That's warrior 2 with the breath.

[01:22:18] Virabhadrasana II: Joint & Muscle Actions

Amy: Let's look at the joint actions then in the transition into warrior II. The same one you started with before.

So come into warrior I. Bring your arms up overhead, or you can cross them on your chest. We're going to look mainly at what happens in the pelvis and take this transition from warrior I to warrior II without changing the position of your feet. Yes. Great.

Then come back to warrior I and step, sorry. Take that transition once again. I'd like to point out that what's happening in the front hip here is not rotation, but what we call abduction. So as you take this transition again, the joint action in the hip is of the knee coming out to the side, not rotating. What that means, what that might look like, would be, step your feet together, please. Face that way. Flex your hip.

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Right in front of you. Just pick it up. Yeah.

So you flex your hip and then rotate at the hip externally. Then come back to neutral. Then abduct at the hip and bring it out to the side. This is actually the action in that transition from warrior I to warrior II. Come back. Set your leg down. Come back to warrior I.

We're going to look at another little piece of this that comes in. So from warrior I, then, transition to warrior II and think about doing that action of abduction. Yes.

Now, what sometimes happens is, because of a challenge in the range of motion here, the knee gets pulled that way or rolls that way. In which case, we might need to feel like we're externally rotating to keep this desired line in the leg.

The sensation of rotation or the activation of muscles we associate with rotation may or may not have to do with actually doing the joint action of rotation. The basic movement of this, if nothing is compromised, is actually abduction in the front hip.

Then come back to warrior I. We'll look at what the back hip does. A similar thing, then, is going to show up, that from this position of hip extension, when she transitions to warrior II, it would be an action of moving from extension into abduction rather than of rotation. Because the leg here is actually not rotated so much. It didn't change its rotation so much. The change is in a shift from extension to abduction, which can be a puzzling thing to do in the pelvis. For some people, we don't do it in the pelvis. Can you tip your pelvis forward? Tip your pelvis forward the other way. Nope. Towards your front leg. Come back to warrior II and then do that tilt, yes.

So for some people, abduction is not clear in the leg. We don't do it here, but we deepen the flexion in the front hip. So if you bring your pelvis level, the abduction in the back leg needs to increase.

Okay. Come to stand with both feet facing forward, that wide legged stance. Then, from there, like you did with Leslie, can you come all at once into warrior II. Then come back.

So this transition then is more about rotation and flexion in the front hip, and is about extension and abduction in the back hip. Can you take it once again?

Mm-hmm. So coming into this pose, then, is going to involve muscles that are both rotators, abductors, extensors and flexors, and in a huge variety of combinations. But, basically, lengthening in the front in some way and shortening in the back. That shortening in the back will probably be a concentric contraction, but it could be shortening just as a result of other actions. Not because of a contraction.

It could be lengthening in the front in an eccentric kind of modulating contraction, or it can be lengthening as a result of other things shortening. The ongoing eccentric action of support from underneath to present the drop, to resist the drop into the floor at the back of the leg and the front of the leg here, those are both ongoing in this.

Then, in the back leg, in that transition, there will be sliding short in the back, sliding long in the front, in some combination of concentric and eccentric contractions, along with some shortening in here that may be concentric or may be just a result of other things, and some lengthening through the inner leg that might be as a result of the extension. It might be as a result of the abduction in the back leg.

Thank you.

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[01:27:42] Virabhadrasana II: Workshop

Leslie: Using the form of warrior II, virabhadrasana II as a starting point, I'd like to explore just one aspect of that particular shape. That is, the positioning of the shoulder girdle and arms atop the upper ribcage.

The way that each and every one of us expresses the shape changes of breathing is unique to us, and there are some patterns that a lot of people do tend to struggle with in common. One of them has to do with an overuse of some of the musculature in the chest, neck, and back, and sometimes even the arms, in assistance to the actions of breathing.

We call this accessory breathing. It's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of muscles get involved in breathing all the time for various reasons. Yet, occasionally we'll run into this problem where the neuromuscular control mechanisms, if you will, in our habit systems have a hard time recognizing the difference between the muscles that create movement in the shoulder girdle and the muscles that create movement in the ribcage. Really, a lot of them are the same muscles.

So the lack of recognition of the neuromuscular difference and the patterns that control them is what I'm talking about. A quick example of this, which I often do with people, is an exercise that involves inhaling deeply and lifting the shoulders up. This is like the bad breathing pattern, right?

So give that a try. Deep breath into the chest. Now, hold your breath but drop your shoulders.

Now exhale. That's pretty good. All you highly trained yogis did that perfectly the first time. Let me show you what happens with somebody that is usually not so highly trained

[Timestamp 01:30:00]

the first time they try that. They do this. (Leslie inhales and softly coughs)

They leak. They have a hard time holding their breath while relaxing the shoulders. For them, releasing shoulder tension also means releasing the breath. Engaging shoulder tension means taking the breath in.

So this is what I'm referring to as a confusion between the musculature that gets involved in shoulder girdle action and the musculature of breathing, or at least the neuromuscular patterns that control the musculature.

Now, this can all come up in warrior poses. It's not just warrior II, but warrior I as well, where we see people griping and holding tension here. Then they get the instruction to pull their shoulder blades down their back in response to this, okay?

But that doesn't undo the reason why the shoulders were up here in the first place.

So I find it interesting, and you can do this just sitting before we stand up. Just take a comfortable seat, wherever you are.

So I like to think of the breath and the movement that happens in the upper part of the lungs, the upper ribs and the top of the sternum. Can you, through spiraling the arms and feeling the upper spine and upper

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ribcage moving, get a sense of using this motion here as a breath motion? This would be the exhale spiraling in and down and this would be the inhale spiraling up and open.

Can you almost picture the breath entering and leaving just through the top part of the lungs? Good. All right?

So you can put your arms down. So it wasn't about the entire spine going into flexion, extension. It was really about trying to get things, basically, from here to here moving.

So that's a beginning of exploring that. But this is not actually the arm position. This is a movement for warrior II. The arm position would be actually part of the opening spiral up to the elbows. Then it would be, from the elbows down, the other spiral just in the forearms and hands. It's actually a double spiraling action in the arms.

So what would it feel like to take that nice, deep opening spiral through the entire arm, upper ribcage structure, hold it, and then as you exhale, just from the elbows down, isolate that spiral in the forearms?

Just sort of breathe there with your arms like that.

Can you freely turn your head from side to side? Or does the act of keeping your arms there engage some of your neck muscles in a way that restricts your neck movement?

Release.

The idea being this is we want to gain an experience of what it's like to have our upper ribcage supporting our shoulder girdle. Not the other way around. Not holding ourselves up from above, but allowing these structures to be supported from below.

You might ask yourself, and rightly so, "Well, if this is what holds up this, this, and this, what's holding up this?"

Well, this, this, this, this. The floor, basically. The floor is what holds everything up. So let's bring all that into it and stand.

We're not going to actually do a full warrior II just now. We're just going to take a wide stance. So you guys can face me and you guys can turn that way. All right?

So we're going to simplify the lower body action here by just taking this prasarita stance, but explore the arm movements and positioning of the upper body. So just what we did sitting down, we're going to do here standing.

Exhale, spiraling and down. Inhale, spiral up and open.

After one of those nice, deep inhales, keep everything spiraled open, and from the elbows down on the exhale, turn your palms towards the floor and then continue breathing in a nice relaxed way if you can. Turn your head from side to side, pointing the gaze and the tip of the nose down towards one arm and then the other.

Notice if, as you move and turn your head, any tension starts creeping in to the neck, the upper trapezius area. Remember here, the mantra of this is, my ribcage supports my shoulders. My ribcage supports my shoulder girdle. Breathe. Good. Lower your arms.

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Okay. Can we put that all together with a warrior stance?

Let's give it a try. So you're already here. You would just turn your feet and adjust them any way you want to. We won't go into those details this time around, okay, for the warrior stance. Get the front knee into position. Try to feel equal standing in both feet, okay? And, same thing.

After a nice deep inhale, keep all of that open spiral from the elbows down, from the elbows up and then from the elbows down, turn the palms with your exhale and breathe. Then, again, turn your head from side to side. See if you can let the neck be free enough to turn easily without excessive tension.

So do that a few times before you settle your gaze down the front arm, which would be the classic presentation of this warrior II shape. See how, as you remain here, as you continue to breathe, you can remind yourself to allow your shoulder girdle to settle onto your upper ribcage.

Notice how, if your legs started to get a little bit tired, a little more challenged and feel like they are a little less able to hold you up from below, do you instinctively try to hold yourself up from above? Is there a bracing that happens here as you try to transfer some of that support from here to here? Keep letting them settle.

Release. Okay. Maybe you'll want to try the other side. So now you guys are going to turn this way and you guys are going to turn this way.

So let's try the other side, okay? Set your stance. Okay? Facing straight on, let the arms raise up. Actually, you know what? Let's do a little breath trick. Raise them all the way up with a deep breath. Hold the breath. Let them drop.

There they are, settled on your ribcage. Now breathe. Do the spirals. I tricked you.

I made you do something on the second side we didn't do on the first side. We can never go back and make that right. The joys of asymmetry strike again. There we go.

Can you keep your base, your legs, your pelvis stable as you isolate these movements in the upper spine and ribcage without your whole body swaying as you do this? How well can you isolate these?

Then, after that nice deep inhale, keep the openness, but from the elbows down, spiral the hands towards the floor. So it's that double spiral in the arms. That's it. There you go.

Then turn your head from side to side. See if you can make the neck a little freer in that motion. Keep the upper traps nice and soft. Beautiful. Your ribcage supports your shoulder girdle.

That's it. Then turn your gaze down that front arm. Take a few breaths in the completed expression of this version of warrior II.

Good. And release. Very nice.

And bring yourself back to standing. Maybe just for the hell of it, roll down. Let your arms relax. Take a few breaths. When you're ready, you can roll back up again and we'll be done.

Okay. Thank you.

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[01:39:25] Virabhadrasana III: Starting with the Breath

Leslie: Okay. Continuing our march through the warriors. The march through the warriors, is that a Christmas movie? No, that was The March of the Tin Soldiers, wasn't it? We are going to look at warrior III. This is, of all the warriors, the asana where the active engaging of axial extension makes a little bit more sense. Can I borrow you, Patty? I'll give you back when I'm done,

[Timestamp 01:40:00]

but I'm just going to borrow you for now. Let's turn this way.

There's a lot of ways of getting into warrior III. You can drop into it from above, or you can actually kind of start here in a parsvotanasana position and lift into it from below. There's rationales for doing both, but what I'd like to at least start with is, come into a warrior stance.

So, to get from here to warrior III, from a breath-centered perspective, we're going to have to find that axial extension. So what we want to do is create a straight line between your spine and your back leg. You'd have to change the angle of your torso this way. See, think of this angle here, and think of that continuing through your spine and out the crown of your head. So you've already got a diagonal involved. So now turn this foot, raise the back heel, come up on the ball of the foot. There.

So you have that energetic of the back leg. In fact, bring your arms back here, just to clarify it, and feel your chin tucking and the crown of your head extending. So if your heel is going back and down that way, the crown of your head is going that way, in the opposite direction on that same diagonal.

So if you can organize your spine and your breathing here, this is actually the core of warrior III. The question is, can you take this shape and this breathing, and balance it over the front leg without losing that? See if you can. Bring your weight over your front leg. Okay, breathe. Ah ha! It’s a little shaky. Good. If you can be steady there, then we can explore other arm positions. Now come on down. Woo-hoo! You’re working really hard, right?

Patty: M-hmm.

Leslie: Switch legs. What would be the usual way of getting into Warrior III? Would it be with your front leg straight, and then this here, and then pivoting at the hip?

Patty: For me personally?

Leslie: Yeah. The one that doesn't make your leg shake so much.

Leslie: Yeah, you rise up into that leg, and then once you’re balancing, you have to find that line through your spine, right? I'm suggesting here that if we engage the breathing, and the bandhas, and the actual—you’ve got all that happening in the core of the pose, right?

Patty: Yeah.

Leslie: So keep the core of the pose and then balance it over your front leg. Ah ha! There we go, that's it. Good, breathe. This is hard work.

Patty: This is my hardest side.

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Leslie: This is your hard side, okay. Beautiful, then come on down. I would suggest that from many people, they are getting more useful and better work in that sort of a scaled back version of it, rather than doing this right away, because if you are just sort of propping on your bones and joints like that, the muscles really aren't engaging, and it's not challenging some of the patterns that could be difficult when you see the shaking.

But the breathing, keeping the breathing at the core of it has to, it’s not like you got the shape and then find your breathing. Find the breathing and try and keep it as you go into the shape, is what I'm suggesting. So fun, warrior III. Thank you.

[01:43:33] Virabhadrasana III: Joint & Muscle Actions

Amy: So coming into virabhadrasana III from a starting position with your arms already up and your leg, take your leg behind you, but keep your weight on your front leg. So just take that leg back. Don't even shift your weight back. Touch your toe. Touch your toe. Can you keep this leg extended?

From this starting position, come forward into virabhadrasana III. The joint action is flexion at the hip. It's just flexion at the hip.

If we just go and come back out of it from that starting position into it, go ahead and step your foot forward. So if we're very specific about what the starting position is and then the movement into it, in theory it is just tipping the body over the standing leg and would only be hip flexion.

But the simplicity of that joint action does not convey the amount of activity going on to maintain all of that.

So, in that starting position, so can you come back to the starting position? I won't ask you to tip into it. Stay there.

So there's whatever activity it takes to be here in terms of muscle engaging. Whatever is sliding short, sliding long, concentric, eccentric activity, organizing in the spine, superficial abdominal muscles, pelvis, leg. There's all kinds of activity to be here now, and as she folds forward there's the weight shift.

Then, in this tipping, it is a process of gradually eccentrically activating on the standing leg side and maintaining, thank you. Come back up to standing, and maintaining the joint action through the rest of the joints, which might involve a different muscle at each moment. Because if she changes her relationship to gravity, different things will be needed to maintain that arrangement of bones.

The other thing I would like to point out, and I'd like to ask you to turn this way. Oops. Turn this way.

In the moment of transition to come to one leg, something needs to happen on the outside of this hip. So shift your weight into this leg.

Yeah. Cross your arms on your chest. Come back to both feet. Cross your arms on your chest. That was a great impulse. Then shift your weight into one leg. Can you bring your right leg behind you, just toe on the floor? You can balance there.

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So what needed to happen in this leg to come here is that this side had to get longer to do that lateral shift to the pelvis. This side had to get longer and is actively lengthening. It is in an eccentric contraction to maintain, not collapsing, not dropping this hip, but also not lifting it up.

As she tips forward, can you tip forward from there? This has to very actively negotiate keeping the pelvis level in that idea that we make part of doing virabhadrasana I.

Come back up to standing. That was great.

Come now. Turn forward. Step your front foot forward. Bring your arms up into virabhadrasana I. This is a very similar, in terms of muscle activity, transition to the previous one we did, but we add another joint in to doing this. So, from there, can you shift your weight forward and come into virabhadrasana III?

There's going to be a change in her knee and in her hip joints. A little extra hip extension, maybe, in the back leg. Then knee extension, should she extend this leg.

Then go ahead and flex your knee and come back out of it. You can come back to stand.

One of the things I think is very interesting about virabhadrasana III and the effortlessness of it is not that it's really very big joint actions or really very many changes in bone relationship, very many articulations. But the effort it takes to maintain the chaturanga or the tadasana feeling of maintaining something and moving it through space calls on a whole lot of different muscles in different positions.

We're going to do one more thing. Can you come into a low lunge? It doesn't have to be your longest lunge, because you know where you're going from here. But I'd like you to release your head down for a moment.

So to come from here, then, into virabhadrasana III, I’m going to say it before you do it and then you can do it, is going to involve more joint actions, which is going to be, from this flexed position, spinal extension and hip extension to bring her leg up, and knee extension. But maintaining that, on the front leg, the hip flexion.

So it will be a whole set of different muscle actions that may or may not be more accessible for her depending on what feels, depending on her.

So, from there, can you find your way into virabhadrasana III, making all of those changes at once? Mm-hmm.

So a very different set of muscle actions to come into it, of concentrically contracting and then maintaining. Then, can you come out the way you came, and let all of those muscles eccentrically contract to come out of it with control? Thank you.

[01:49:33] Virabhadrasana III: Workshop

Amy: We are going to take a look at warrior III now, virabhadrasana III. It's like any pose, there are a lot of really interesting things to look at in it. One of them I think, that I want to spend some time on is what's happening in the standing leg.

Before we do it standing up, come to your hands and knees.

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[Timestamp 01:50:00]

So from your hands and knees then, make sure that your pelvis is not in front of your legs at all, so depending on how you set it up a little bit, it might even feel like you are a little bit behind yourself. Take one leg back behind you with your toes on the floor, and see what you are doing in your standing leg here.

Can you let that outside of that leg lengthen from the back of your pelvis, maybe all the way down to your little toe on the floor in such a way that it makes your hip, the leg of the hip that's back lower down towards the floor. That’s great Patty, that just what I was looking for.

Can you find in the leg that's back, that sense of foot-to-head connection, so that you know where that line is. How is it to be here, and you can always look back and check at the front of your pelvis, maybe, if your clothes don't get in the way, to feel that your pelvis is level here? I think this is one of the challenges of this. In the effortfulness of it, we start to shorten on the standing leg, on the outside of the standing leg, and it picks the hip up.

Now can you maintain this and and lift your back leg off the floor, without twisting in your pelvis, without lifting that outer hip up? How do you extend the leg without lifting the pelvis? Can you find that head-to-foot connection here, and the length in the outside of your pelvis? And then can you maybe lift your opposite arm up? So if your right left leg is lifted, can you take your left arm out, and can you find some sense of the relationship between your fingers and your toes through your center? If your right leg is lifted, lift your left arm up, and then everybody lower down and come back.

So, one of the things I think that's interesting before I ask you to do it on the other side then to point out is that when we take this leg back, the support here on the leg is on the outside here, and when I engage it, if I shorten it, that's what picks this hip up. So letting this hip be down is not actually a function of using my inner leg, it's about engaging this leg while it's lengthening, or stay in the same length it is and not shortening.

So how to have that be long and supportive is a question. Sometimes I hear people say like use your inner leg to pull it down. It's not really an inner leg action right here, because gravity will pull your hip down if you stop shortening on the outside. But it can be really challenging on the outside of our hips to figure out how to be long and engaged. So you can look for kind of sliding quality. You might think about sliding long without letting go.

Come down to your hands and knees and try it on the other side. Of course you want to slide just long enough. You don't want to slide infinitely long because you could get your pelvis out of balance the other way.

So from here, can you take your other leg back, and feel what you are doing in your standing leg. Let your back toe be on the floor to start with, and puzzle out where your hands to your tail connection is, what you are doing in your standing leg, and the connection from your head to your back foot. And then can you change nothing in your spine, but lift your back leg up.

If you lift the leg too high for your own body, it will change your spine somehow. So how do you find head-to-foot here, however it's expressed, and then can you lift the opposite arm up. If you have your left leg lifted, can you bring your right arm out, and think about finding the line through rather, I think, than height, and then release down and rest.

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Then come back up to your hands and knees. Now take downward dog, and you can absolutely have your knees bent here, but take one leg back behind you and notice here if your hip wants to lift up. This can be a puzzle about noticing if your hip wants to lift up or not. You may sometimes need an outside eye, but can you feel that same length down the outside of the standing leg? And then is it possible to reach so much through the back leg that you walk your hands back to your feet?

You can bend your standing leg as much as you want to. And then can you reach so much through that back leg that you lift your spine up? No. the answer might be no. Or does your back leg come down when your spine comes up?

I think this is a really interesting question, because so often we come into it by tipping here and then picking the leg up. So I think it's a really interesting question to instead find that reach through the leg. Can that be so clear that I can bring my spine up? It is harder to bring it up that way, but I think that the clarity of the back leg is not to be underestimated in doing that.

Come back down and try it on the other leg for a second, seeing now that it might be possible. In your downward dog, you can progress in your own time, but bring the other leg back, and find now the energy through that back leg. It's not about going high. Patty lower your leg a little bit, split the difference and then think back. Think that leg is going back so strongly that you are going to walk your hands back.

It doesn't matter how high it is, what's important is the clarity of the backness so that your spine can extend forward.

Patty: Oh my gosh! That was awesome.

Amy: So the reach of the back leg is really a key factor here, because it was there for a little moment.

Patty: They always say that, but to actually do it that way is amazing.

Amy: Makes it really clear, right?

Patty: Yeah.

Amy: How did that feel Liz? Oh, you did it.

Liz: No, I didn’t…

Amy: How did it feel to do the reach of your leg?

Liz: I can do it when I am supported with both hands. I feel what you were describing of the leg shortening very clearly, and don’t, I’m wondering if I'm structurally actually kind of lengthen and pull, because I have like a slinkiness…

Amy: Right. Okay, but if you can stand on one leg, you can lengthen and hold, to some degree, and then can you tip that forward? Or, here is the other thing, is that if you can stand on one leg here—I mean if you can stand on both legs and be folded forward, then you’re long. Here is another question is, can you be here and pick one foot up in front of you?

Liz: In front of me?

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Amy: Yep, just like you are going to pull your knee into your chest. So that's what your standing leg needs to do.

Liz: It's so hard.

Amy: Yes. It might be really hard, like being in utkatasana maybe and picking one foot up. That's close to what your standing leg has to do in warrior III.

So that might be really hard to stay organized, to be that long there and organized. So to play with what the standing leg needs to do, you might just play with doing this, and being this folded over and picking one foot up. Yes, and then you can take that foot back if you want to. Can the reach of the leg back create the reach of your spine forward? You can do all kinds of things with your arms. Yeah, that was great. That wasn't too bad balancing, right? That's it Angel.

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So it's hugely, hugely effortful on the outside of the hips, and not to be underestimated how much work that takes, I think. I think it's really interesting too if we get really factful at the very, very reaching into space quality of it, because the reach in the space can help hold us up, is to do a much less reach-y version of it, reach-y version of it, which might be to come here, and to be not tipped way over, but can you find that spot right there, arms are soft. So can you soften your arms a little bit, maybe even turn your palms up, just for the express of delight of it, and can you find your heel-to-head, but don't tip your spine forward. Don't tip your upper body forward. Simply be there, and then maybe lift your back leg, and your upper body might come forward, but don't drop your upper body.

How can that back leg lifting tip my spine forward, and at whatever point your pelvis starts to twist, pause, so that you can keep the kind of integrity of the question without worrying about how far over you are.

Because I think in a way when we get into the fullest, fullest part of the pose, we can activate so strongly that we override the underlying connectivity. That can be really useful. That can be really great, that reach in the space. Extend, reach, reach, reach, like we did to bring you up, but there is also something about, can I be internally organized enough that I don't engage anything strongly. Everything is participating a little bit, and I can find the expression from the inside out, instead of from reaching out.

So try it on the other side, last time, in whichever side you've done least. So start by stepping, actually, here is one more variation, which is step one foot back, and reach your heel away from your head before you pick your back leg up. Let your upper body tilt a little bit forward to be in relationship with the back foot so your whole body is on an angle like this. Can you tip forward and keep breathing, and pause in the place where you are breathing, stops being available. If you want to bring your arms out, you can. I think if you are in this kind of angled virabhadrasana III, if you are not totally flat to the floor, that you have a sense of your head to your tail, or your fingers to your feet, and you can breathe, then that is an expression of the pose as much as being in a complete "T" shape. And then come back up and stand on both feet.

Patty: That's very fun.

Amy: It's very fun, good. Then take a moment and stand on both feet, and feel from your feet to your head here, and your head to your feet. Great, thank you very much. You're welcome.

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