LIVE WELL: Down dog, calm child and deep healing
In our return to yoga we’ll focus on two lovely postures you’ll find in almost every single yoga class: child’s pose and downward facing dog.
Child’s pose. Doesn’t it just sound lovely?
Balasana (the Sanskrit name for it) is interspersed through class. It can begin your practice, provide refuge as a break during your practice or end your practice. Feel free to sprinkle this restorative posture throughout your day. Perhaps this is the only pose you do. Come into it when you return home and find some comfort.
(Watch a video of the pose here.)
To find Balasana
Come to kneeling on your mat or a carpeted area to spare your knees. Spread the knees wide to the outside edges of your mat, bring your big toes together to touch behind you. Fold forward over your thighs and allow your arms to rest on the floor in front of you, reaching forward, palms down or up. Forehead rests on the mat. Chest releases to the mat. Close your eyes and breathe.
Modifications
You can bring your knees together, or rest your arms down by your sides. If your knees aren’t happy, roll up a blanket or towel and place it behind the knees before you lower down to help reduce flexion there. To reduce low back discomfort, make fists with your hands to rest your forehead on, or use a telephone book or a yoga block. You can pull a blanket up over your whole body, even covering your head, once you’re in the posture. It’s the ultimate in turning inward and blocking out an overly stimulating world.
The benefits
This posture will gently stretch your arms, hips, thighs and ankles. It stretches and releases the spine and lower back. The pose offers therapeutic benefits to your mental state and calms the mind and emotions. Or perhaps it will allow emotions to surface, and you can safely feel them in your hidden human cave.
From Child’s Pose, you can choose to press up into our next posture, Downward Facing Dog.
To find Down Dog
Adho Mukha Svanasana (Down Dog) looks like an inverted V, with both hands and feet pressed into the earth, and tailbone lifted high. An easy way to come into down dog is to press up from Child’s Pose onto all fours. From this tabletop position, come up off your knees and walk your feet back until you’re in a high plank. Check that your hands are shoulder-width apart and that your wrists are directly underneath your shoulders. Your feet are out about hip distance and your tailbone is tucked under, making your body as straight as that proverbial plank. Pull your belly button in all the way towards your spine so the core is fully engaged.
From here, without moving the feet or hands, simply lift your hips high, pressing the sitting bones up to the sky. Good doggie! Now slowly warm it up by lifting one heel and then the other.
Take your time, and don’t worry if the heels don’t touch the mat. They might never get there and that’s OK. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure at yoga and should stop doing it.
Be gentle with your hamstrings here; keep your knees as soft and bent as you need to. It’s more important to maintain a flat back with your shoulders away from your ears. To find the distinction, shrug your shoulders so they’re way up near your ears. Then release them down, letting the blades roll toward each other. Bending your knees will help with that. Your head hangs and your gaze is toward the wall behind you, or toward your thighs.
Spread your fingers wide and press the whole hand into the mat, all the way up to the tips of the fingers. Pretend you’re pressing the top of the mat away from you, so the hand and the wrist flattens out. You don’t want to feel a whole lot of pressure in the wrist.
Modifications
If your wrists bother you, come down to the forearms or place a towel under your wrists to rest on. If the whole posture is a bit too much, try Puppy Pose. Just drop to the knees, but keep the hips lifted and the arms stretched out in front of you, head down, forehead to the mat.
Benefits
On a personal note, I believe this posture helped me heal from the plantar fasciitis I developed from running. If you don’t know what that is, let me say it’s a zinging, frustrating heel pain that comes when you rise out of bed first thing in the morning to walk or whenever you happen to be standing or walking for awhile. Down Dog stretches the whole backside of your body, including the shoulders, hamstrings, calves and Achilles tendon. It builds strength in your wrists and hands. The spine lengthens and circulation is increased to the brain in this baby inversion, where the head is below the heart.
It is also an energizing pose that can help calm your brain and relieve mild depression and stress.
Both, believe it or not, are considered resting postures. You’ll probably agree with me about Child’s Pose. Maybe not so much about Down Dog. I promise, though, that the more you practice, the more you’ll begin to find the comfort and stretch in the latter. Have patience and keep practicing.
Please let me know anything you’d like to read about in the yoga scope of things. Tell me about your own practice, what you love to do, what you want to try or what you’re looking for help with.
