Practicing yoga poses on our mats is often reflective of life’s greater teachings. At times some postures — like life — require complete surrender to fully experience their benefits and joys. One example of this is restorative pigeon pose.

Pigeon pose has many variations, but restorative pigeon is one of yoga’s most popular asanas, or poses. “Restorative” can be a little misleading, though, as many yogis find it easier and more relaxing to power through stronger asanas than to relax their bodies and minds in deep hip-openers such as pigeon pose, but learning how to let go on your mat can help you learn to let go off your mat as well.

To begin, start on your hands and knees on your mat. Bring your right knee to your right wrist. You can keep your right ankle tucked under your left hip crease if you have tight hips, or you can flex your right foot and begin to take your shin a little more parallel to the top edge of your mat. Make sure that you’re on the side of your right foot and ankle.

With your right leg bent and your right hip in deep external rotation, extend your left leg behind you. Curl your left toes under and track your left knee towards the midline of your body — bringing your left hip into internal rotation. Then uncurl your toes and press all of the toenails of your left foot down into your mat as you lengthen through your left leg. Feel the opening from your left hip crease all the way down the top of your foot.

Tuck your tailbone to lengthen and protect your lower back. If your hips are high off the ground, you can stuff a blanket underneath you. Don’t lean toward the right; rather take your hands to your hip points and make sure that they’re even.

From this length in your lower back and evenness in your hip points (even if your hips hover above the ground or rest on a blanket), take your hands out in front of you, shoulder-width apart. Bring your arms to a 45-degree angle (think downward dog arms). Press into your hands without moving them and energetically push the mat away. At the same time burrow your right shin into your mat and energetically pull your shin back toward your body. Feel the depth of sensation in your right hip as you do this and then release.

Walk your hands out as far as you need to in order to deepen the stretch. It’s more important to lengthen your spine than it is to take your arms or forehead to the ground. Don’t force your forehead to a surface, but do rest your head on your hands, a block or a blanket if you can. Imagine resting your brain along with your body.

Breathe evenly through your nose and let go of any unnecessary gripping—especially in your forehead, jaw and abdomen. Imagine breathing in positive, healing energy with each inhalation and feel your heart center soften with each exhalation.

Find even deeper release in your restorative pigeon pose by fully surrendering your body and mind.

Hold pigeon pose for up to two minutes or as long as you comfortably can. Release the pose by slowly pressing yourself back up to hands and knees. Repeat on the other side.

Pigeon pose offers an array of health benefits, but to experience its true joy and restoration, it’s first necessary to let go of harbored tension. Learning to leave behind what we don’t need to carry might be one of life’s hardest lessons. Help yourself on your journey with pigeon pose.

Tags: hip opener, Jennifer S. White, Pigeon pose, restorative pose, yoga, Your Personal Yogi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Star, Your Personal Yogi.
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Bakasana, Sanskrit for either “crane” or “crow” pose, is the first arm balance that many yogis attempt. Typically, crow pose is thought of as the bent-arm rendition and crane the version with straight arms. This bent-arm posture is thought to be easier for beginners.

Whenever I teach arm balances and demonstrate a pose, one of the most common things I hear from students is, “I could never do that. I don’t have the arm strength.” This is a misunderstanding.

More than powerful arms, bakasana requires a strong core and open hips. Arm balances frequently sort out the experienced yogi from the inexperienced with the necessity of both strength and flexibility in one body.

Practicing arm balances encourages the yogi to add core-strengthening and hip-opening postures. Hardly anyone enjoys doing core work and stretching tight hips is uncomfortable on many levels, so bringing both into a regular yoga practice requires discipline. Being able to fly in bakasana, however, is a well worth-it reward.

To begin, you’ll need one yoga block.

Place your block on your yoga mat with the broad, stable side down, and perch on the balls of your feet on top of it. Your feet touch as you squat low.

Keep your feet together and open your knees wide. Reach your arms long in front of you, taking a preparatory stretch.

Place your hands shoulder-width apart with your fingers wide.

If you’re scared, put a crash-pad — a blanket — in front of you but out of the way of your hands.

I guarantee you’ll fall. Falling is part of practicing. Just like life, the true beauty of balance poses is how gracefully you get back on your feet — or hands — and try again.

The higher up on your arms you can take your knees, the easier the pose will be. This is the hip-opening aspect. Squeeze your inner thighs around your upper arms—maybe even around your outer shoulders.

Flex and round your spine. Pull your naval back and tuck your tailbone. Feel strength in your abdominals and protract your shoulder blades, taking their inner borders away from each other and lifting the space between them toward the ceiling.

Press evenly into your hands and push the ground away rather than hanging heavily on your arms. This lift from your core and opening of your hips will help you take flight.

Now transfer your weight from the heels of your hands into your knuckles and fingertips. Gaze steadily ahead and play with picking up one foot. Maybe try picking up your other foot.

If both feet are up, glue them together and use your hip-flexors to hug them toward your glutes as you spread your toes.

Breathe. Hold your pose but not your breath for up to one minute. Release and rest.

The block helps elevate your hips. Getting your hips high and your thighs tight to your body are key elements of bakasana. Play with taking it away when you feel ready. The word “play” is important. Have fun! Try not to become discouraged. Smile and keep trying until you take flight.

Once you become proficient in the bent-arm version of this pose, begin to straighten your arms and loosen the grip of your knees on your arms. This takes more core strength and less arm work.

The ability to fly on your yoga mat will help your soar to new heights in other areas of life too.

Confidence and resiliency are crucial elements of success in any arena. Build yours by practicing bakasana. And who knows? Maybe you’ll cultivate strength and flexibility in your body along the way.

Tags: bakasana, core strength, hip flexibility, Jennifer S. White, yoga, Your Personal Yogi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 8:06 am and is filed under Star, Your Personal Yogi.
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I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. I think that if you’re only considering improving yourself one day each year that you might want to reconsider what you’re doing on the other days. Having said that, I do appreciate the thought and effort people put into any self-betterment, so this year I’m suggesting a yoga resolution for all—letting go of your past.

Yogis believe the back body relates to one’s past. Forward folds are a perfect example of putting this idea of releasing one’s past into physical action. Releasing tension from our backs symbolizes letting the past dissolve to make room for the present and future.

First, let’s look at the anatomy of a forward fold.

If you have tight hamstrings and they reach their maximum stretch, your body will do one of two things. You will bend your knees to stop the stretch or you will round your lower back. It’s much better to keep your lower back long and flat during your forward fold, so feel free to bend your knees if necessary.

To begin, sit on the floor with your feet flexed, toes pointing toward the ceiling. Bend your knees if necessary or sit on a folded blanket. Try to keep your legs and feet touching.

Remember that we don’t want to go back into our past—even to let it go—without also bringing a sense of our present self and our future hopes and goals. The front body relates to our future, so keep this in mind as you lift your heart away from your engaged lower abdomen and long lower back. Draw your shoulders down away from your ears and firm your shoulder blades into your heart center. Keep this lift of your front body—this imprint of your future hopes—as you hinge from your hips into your forward fold.

Your hands can rest alongside your legs or you can loop a belt around the balls of your feet to help stretch your calf muscles. Rather than using your arms to pull you into the pose, keep a bend in your elbow and use this bend to help broaden your back body.

Don’t worry about getting your core to your legs. Instead imagine taking your belly button to your feet to help keep your lower back long.

Take your gaze to your big toes and encourage this lift of your heart or begin to round with the natural curve of your upper spine and tuck your chin. Listen to your body and do what feels right for you.

If you choose to round your spine and tuck your chin then think of the crown of your head growing towards your feet. This will help you fold from your hips rather than your waist, encouraging length in your spine and lightness in your hips.

If you’re flexible and your hands easily come to your feet, then wrap your fingers around the outsides of your feet as you place your thumbs on the tops of your feet over your arches. Gently pull with your fingers as you push with your thumbs to give the feet an added stretch.

Hold this pose for at least one minute, breathing in and out through your nose the entire time. Visualize releasing yourself from your past.

As you inhale slowly back up into your present, feel joy opening your heart to new hopes and possibilities. Happy New Year.

Tags: fitness, yoga, Your Personal Yogi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 8:41 am and is filed under Star, Your Personal Yogi.
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Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Regardless of your religious affinity, childhood costumes or opinions on chocolate, it’s very difficult to avoid conjuring up images of skeletons and ghosts around the Day of the Dead (which, by the way, is Nov. 1 and 2, not Oct. 31). In celebration of Halloween’s ghoulish apparitions, we’ll dig a little deeper into corpse pose.

Corpse pose is the most difficult yoga pose that exists, and no, I’m not kidding. Lying on your back as still as death is yoga’s most complex posture. Let’s look at why.

For most of us, getting into this posture is simple, but accessing that limbo-state between awake and asleep is what presents the challenge. Savasana is typically, and more pleasantly, translated from Sanskrit as “final relaxation,” but sava literally means corpse. However, the real problem arises when we begin to define “corpse.”

Not all belief systems see a corpse as something completely inanimate. Many believe in the existence of something more, something less tangible. Obviously, though, most would not argue that when dead you are not truly “alive” in the common physical sense. This is the general idea behind corpse pose. When taking corpse pose, the yoga practitioner is trying to drift away from being actively mentally and physically alert, without falling asleep. With this in mind, corpse pose’s difficulty becomes more understandable.

Let’s take a stab at corpse pose. Lie on your back with your heels a few inches apart and let your toes simply fall out and away from each other. Lengthen your tailbone toward your heels, but retain your spine’s natural curvature. Momentarily reach your arms up toward the ceiling to help broaden your back body. Allow your shoulders to drop away from your ears as each arm rests alongside your torso at a 45 degree angle, palms facing up. Tuck the chin slightly and find length in your neck as you lift the base of your skull away from the release of your shoulders. Consciously find symmetry throughout your entire body before letting go. Make sure your nose points straight up and is not tilting to one side, feel both hands rest on the same knuckle; experience openness in your collarbones and a slight lift of the heart.

Scanning your body slowly, let tension go from every cell of your being —including but not limited to your forehead, cheeks, tongue and jaw. Scan your body a second time, and this time let each soft inhale bring new life into your still body. With each exhale imagine residual stress and tension leaving you. Feel your body become heavy, your eyelids so heavy that you cannot open them.

As your body becomes more relaxed, allow yourself to welcome the thoughts and emotions that come to you. Without judging, feel every sensation and then let it go.

Corpse pose has more to offer than any other pose, hands down. Letting go of attachment to our bodies is not easy, but we are so much more than our physical selves. We play dress up every single day, whether it’s in a princess costume, suit and tie or yoga clothing. This Halloween, I invite you to take a moment (even if it’s in bed right before you fall asleep) to welcome awareness of the deeper you with corpse pose.

Jennifer White is a certified yoga instructor. Email her at yenniwhite@hotmail.com.

Tags: Halloween, Jennifer White, yoga, Your Personal Yogi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Star, Your Personal Yogi.
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Football. This one word describes my family’s weekends for months. These two syllables also describe the atmosphere of countless other American households. I never liked football until my husband took the time to help me better understand the game while watching the Super Bowl more than a decade ago. Now football is part of my anxiously awaited fall repertoire and, believe it or not, football easily relates to yoga.

Football plays are often complex and intricate, a single play taking significant preparation. And then it’s over. Yoga poses are much the same. One pose can take years to master. And then you’ve done it. Your goal is met. There’s an ironic letdown that accompanies this glorious feeling of triumph.

As yogis we can forget to enjoy the journey it takes to get to a single, successful posture, and, as football fans, it’s challenging to enjoy watching beautifully executed plays if the desired goals are not achieved.

Often we fail to remember that many less complicated postures are the physical and mental preparations for more challenging poses. Similarly, some football plays are only called as preparations for other, more rewarding plays.

Yet another way a football play is like yoga is the all-important concept of team. It takes several working parts, or players in the case of the game, to create a properly working play. These parts can be readily equated to our bodies. It takes our various body parts working as a team to create a single, beautiful pose. To examine these unorthodox though apt connections between football and yoga, we’ll take a deeper look into one of yoga’s most celebrated plays — I mean poses — fierce pose.

In English, “Utkatasana” is typically translated from Sanskrit as “chair pose.” However, “powerful” or “fierce pose” is a more accurate interpretation.

We’ll use this less common translation of fierce pose, not only because it better relates to football, but also because this name helps get the practitioner into the mindset required for this pose.

Fierce pose has many variations. Some (for example, one-legged and twisted chair poses) are seriously challenging, or fierce. These poses are typically used as prep poses for other, more complex ones. Twisted chair pose, for instance, has exactly the same architecture as the arm balance side crow pose. Thus, it’s important to intrinsically understand side crow’s twisted sister, a variation of fierce pose. We’ll start by tackling a more simplified version.

To begin, stand with your feet parallel and hip-distance apart. Sit powerfully into your imaginary chair. Feel the length in your lower back and strength in your lower abdomen as you slightly tuck your tailbone and release it toward the floor.

Take your thighs as close to parallel to the floor as possible, keeping your thigh bones parallel to

each other.

Don’t allow your toes or knees to wander out. If you sit deeply enough into this pose your knees will jut slightly past your feet and your core will lunge forward a little, but try to keep your core upright as much as possible. Imagine helium in the heart, lifting your upper spine skyward, shoulder blades sliding down away from your ears and firming into your heart center.

Maintaining length in your lower spine and engagement in your core (and with breath still flowing evenly in and out of your nose), extend your arms overhead shoulder-width apart with palms facing each other, pinky sides of your arms rotating slightly in to activate the triceps.

Allow your front ribs to feel knit together in the front, but continue to open your shoulders by pulling your arms back further; possibly alongside your ears or maybe even behind them.

Keep your chin parallel to the floor and find balance in your feet. For a moment, pick up your toes and make sure that you aren’t sitting too heavily into the balls of your feet. Breathe deeply as you hold your fierce pose for five to eight breaths.

On your final inhalation, straighten your legs and exhale as you return your arms to your sides. Feel the personal power you’ve tapped into by sitting in fierce pose.

With another glorious fall weekend of football watching ahead, take the time to truly enjoy the game (even if your favorite quarterback gets sacked), and also take a moment to tap into your own personal power with fierce pose.

Jennifer White is a certified yoga instructor. Email her at yenniwhite@hotmail.com.

Tags: Jennifer White, yoga, Your Personal Yogi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 11:13 am and is filed under Star, Your Personal Yogi.
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