thedancingj

What if my arms are behind my head even?
In the first part of this posture, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I have hyperextension in both of my elbows (from a high school cheerleading injury where I fell off the top of the pyramid during practise, nonetheless!), and in order to straighten my elbows and reach up, my arms end up behind my head, not just behind my ears. The position feels great. In fact, it is one of my favourite postures to be in. But, I’ve never seen anybody in any class before with their arms so far back, so have always wondered if I’m doing what I should be doing.
I can post a pic or two, if that’d help.
Thanks
Jodi

The instruction for the pose is actually “elbows locked, arms always TOUCHING WITH the ears.” Not behind! Before you go into the posture, you should stretch up to “touch the ceiling,” so your fingertips are pointing directly up to the ceiling when you start, and then you bend directly to the side. You might want to have a teacher or friend watch you do it from the side to make sure you are bending in an absolutely straight line, no backbending (yet).

Nynn!

Haven’t been on this board in ages, but I still get these little alerts on threads that I’ve written on, so this thread popped up in my inbox and I couldn’t stay away… 🙂

I have the same background. I came to Bikram after 15 years of ballet. I’ve been doing Bikram 5-7 times a week for the last 3 years now and couldn’t be happier with it.

Balancing “turned in” will be tough at first. In ballet, you’ve learned to balance by engaging your inner thighs. Here, you have to balance engaging the TOP of your thighs, the quads. So the mechanics of balancing are totally different. You just have to learn this new technique. Eventually it will feel completely natural. (It is a much more natural position than standing 180 degrees turned out!)

Best advice I can give you for balance in standing bow is to work on your balance in standing head to knee. Best advice for balance in standing head to knee is to work on eagle pose. See where I’m going? The postures are all cumulative. So don’t let yourself cheat. Set yourself up for success. Starting from the VERY FIRST breathing exercise, make sure you are standing with your feet pointed STRAIGHT ahead, rooting your feet into the ground, and engaging the quads. (Yes, this feels really weird because it’s the opposite of how you’ve been trained. Do it anyway!!) You can work on this alignment in every single posture. Standing head to knee is the hardest and the best: you are standing on one leg, concentrating on NOTHING but that standing leg. (That’s obviously the bit that you need to work on, since you said that you fall out before you even start kicking.) By the time you get around to standing bow, you’ve already practiced standing that way for 30+ minutes, so that should help.

Remember that it took you 13+ years to master balance on a turned out leg, so you won’t reverse that overnight. But you CAN reverse it in less than 13 years. Be patient!! You’ll get your do-over. It just takes a little time.

From one ex-dancer to another… enjoy!

Juliana 🙂

Geez. I don’t know what I can say here that won’t be misconstrued as “hate mail”!

I agree with a lot of the things that have been said on here so eloquently. I especially like the observation that the quality of a teacher will ultimately always depend on what the individual brings to the table. There is no nine week (or nine month, or nine year) program ANYWHERE that can teach you EVERYTHING about practicing and teaching the yoga, and there are probably some things that can NEVER really be taught. They just have to be understood.

But I have to back up “addicted,” too. It strikes me as really flip and condescending to say, “well, if you’re annoyed by something, maybe you should just be a better yogi”! Sheesh!! None of us is perfect here… but if something is really “off” about a situation, I think annoyance is a totally valid response. And I agree that it is totally bizarre to see how some people train with Bikram, learn everything from him, and then turn their backs on him and start telling their students that Bikram is teaching his own yoga wrong. I can’t understand it either.

If you put someone up on a pedestal, they’re going to fall. It doesn’t matter who they are. Why would you expect him to not be human?

Hey Spring!

Hope Gabrielle doesn’t mind if I chime in with my own experience here.

The general rule is that you always want to try to follow the instructions of the person teaching the class, unless you are in danger of actually hurting yourself by doing so. It is respectful to the teacher, and you might learn something new. Just smile and follow the instructions for that class, and then when you’re back home, you can go back to your old way if you really feel the need.

I’m just going to use one of your examples as an illustration: the sit-up! I know that Gabrielle likes the “pop-up” in the middle, so if you were practicing in her class, you would do it that way. That is actually the older version of the sit-up, that Bikram used to teach “back in the day.” The version that your teacher was trying to show you recently is the newer version of the sit-up (version 2.0, if you like!), which Bikram and Emmy Cleaves and the other teachers have been teaching for some time now. (Bikram likes to tweak the system from time to time in an effort to improve it.) So these are just two variations on the same theme, and both are equally good and beneficial when performed correctly. So… why not learn the sit-up the way your instructor of the day is teaching it, and see how it goes?

It may feel strange at first (and this applies to all of the differences that you mentioned), but changes always take some time to adjust to. So do an experiment: if you’re given a correction that you’ve never tried before, trying working honestly to do the posture that way every day for a couple weeks, and see what it does to your body. I always try to use a “30-day rule” in my practice. When I get a weird new adjustment, even if I don’t think I like it, I try using it for the next 30 days and see what happens. Sometimes when I do this, it turns out that something I HATED at first is just the thing that I needed to take my practice to the next level. And other times, the correction doesn’t work at ALL and then I just go back to my original way after 30 days, no harm done! But experimenting on your body is always a GREAT way to understand the yoga better!! That way you won’t have to take MY word for it, OR Gabrielle’s word, or ANY of these other wacky strangers on the internet… 😉 You can be your OWN teacher!

Best,
Juliana

Hi Jeta

Your suspicions are correct. A straight back with bent legs in this pose trumps straight legs with a rounded back, every single time. As you have indicated, it literally feels much better and you can really enjoy that stretch. Strangely in this position (contrary to most people’s logic) the all over stretch even through the bent legs is superior.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Whoa! Wait. What?

So you’re saying that a person who CAN grab their feet – with straight legs – should BEND their legs again in order to get their spine straight? Ok, that will certainly feel different. But I always thought the point of this particular posture was that, once your legs are straight, you can use both gravity and the strength of your arms to straighten your spine out. Your spine hangs off your hips and legs like a frame and gets pulled longer and longer. It’s just a question of order of operations; eventually the back and legs should BOTH be straight. And Bikram always said, “first legs stretching, THEN hips stretching, THEN lower spine stretching, then WHOLE spine stretching, EVENTUALLY whole BODY is stretching…”

Am I wrong about this?

J

If you look around the studio, you will probably see that when students follow the directions in the dialog you are more likely to see yogis with their legs at varying heights, their arm almost out directly in front of them and their belly down, making their back straight. In fact it pretty much looks like Balancing Stick with a leg up in the air. 😉

And they are correct. It IS just like balancing stick. Same cardio benefits, same health benefits. The main difference is that in bow you are compressing one side of the body at a time.

If you are inflexible, that is how the pose has to begin. Emmy says, ESPECIALLY if you are inflexible, you’ve got to get the body down. If the body doesn’t come down, there is no space for the kick to happen at all. You will stand upright trying to kick for years and never make any progress, and if you’re tight you will just end grinding in your knees and shoulders. If you are flexible and you keep your body up too long, then you just grind in the hip joint. No good.

If the posture starts the right way, the backbend develops correctly over time.

Balance in the posture does not come from kicking. It comes from getting the body down while you kick, and THEN kicking and stretching simultaneously.

I believe this from my personal experience, the advice of every expert teacher I know, the other people’s practices that I’ve observed, and of course THE DIALOGUE. The dialogue is just RIGHT.