The Art of Yoga and Relaxation: Technique and Details

This week the yoga class taught by Maria focused more on the strength and balance building poses, more advanced harder poses to hold and get into. One that I struggle with is the tree pose, requiring you to place one foot above the knee of your other leg, on the inside part of your leg and stand balanced, in theory this is a simple balance exercise, but in application it is incredibly difficult. So I would like to talk about the importance of the techniques used to do various yoga poses. A core aspect of the movements made to do the poses is coordinating certain movements with the breathing patterns. For example, in one pose, called cat-cow, while you are on all fours you round your spine on the inhale and straighten back out on the exhale. This is important because it allows you to stretch out your spine more, many poses require this further stretching allowed by coordinating breaths with movement. Another key technique, or rather detail, is what is going on with your feet, depending on the pose either fas feet on the mat with toes stretched or on toes with the heels facing back, this is extremely important to pay attention to because it is easy to hurt yourself if you are doing the base of the pose incorrectly. another thing to pay attention to and make sure you are doing correctly is how the pose feels as you get into it and hold, there should be no sharp stabbing pain, a dull throbbing means that there is a tightness in the mussels and fascia, connective tissues, which is ok and to be expect and over time it will go away. A sharp stabbing pain on the other hand, especially if in a joint, means stop immediately and assess if the pose is too hard or if you are doing the base incorrectly. When doing the tree pose mentioned earlier I can feel a steady pulsing light pain in my thigh and hip, tightness, but now per se if my knee were to be experiencing a sharp pain I could be trying to pull my foot up too high to fast and I need to back off and try it lower down. Finally the last thing is to focus on the task at hand, brining this all back to being in the moment free of outside thoughts and distractions so that you may recognize any incorrect breath patterns, foot, hand placement, and how the poses feel.