Cues to firm tummy and stabilise shoulders and more pigeon escapades
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Whybrow
Sep 20, 2015, 3:05:38 AM9/20/15
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Sharing with you the delight of our weekend of outdoor yoga. Looking forward to sharing some beautiful outdoor moments with you wherever you are. There is no yoga studio anywhere that can make you feel as good as sitting by friends on a sunny day with the warmth on your skin as you look out over the water to the hills around you!
What a difference a day makes, however. In this week's blog post (shot on Saturday) it was a bit chilly and gloomy. But I got warm fairly quickly doing this sequence. I show a variation of suriya namaskar that creates postural firmness in your tummy (so you can still breathe there), length in the lower back (and all of spine), and stabilises your shoulder joint. I give four cues to help cultivate these things in the post, along with a video and some step by step instructions.
Lots of people wrote to me after my pigeon post last week. Thanks! It was great to hear from you all.
Pigeon seems to be a 'go-to' pose for a lot of people and I wanted to expand your thinking a little--especially if you do pigeon a lot either with lots of props or have been doing it for years and it does not seem to be getting any easier. Those are good signs you could afford to change your practice and mix things up. This week I have posted a video about doing pigeon--but in a hands free manner with active movements. I posted it mainly to show that maybe if you cannot get into the posture without props and without your hands then you might consider doing some of the other versions (like the standing variations I showed last week). Or you might consider whether you are practicing your standing postures correctly.
Check out the post here.
Being able to do hands free pigeon is what helps me when I move to other arenas, such as circus class, where I need to use active movements to come into postures rather than hanging out passively. Below is an example of what I called inverted flying pigeon.
I am in Sri Lanka 24 September-5 October. So looking forward to meeting up with old friends. I am running a retreat where I will delight in teaching controversial things like how it is good to take shoulders to ears, how to stop sucking in your tummy and get firmer abs while doing so, why your handstand is more likely to suffer from incorrect wall practice, how your focus on breathing in class (especially that breathing where you can hear everyone around you sucking it down) could be doing more harm than good and more. For yogis who want to explore spinal practice and free movement under the observant and watchful eyes of yours truly. While there I might use some circus skills and see if I can figure out how to climb a coconut tree.
I am not scheduling any classes in Colombo though I will no doubt be found most evenings doing some outdoor practice at Independence Square so stop and say hi if you see me. Join in if you like!
See you soon!
Much metta,
Samantha
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