South Okanagan Yoga Academy Yoga Teacher Training Programs

Featured Asana

• From stick posture, Dandasana, lean your torso back slightly on your hands and lift and open your legs to an angle of about 90 degrees
• Press your hands against the floor and widen the legs a little further, if you can’t sit comfortably on the floor, sit on a folded blanket.
• Continue to breathe normally and rotate your thighs outwardly, knee caps and toes are pointing towards the sky.
• Extend through your heels, pressing though your big toe bone as if trying to make your legs longer.
  
• With your hands behind your hips, back is flat, inhale and extend through your spine, creating space and lifting your heart.  Exhale and create resistance, pushing with your hands as your fold from your pelvis, feel as though your femur bones are being sucked into your hip sockets.  If you are unable to comfortable get into this posture, bend the knees slightly, maintaining their upward direction.
  
• If you want to go deeper, on an exhale walk your hands forward between your legs. Keep your arms long and your knees and toes pointing to the sky.  Continue to extend and create length in your upper body.
  
• If you feel yourself bending from the waist or rounding your back, you have gone to far, move back and create length in the upper body to fold from the pelvis.  With every inhale extend and with every exhale fold further into the posture until you feel a nice opening in the hamstrings.
  
• Inhale and support yourself to come up maintaining the integrity of your upper body and spine.
  
• Exhale and release
  
• Always work within your own comfort without pain. Check with your doctor if you have medical questions or concerns.

Benefits

Opens hamstrings, calves, hips, groin and lower back.
Stimulates the abdominal organs, detox of kidneys
Strengthens the spine
Calms the brain
Creates awareness with the lower body, connecting with the active direction of the thighs, knees and feet.
May help with arthritis and sciatica

Contraindications and Modifications

Lower-back injury: Sit up high on a folded blanket and do not fold to far forward.
Groin or hamstring injury or imbalance, as well as SI, need to ensure a even forward movement, equally relying on each side of the body when folding.  To help ensure that moving forward happens evenly keep hands behind the hips pushing against the floor to fold from the pelvis and draw the upper torso forward, or have a partner assist, or utilize a set of blocks for each hand and focus on the movement of the pelvis and lower back rather than the opening of the hamstrings.
For pregnancy, this pose is excellent in helping open the hips and prepare the body for childbirth, if the pose does not provide enough opening due to the pregnant belly for advanced practitioners they can use a partner to pull them upward and forward.
For blood pressure, ensure the head is not lowered lower than low blood pressure the waist, high blood pressure the heart.  By preventing rounding of the back and compression of the torso and folding from the pelvis this can be prevented.
 
Preparatory Poses  (you can google these if you aren’t sure what they are!)

Baddha Konasana
Dandasana
Prasarita Padottanasana
Supta Baddha Konasana
Supta Padangusthasana

Follow-Up Poses

Baddha Konasana
Bakasana
Gomukhasana
Malasana
Padmasana
Siddhasana or Sukhasana
Supta Padangusthasana