Beyond Shapes

Making asana work for you.

It’s easy to get hung up on form in asana. The challenge is figuring out how to use these shapes in a way that serves us best.

For example, I have tight hamstrings. When I first started practicing, I believed a textbook downdog with firmly planted heels would solve this. My heels touched down soon enough, but my hamstrings stayed just as tight.

For years I practiced downdog this way, digging my heels in, so to speak. I was fully committed to the strict form of the pose even though it clearly wasn’t working for me. But when the back of my knees started to hurt, I was forced to abandon my dogmatic downdog to figure out what was going on.

Once my focus switched to the inner workings of the pose, I realized sensorially that I hadn’t been stretching my hamstrings at all. Doggedly grounding my heels meant stretching my ankles, calves and knees to the point of strain while my hamstrings and glutes remained unmoved.

Eventually I learnt how to tilt my hips anteriorly, inner rotate my thighs and widen my sitbones, all of which produces a much juicier hamstring stretch in downdog. I also learnt I could initiate these movements much more easily with lifted heels and bent knees.

These insights helped me overcome my problems in downdog, and they may help you too. Or they might not! The point here is not that you should do this pose in any particular way. Rather, you should practice all poses in a way that serves you best.

Approaching asana this way invites inquiry. It cultivates sensitivity to sensations which arise in a pose, and the ability to move intelligently in response. This cycle of sensation and response creates a feedback loop which makes even the stillest pose feel live and dynamic. Practiced this way, asana becomes more than rigid outlines empty of personal meaning. Instead, each pose becomes a window to knowing our bodies directly, a crucial step in the yoga process.