Good (Down) Dog! Making your practice 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 grounded heels would solve this. Soon enough my heels touched down, 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. But when my knees started to hurt I had 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. By grounding my heels so doggedly, I was only stretching my ankles, calves and knees to the point of strain, while my hamstrings and glutes remained dull. Eventually I learned how to anterior pelvic tilt, inner rotate thighs and widen sitbones, all of which produces a juicier hamstring stretch in downdog. I also learned I could initiate these movements much more easily with bent knees and lifted heels.
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 know our bodies directly, a crucial step in yoga methodology.
