Day 52 : Meditative : Ushtrasana ( camel ) to Kapotasana (pigeon) subroutine from Vinyasa Krama Meditative sequence

VIDEO LINK

This is an extended Ushtrasana subroutine (Day 51) that continues on into Kapotasana (pigeon), kapotasana is a challenging posture, it's wise to work on becoming comfortable and stable in Ustrasana then advanced Ustrasana before moving on to Kapotasna for which they prepare you.


HINTS/TIPS/SUGGESTIONS

These are the same as for yesterdays ushtrasana subroutine (Day 51)


The danger in kapotasana is to put too great a strain on the lower back, to avoid this we want to create a strong and stable base, ushtrasana allows us to focus on developing that stability.

Press the toes into the mat, all of them

Press the feet into the mat

Press the whole of the lower leg from the toes to the knees into the mat

Keep pressing into the mat from the moment you begin to raise your arms above your head, throughout your stay in ustrasana and until you return to vajrasana stithi

Engage your bandhas, draw up your anus and suck in the belly, imagine the muscles of the bandhas holding the base of the spine firmly, (Ramaswami's fishing rod example).

Engage the front of your thighs ( make the most of any postures that engage the quads so as to develop strength).

Most important of all bring the hips forward and keep encouraging them forward throughout all the way back into ushtrasana and throughout your stay in the posture.

With every inhalation raise up your chest and with every exhalation push your pelvis a little further forward.

As you raise your arms and lift up of your knees lift out of your pelvis and try to keep lift ion out of your pelvis throughout your stay in ustrasana.

Ideally your legs and thighs should be together, this may be something to work towards as it is  less stable


Advanced Ushtrasana (picture 6)

Remembering all of the above, the lifting out of the hips and keeping the legs from the toes to the knee firmly into the mat, engaging the thighs and pushing forward the pelvis, arch back and take your arms over your shoulders towards your heels.

At first you may only be able to reach the mat behind you and may have to work towards taking your heels or ankles over time.

To avoid collapsing as you arch backwards it's necessary to keep your thighs strongly engaged and your hips forward and keep lifting out of your pelvis.

To reach your heels: one way is to land your hands on the mat and then walk them in towards and up your feet.

Ideally you will want to reach your heels from the air, this will take time but the trick is to keep the pelvis forward and the thighs engaged.

Work on strengthening the thighs and keeping the hips forward in other Vinyasa Krama postures, particularly the table subroutine in the Supine sequence.

If Kapotasana is beyond you for now you will bend to come back up from advanced Ustrasana. To do so press your legs from the toes to the knees into the mat, engage the thighs strongly and most importantly lift from the hip pushing your pelvis forward.

Kapotasana
From Advanced Ustrasana inhale, press your palms, engage your thighs and tighten your buttocks, push your pelvis forward as if you were going to come back up to seated but instead lower your head to the mat as near your feet as is possible for you.

By acting as if to lift out of the pose when lowering you give your self more control in lowering into the deep back bend.

You may wish to stay in this version of Kapotasana for a number of breathes, lifting the chest on the inhale and pushing forward the hips on the exhalation.

The depth of your kapotasana will depend on your Ushtrasana, if you begin to lower while your hands are on the mat, your toes or half way up your feet that will be the extent of your kapo. To go deeper into the posture you will need to take your feet, ankles of calves in Ustrasana and then lower.

It is harder to deepen your Kapotasana once you have lowered your head to the mat although it is possible to take a rest and then straighten the arms and lifting the head and walking back in.

The depth of your kapotasana seems to be directly related to how far your able to push tour pelvis forward and keep it forward.

On the exhalation take your arms around to the side and hold your thighs.

To come back up return your arms to your heels on the inhalation and return as in Advanced ushtrasana above, pressing your legs from the toes to the knees into the mat, engaging the thighs strongly and most importantly lifting from the hip and pushing your pelvis forward.

The ideal is to perform this subroutine with your feet, knees and thighs together, this is challenging as it gives you a less secure base and there is the danger of toppling over to one side, good bandha control is necessary as well as smooth and steady breathing.

Arguments for keeping the feet and knees together in Kapotasana and when dropping back

A couple of weeks ago, in THIS post, I looked at approaching the dropback and Kapotasana with the knees and feet together. This is something Ramaswami had mentioned in relation to Kapotasana back on the TT course and also seemed implied for the drop back in the 'On your feet' sequence in his book The complete book of Vinyasa yoga'.

I tried it, managed it but wondered what the reason might be behind it.

In Ramaswami's Newsletter this month, on Spinal exercise, he writes about performing backbends with the feet, knees and thighs together. He doesn't mention Kapotasana or the dropback back I wonder if the same reasoning applies.

The relevant section is below, the full newsletter can be found HERE and an illustrated version of the Spinal exercise article including the exercises HERE

'For the back bending exercises it is necessary to protect the lumbar
spine. Towards that, the flexibility and the strength of the sacro-
coccygeal region is to be necessarily cultivated. The pelvic push is
efficiently facilitated by a simple but effective asana called
dwipadapeetam (pages109-115) or desk pose . This posture which is
casually practiced with the feet apart and thighs spread out leaves
out the the spine in the pelvic region. Hence it is necessary to keep
the feet together, tighten the gluteal muscles, draw in the rectum and
gently push the tailbone/sacrum up and feel a healthy stretch at the
bottom of the spine. Any back bending done without fully involving the
sacro coccygial region is a less efficient back bend and tends to put
more strain on the lumbar spine. Again my Guru used this posture to
teach to almost anyone. This upward pelvic push is to be done on
inhalation generally but, it can be done while exhaling smoothly by
the elderly, the obese, the pregnant, the highly strung etc. Because
the feet and back of the head are well anchored it becomes easy to
control the back bend very well and one can improve the stretch step
by step. Other poses that are in this group would be catushpada peetam
or Table pose ( page79 ) and Purvatanasana or the anterior stretch
pose (pages78,79). The other back-bends in the prone poses such as
Bhujangasana, dhanurasana and salabhasana (pages 138-145) also may be
done with the thighs and feet together to keep the sacrum and tailbone
engaged and stretchered. To ensure this condition, the teacher may ask
the student to keep the feet and thighs together by placing a piece of
paper between the feet  and not let the paper drop to the floor while
raising the legs up in asana like Salabhasana. In these prone
exercises keeping the legs together enables to exercise all parts of
the spine, especially the oft neglected sacro-coccygeal area.'

from Ramaswami's September 2011 Newsletter

Here's the video once again of my feet together drop back attempt




It's harder, in that you have a less secure base but interesting to explore as your regular Kapo and drop back become more comfortable.

In the same newsletter Ramaswami also writes about the importance of engaging mulabandha when back bending,

'....all will be better if the mula is gripped firmly and engaged.'

See this post for his fishing rod analogy

4 & 5 Diamond postures, Usthrasana and Kapotasana ( feet together )

I mentioned in the dropping back post a couple of days ago that in Ramaswami's book the feet are, perhaps surprisingly ( for me at least coming from ashtanga) together. This adds quite a degree of challenge as you have a less stable base to work from.

I try to keep the three locks/bhandas, (Mula -root, uddiyana-belly and jalendhara-throat ) engaged throughout my practice, in some poses more engaged than others. Uddiyana bandha, drawing in the belly, is especially useful for backbends, seems to help protect the back and ground you somehow, makes you a little more stable.

Recently, somebody mentioned a tip from a workshop where they were told to imagine they had a pea beneath their belly that they were trying not to squish as they were laying in the Salabhasana's (trying to find the source of this anyone remember?). great tip, it really helps but what about standing backbends and kapo, here's my variation.....

This only works if your belly button is an innie, sorry outie's your backbends are just going to have to suffer or perhaps you can come up with your own version in which case please let me know.

The yogi and the pea
So the idea is that you imagine your holding a pea inside your belly button. Now you want to grip that pea so suck your belly in and up, grip the pea and draw it back nice and safe, now keep that engaged like that through your drop back's, kapo's and what have you.

In the video below I'm whizzing through the Bow sequence and part of the meditative sequence. The idea here, as with the previous Leg behind head post, is to show how the postures of the sequences build upon each other preparing you for the more challenging poses.



I'd already done my bow sequence practice this morning, here I'm going in and out of each pose on the breath but earlier, of course, I was repeating the postures three times and or staying in the pose for a number of long, slow breaths.

Key to ushtrasana and kapotasana are getting the hips as far forward as possible, lifting up out of the hips as we do every day in tadasana. There's a tendency to collapse the hips backwards as we go over but all the way keep thinking "hips forward, hips forward...". Mine collapse here because this is my first time doing kapo with my feet and knees together. You may find it easier to work toward the feet together version by practicing with your feet and knees apart.

Look inside

The full kapotasana doesn't show up in Ramaswami's Complete book of vinyasa yoga but it's there in his earlier book ( and one of THE best books on yoga I've come across) Yoga for the three stages of life.

5 Diamond postures. Dropping back, Kapotasana (backbending)

NB: Ramaswami marks each of the postures in his book with 1-5 diamonds depending on the challenge.


One of the things that's troubled me about Vinyasa Krama ( oh yes, it's not just Ashtanga I have problems with) is how to work on challenging postures/areas of practice.

In Ashtanga it's kind of straight forward, you do the same postures everyday so your constantly working on the same area of difficulty. If/when you get stuck at the Marichiyasana twists or at Supta Kurmasana, or Kapotasana or the Leg behind head postures, you just keep plugging away at them until you get they get a little easier, more comfortable

In Vinyasa Krama, however, we're seeking to cover a wider range of asana. We also have some key postures to practice daily, paschimottanasana, maha mudra, the inversions, time is often a concern. How to cover a wide range of postures and yet still work on the same ....challenging areas.

Ramaswami mentions difficult/challenging vinyasa in his September 2009 Newsletter .

• In about six months to one year of consistent practice one would be comfortable with the system, the  sequences and especially the required synchronous breathing. This would complete the learning process. 

• Then one may prepare a green list of asanas and vinyasas one would be able to do and wants to practice regularly. 

• There will be another list, amber list which would contain  those vinyasas which are difficult now but one would like to practice them even if they are somewhat imperfect. 

• Then there would be another red list which will contain procedures that are not appropriate or possible for the practitioner—which could probably be taken up in the next janma. 

These are perhaps the four and five diamond marked postures in his book although.

Lets take backbending and in particular kapotasana and dropping back, both five diamond postures in Ramaswami's book. The former comes up in the Meditative sequence (p182) the latter in the On your Feet sequence (p20). I learned my dropbacks in ashtanga and tend to do a handful of them every morning, they're good prep for the more extreme backbends like Kapotanasana, so even if I'm only doing Bow sequence once a week I still feel I'm not losing any facility. I wonder though, how I would have worked towards them in Vinyasa Krama. How I would have been able to put in the time required to nail them in the first place

Two key elements to backbending come to mind. The first is obvious, improving flexibility along the full length of your back, the second is hip flexibility and strength, being able to push your hips forward as far as possible, this takes a lot of strain off your back and basically 'doubles' the effectiveness of your backbend, supercharges it. So to keep up my current backbend facility or for anyone working towards them we want to find places in Vinyasa Krama where we can work on these areas, if possible,  every day.

Tadasana is nice prep, those behind the back hand variations with the back stretch are nice dropback prep, very similar to some of the hang back exercises I used to do when I was learning to drop back.

The big thing in Dropping back is getting the hips forward and that's something you can work on with some of the supine exercises, variations of which come up after most forward bending subroutines as counterposes. Urdhava Danurasana is pretty much a must and makes an excellent counter after the shoulderstand your going to be doing every day anyway.

Armed with these postures we're going to be working towards dropping back, strengthening our hips and preparing ourselves for any of the more extreme backbends and generally keeping the backbending facility ticking over nicely.

For more backbending ideas, tips, hints, suggestions there's fifty odd posts on my other blog Ashtanga vinyasa krama at home. Take a look at THIS post, for dropbacks, or THIS, for Kapotasana, take a note of the date that most resembles where you currently are in your backbends and look for posts on backbending around that time in the archive on the right of the blog.



Here's a video that looks at dropping back and preparing for it with Vinyasa Krama postures/subroutines, it isn't intended as a sequence but just relates to the above.



NB: Just noticed I'm doing a kind of Ashtanga approach to dropping back here. In Ramaswami;s book he has you stretch up and then continue over into the dropback.

another NB : just noticed too, that there are some other differences from Ashtanga re the dropback. you come up on the exhale and your feet are together throughout! See the next post  HERE

Vinyasa Krama Kapotanasana ?

Didn't make it to the Shala this morning. Woke up at 5am but didn't need to be at the station until 6;30 so allowed myself to doze, next thing I knew it was 6;45. Spent the next two hours trying to decide what to practice at home.


I found myself a bit confused, this morning, as to where I was going with my practice. I'd settled into a nice Vinyasa Krama routine, over the last couple of weeks that was evolving and developing nicely. But then I'd practiced that Primary on Tuesday evening on a whim, and loved it ( Plus there were also those amazing videos of Laruga's practice on her blog http://peaceloveyoga.blogspot.com/2009/09/mayurasana.html ). As I was planning on visiting the Shala this morning I practiced Ashtanga for the rest of the week, trying to practice it with Vinyasa Krama in mind, slowing it down, focusing strongly on the breath and finishing with some Pranayama, meditation and even some Chanting.


Reading Yoga Mala again in the week I found those elements stressed by Ramaswami in Vinyasa Krama to be just as emphasised by Jois in his book. Ashtanga, though dynamic as a result of all the full and half Vinyasas still advises long slow, steady inhaling and exhaling and plenty of it. It also recommends you stay in key poses for extended periods, just as Vinyasa Krama does.


Ramaswami recommends that you study and practice the sequences in his book until you've learned them and then develop a practice that best suits you, choosing from the sub-routines in his book and practicing some key postures daily, finishing your practice with Pranayama, Meditation and ideally some chanting. Krishnamacharya developed several such sequences over 70 years ago that we continue to practice today. Perhaps those Ashtanga sequences aren't for everyone but they do seem to pretty much suit me, for now at least.


And yet I also like the flexibility of Vinyasa Krama. I'm becoming familiar with the asanas and sub-routines now and am more able to, occasionally, add postures to my basic practice where I feel they may be beneficial.


For now at least, I'll continue to practice Ashtanga while keeping Vinyasa Krama (and Yoga Mala) firmly in mind. Slowing the practice down as much as possible, with the breath ever paramount. Because of it's dynamism a certain level of fitness is required and once a week doesn't seem to be enough.


So the new plan is to practice Primary and Intermediate twice a week each and Vinyasa Krama the rest of the week pretty much as laid out in the daily practice plan on the blog side bar. I'll continue changing the sequence on those three days while continuing to learn the sequence and improve my understanding of the sub routines.


So in the end, I decided on Intermediate this morning and it turned into a nice practice. Back bends went particularly well. I added a couple more of the back bend asanas from the Bow sequence and managed to come up from Kapo for the first time in ages. I also came up from Urdhva Danurasana for the first time in several months, something I'd just stopped bothering with. It turned into a long practice though, two hours plus another half hour of PMC (Pranayama, Meditation and Chanting).


This is a long slow Kapo build up with a rest, you might want to jump ahead.