Pose of the Month

In the great ancient Indian epic, Ramayana, Hanuman is called upon by Lord Ram to rescue his wife, Sita from her captivity in Sri Lanka.  Hanuman, with his noble spirit of service and devotion, performs the impossible task of leaping across the sea from mainland India with great power and beauty. Like Hanuman's mythic leap across the ocean, Hanumanasana requires both power and flexibility: unwavering strength and refined sensitivity. You, like Hanuman, may feel up against a seemingly insurmountable task. However, by establishing yourself in a steadfast connection to your heart, your breath and your alignment, what seems like an impossibility becomes an invitation to discover your own greatness and freedom.

When your teacher calls for this pose in class take a moment and connect to the highest ideals of practicing yoga: expansion of our awareness and enjoyment of our essential freedom. Rather than allowing your thoughts to highjack your experience of the challenge, turn your attention to the power and fluidity of your very breath. No matter how tight your hamstrings or hips are, Hanumanasana has the potential to serve and empower you. It's all about how you approach it.

Ask yourself, who you will have to become in order to perform this posture? Ask yourself what parts of your body aren't usually engaging during your yoga practice with as much power as they could be. Ask yourself if you are cultivating a sense of sensitivity and allowance during your yoga practice as much as you are connecting to your strength. Muscles that are generally disengaged must become active, while muscles that are overly tight and hardened must soften and become flexible. Your intention must be strong and your patience must be soft. In these ways, you will embody the heroic and loving qualities of Hanuman and make this pose a remarkable reality. 

For the past 2 years I've been teaching Anusara Yoga^® to 15 year-old boys at a juvenile detention center. The moment the guys see me they know that they are doing yoga instead of gym sports. Most of them make no attempt to hold back their expressions of deep disappointment. Many times on my way to teach at the detention center I question if it's worth it. Is teaching them yoga a waste of time? Are they getting anything valuable from the experience? Sure enough, at some point during the practice, it's clear to me that they are gaining something. It may not be a huge change, but it's just enough to inspire me to return the next week, and every so often, one of the guys has a deep transformational shift that lights me up for weeks! Mastering Hanumanasana requires consistency and dedication as well and can also afford you a profound and radical light-filled shift.

What it takes:
In order to experience this shift, we must approach Hanumanasana as an ally, not an adversary (not a bad idea considering Hanuman is the ultimate warrior). This is easier said then done - how many of us have battled our way more deeply into Hanumanasana only to come out feeling defeated and even injured? The most common reason people are injured in this pose is because they lose the engagement of their leg muscles. So, the key to this asana is finding a balance between the strength of our effort and the ease of our surrender.

The Benefits:

• Radically strengthens and opens the muscles of the legs and hips.
• Tones the sacral ligaments and helps to keep the spine strong and supple.
• Clears binding and tightness of the lumbar spine, as is often experienced after backbends. 
• Invites us to serve and to be compassionate to our body in the very posture we might tend to do just the opposite. 
• Invites us to remember and celebrate all that Hanuman represents and to experience those ideal qualities within ourselves.

Preparation:
Plenty of standing postures done with full engagement of the muscles on all sides of the legs, with a focus on forward bends, hip openers, and quad stretches. Uttansana, Prasaritta Padotanasana, Parsvotanasana, Pigeon pose, and Runner's Stretch are extremely helpful in toning and opening the hamstrings and hips. Hold forward folds for longer than normal, and do several repetitions of each, focusing on keeping even action through the leg muscles, while simultaneously extending energy from the core of the pelvis towards the feet, through the bones of the legs. Also work on moving the thigh bones (femurs) strongly towards the backside of the legs. Quad/thigh stretches are excellent because they release the tightness of the front leg and make it more possible for the thigh bones to move towards the back of the legs, which helps bring freedom to the hip joints and soften the inflexibility of the hamstrings. Backbends such as Urdhva Dhanurasana are also helpful for toning the legs and opening the hips.

First Principle:
Hanuman is a changeling, which means he can change his physical form at will. However, his heart and mind remain unchanging in their devotion and service to Grace in the form of SitaRam. His every action is a gesture of his devotion to the Divine. Be like that when you practice Hanumanasana. Let each inhale move you deeper into the strength of your heart and each exhale extend out as a selfless offering to the Universal Heart, to Grace itself. 

Become a changeling physically by either backing off and softening your breath when you are pushing too hard, engaging your muscles fully when you are releasing too much, or refining the alignment of your legs and pelvis as you progress in the pose. While you work on changes in your physical form, endeavor to stay steady, sweet, and unchanging in your breath as a way of honoring and expanding the immutable power of Grace within and without. 

The most important time to remember Grace is the moment you're most likely to forget: when you are right at the place of expanding your edge. Like Hanuman, never forget to stay open and connected to Grace. Recognize your breath as a manifestation of Grace within you, open to it fully and allow it to soften your edges, integrate your efforts and lead you completely. In this way you will surely become capable of achieving great feats.

Alignment:
A common tendency in this posture is to push our physical bodies, either with effort or surrender, past the point where we can maintain optimal alignment. Rather than focusing on strongly pushing or completely releasing in order to get the hips low to the ground, keep the muscles fully toned and engaged while softening your skin with the fluid, steady quality of your breath. Move to your edge and see if you can stay there mindfully for a few full breaths. Use the inhale to strengthen your muscles and draw energy from the toes, up the entire leg, into the hip sockets, creating a solid sense of integration and power through all parts of your pose. Maintaining this engagement, use the expansive exhale to extend energy through the leg bones, away from the hips, as if you are literally elongating the legs apart.

If you are able to find this primary alignment, a place where Muscular and Organic Energy are equally present, begin to refine your actions by incorporating Inner Spiral. Keeping the legs powerfully active, press the back inner thigh up (towards the back side of the leg) and laterally out to the side, in order to widen the pelvic floor. Take your hand to the back of the front thigh and manually widen the hamstrings laterally out to that side. By pressing the inner thighs and sitz bones away from the mid-line of the body and widening the pelvic floor the femur heads will be more ideally positioned in the hip socket, enabling the muscles of the legs to expand more easefully.

The slow and steady approach has been the only thing that's worked for me in regards to Hanumanasana. Knowing that I've shifted, even a little, gives me the inspiration to practice again. If, on the other hand, I push myself too far, then I end up not wanting to practice Hanumanasana at all.  

Variations:
As you go deeper each set of Hanumanasana becomes it's own variation. The only way for me to make progress in this posture is by doing several sets per practice session. Once you are well established in a skillful experience of Hanumansana, you can fold your torso over your front leg for a powerful forward bend and work on continuing to actively widen the pelvic floor. Bending the back leg up and taking hold of the foot for a thigh stretch, will start to move you towards highly advanced poses such as Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana III and Valikhilyasana. For a fun and less intense variation, you can simply keep the torso upright, lift the arms up over your head and imagine that you are Hanuman himself leaping through the air with all of his incredible glory in service to Grace!

Darren Rhodes, director of Yoga Oasis in Tucson, Arizona, teaches workshops and trainings throughout the US. His mother began practicing yoga while pregnant with Darren, and his father, a scholar and meditator, has consistently inspired and supported Darren's yogic journey. A student of John Friend since 1995, Darren says " John Friend is my primary teacher, mentor, and spiritual guide. John turned my yoga practice into a radical, rock’n life celebration, which is what I strive to share in my yoga classes."