Stability and mobility
There's a misconception out there that yoga is for people who are either really flexible or for people who want to get really flexible. It's understandable that this is the perception of yoga for those who have never practised because of the way yoga is portrayed in our culture. Added to this, of course, yoga practice is actually a great way of bringing more flexibility into the body.
As practitioners of yoga though, we know that there's so much more to it than that. We must never, ever forget that achieving flexibility through yoga practice is always secondary to achieving a sense of equanimity in our lives, calming the stormy seas of our minds, and maybe even, someday, realising our true nature.
But today I want to suggest that, even if we forget about the mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual aspects of yoga practice; even if we approach yoga on a purely physical level, this strong focus on flexibility in yoga is, at most, only half the story.
I've come to realise, through practice, teaching and even through injuries that there are some important aspects of ashtanga yoga which are overlooked by most practitioners. Yoga, when done in a slapdash way over a long period of time, has the potential to cause imbalances and even injuries in the body. This is true of almost all physical pursuits of course if they're not practised in a conscious way.
What can happen with yoga practice is that we bring more flexibility into parts of the body which are already flexible and that we stabilise parts of the body which are already stable.
What we should be aiming to do is to stabilise and strengthen flexible parts of the body and to mobilise stable parts of the body.
For me, the two most obvious examples of this are the lower back (flexible) and the upper back (inflexible).
The lower part of our spine tends to be more mobile than the upper part of our spine, partly because our ribs attach to the upper part and partly because of the shape of the vertebrae themselves. When we bend forwards or backwards, there is more movement in the lower back than in the upper back. When we twist, the opposite is true as the upper back does almost all of the twisting (this also is because of the shape of our bones and it's something that we shouldn't try to change, more on this later).
Leaving out the twists, for now, in this scenario we have two adjacent parts of the body; one flexible and one inflexible. If we go on practising with the intention of 'getting more flexible' we'll tend to make our lower back even more flexible (both forwards and backwards) while nothing really happens to our upper back and ribcage (bearing in mind the way we live our modern lives sitting at computers, watching TV while our upper back becomes more and more rounded and locked).
We'll almost always take the path of least resistance to 'achieve' what we think a yoga posture should look like, so if our upper back is locked, then all the movement will come from the lower back.
If we make an already flexible part of the body even more flexible, we'll always be pushing up against that point at which ligaments, tendons, cartilage and even the bones themselves are brought into a position that they're not able to easily recover from. That sounds serious, doesn't it?
So what's the solution then?
Well, it turns out we already have the solution. And we were supposed to be paying attention to it all along!
We need to breathe deeply in every single posture (and between the postures) and do uddiyana and mula bandha.
Let's consider this further.
Our poor upper back and ribcage take terrible abuse from our modern lifestyle. We're always hunching forward over screens or steering wheels, eating our meals or watching the telly. Everything in the modern world has been placed conveniently in front of us between chest and hip height. Cooking, driving, reading, writing, working on a computer or, scrolling on the smartphone; we rarely have to reach above our heads or down to the floor. And so our upper backs become more and more rounded, less and less mobile and our ribcage becomes locked into position. Now when we come to reach overhead, our shoulders have to do all the moving. Even when we reach our hands above our heads to do surya namaskara, our shoulders do all the moving and the ribcage stays locked. We've actually lost the ability to even breathe fully.
But if we prioritise breathing when we practice, we can start to reintroduce movement into the ribcage. We can work on stabilising our shoulders, instead of needing them to become more and more flexible (and stretching the ligaments in there). We can work on stabilising the lower back too because that doesn't need to move to compensate for the lack of mobility in our ribcage anymore.
And how do we stabilise our lower back? This is maybe a little more complicated (because so many of us have already got some lower back pain), but fundamentally we want to strengthen and stabilise the area. How do we stabilise our lower back? How do we keep that 'locked in' while the other, previously locked areas start to move?
Yes, you already know. We do uddiyana bandha. We switch on those deep core muscles which act as a scaffold for the spine. By the way, when I mentioned twisting the spine earlier we'll also find benefit from allowing the upper back to rotate while stabilising the lower back so the solution is the same.
It's really quite simple, isn't it?
Here's the problem though: the hierarchy of our attention tends to go in this direction.
Posture
Breath
Drishti
Bandhas
We can kind of ignore drishti in our conversation here (although it's such an important part of yoga practice and should never be relegated to an afterthought when we're practising). So we're basically paying attention to the posture first, our breath second, and our bandhas almost not at all.
What we need to do is to flip it around. Breathing and bandhas are our priority. The postures will take care of themselves. In many ways, the postures are just vehicles for the breath and bandhas (and drishti).
Let's take upward dog as an example as it happens so many times in the ashtanga yoga practice. Do you breathe fully in upward dog? Or is your inhale shorter than it is in downward dog? Do you have uddiyana bandha switched on, or does it disappear when you bend backwards like that?
These are the subtle details that we are supposed to be paying attention to. Yes, your back might actually bend less if you breathe fully and switch the bandhas on. So are you doing the yoga posture less well in that case? Of course not.
We must, if we want to practice ashtanga yoga for the rest of our lives, make sure that we prioritise the more subtle aspects of the practice.
Don't say "I had a good practice today; I was able to catch my hands in Marichasana D".
Instead, say "I had a good practice today; I was able to breathe deeply all the way through, and I was able to pay a lot of attention to the bandhas. I'm looking forward to doing it again tomorrow without any pain".
I'll say it again, the postures will look after themselves. If you judge your practice on how well you perform your hardest pose, you'll always be disappointed and frustrated. Pay attention to how you're approaching the practice, prioritise the small details and watch how much your experience improves.