Tutorial: Shoulderstand

Hello and welcome to the shoulder stand tutorial. I'm looking forward to sharing this information with you about shoulder stand. I think all too often we run across this pose and perhaps we haven't been taught how to get up a little bit more deeply into the pose and maybe how to use props to understand how to open the body in a much deeper way. So let me tell you about the props we're going to be using for this tutorial. We'll be using three blankets, three nice thick folded blankets and a block as well so that we can support ourselves very nicely in these poses. And the idea with the blankets here is for the cervical spine. In shoulder stand when we come up from the floor our spine, our cervical spine, our neck spine is without the blankets asked to bend at like 90 degrees or very close to there. And if you are able to see yourself in a mirror finding 90 degrees flexion of the cervical spine is not possible for a lot of people. So the blankets elevate the shoulders and allow that angle from the neck to the spine to be much more open, puts a lot less pressure on the cervical vertebrae and the disc between those vertebrae. Let me show you how to start this up. We're going to take three blankets and you can see I have the folded edges stacked very very neatly one on top of the other and we're going to put those on the end of the mat. I call it the head of the mat. From there we fold over the tail of the mat just about up to the front edge of the blankets. And we use the mat like this because it creates a sticky surface for our shoulders to be able to stay and triceps to be able to stay nicely underneath when we're in the pose. Then we're going to take this up into the wall and I'll explain the distance that we want to use. You're going to have a little tail of the mat just up the wall and what we're looking for is torso distance from your bottom to your shoulders at about the end of the mat. So there might be a little trial and error as you try this once twice even three times to find your right distance. Then the block is right here in the well of the mat and blankets and that is helpful for us to get a little boost up out into the pose. It's just helpful to give us a little lift. Let me take just a few moments and tell you a little bit about the inversions and the benefits that we can gain from taking these poses. The primary benefit according to the things that I've read in the literature is the blood pressure changes when we invert the body. All of that blood that would normally be going down in the standing position is now rushing towards the head and as that comes up into the carotid arteries alongside the neck, the nervous system senses that intense flow of blood and it actually starts to slow down the heart and lower the blood pressure. So we have a very calming effect to the nervous system when we stay in these inversions and that is wonderful for a number of different effects in the body especially with stress that we have going on in the world, finding ways of physically calming the body down. We can do that with these inversions and then we have the hormonal effect, the hormonal cascade of the body being calmed down lowering cortisol and the stress hormones that can sometimes get peeked up from various things in life. So those are some of the main benefits that we can take from these poses. Let's see what we can do in these and I'm going to show you several variations so that you can find a stage that makes the most sense for you and I want to say that I've got three blankets and that's pretty good for my neck. You're even welcome to add a fourth if it makes more sense to you. If you need more space from your neck to your chest, don't be shy to use props. They're there for you to do better and feel more comfortable in the poses. Let's start out by coming to the side of your setup and hopefully I put this at the right distance. If not, I'll just adjust it and I'm going to send my bottom into the wall and roll up and let's see how I did. If I roll my bottom, bottom should be about an inch or two away from the wall, but no further. No further than that. Looks like I did pretty good. I've got my shoulders about two inches away from the edge of the blanket. Let me show you a couple of errors. If the mats were too close to the wall, you'll start here and when you try to pull up, you'll just roll right off the blankets or if the blankets are too far away from the wall, when you lift your hips up, your body's going to be at such an angle, it just won't be comfortable to feel too heavy for you to hold up. So once again, bottom about an inch or two from the wall, shoulders should have a little runway to roll up onto. Next, it's nice to rest in this position for a while to really let the blood pressure settle down and I'll have students rest here for at least a minute and that's why I'm having this conversation with you in this position is to let the blood pressure start to settle down. Let my nervous system sense that the blood is being drawn up into the neck at this point and calm itself down. If we don't, it can feel like the blood pressure is so much in the head that it's just not comfortable and we don't realize it's just the body need a little extra time to do this. So everything feels like it's sort of started to settle down and regulate itself in my body, so it's time to go up. To start, we're going to hold onto the side edges of the mat and this is akin to what we do in bridge pose and it will help us pull our shoulders under. The important part for coming up here is that you pull your heels down rather than push your heels through the wall. So I'm going to bring my feet down and as though to drag my heels toward my butt but we're not going to slide, I'm doing that for the effect of showing you what dragging is, dragging your heels down to pull your bottom up, okay? If you find yourself ejecting off the blankets, it usually means you're pushing your feet into the wall and there's a corresponding sliding away. So I pull my body up by dragging my heels down and now we have to get the shoulders set. Holding onto the mat very firmly, I want to turn my arms outward away from my body, lean to the side and tuck the shoulder well underneath and do the same to the other side. Arm turns out and tuck that shoulder underneath. The tucking of the shoulder helps elevate the cervical spine away from the mat. If I don't, watch here, if I let my shoulders out, you can see my body collapses onto my neck. We don't want that. So once again, holding onto the mat, I turn the shoulder and tuck under, turn the shoulder, lift the chest and tuck under. Now I have very, very little pressure on my neck. So this is a starting stage to begin to work with that inversion and I will admit that in the beginning, if the body is not used to having this inversion shape, it can be a lot of pressure of, you know, blood pressure in the head. It's just the body isn't used to pumping the blood up through the legs like this. So be patient with yourself and your body will grow in strength in the circulatory system. From here, we want to press the arms into the floor. So we really get that lift into the back. Here's a great opportunity for you. If you feel like your, your neck is just not comfortable. It might be time for another blanket for you so that the neck can feel free to do this. Pressing the arms in the floor, holding the spine up. Then we can hold the elbows down and bring the hands against the back. Now, a couple of thoughts with the hands against the back. It can happen where we bring the hands so tight in and I'm going to do it excessively here. I push my hands and you see that closes off my throat. You can even hear the tone of my voice change. The voice should not change. So when I bring the hands, I want to help pull my body up toward the back of the knees. Again, taking the pressure off the neck. And this is a wonderful first step right here where you feel like you're very much in control of your body.

Something to practice for a couple of weeks, maybe even a month. Just learning to feel confident here. And I'd spend about a minute or so and extend that over time. As you become more and more comfortable with this position, we might try to get a little further into the pose. So again, supporting your mid back, we can take one leg and elongate it up the wall followed by the second leg. And the nice part about this position is it actually relieves a little bit of the pressure of the chest to the neck. So you can become more and more confident in this lifted posture. And staying here as you begin, you might stay for a minute or so and then progress to two, three, four or five minutes. But then we could take it a little bit further by coming back into this intermediate pose and lifting the heels off the wall. And as you'll be seeing in the lessons that we're learning through this whole season, the extension of the legs brings a deep, deep lift of the body. So I can work on pulling one leg straight up so much that it seems like the next obvious thing is for that foot to come off the wall. And now we have full shoulder stand. Again, the tone of the voice shouldn't be changed. That lets you know that there's too much pressure on the throat and neck. Okay. And then another pose that is familiar is plow pose. Here we can let go of the back and hold on to the mat once again. This gives us a nice stability so that we have a firm foundation from which to work. If down the line we work into plow pose, we can stretch up a leg, keeping one at the wall and slowly considering taking it off. Maybe we stop right there in the beginning to learn. And then over time, taking the leg to the floor, following by the second leg. Here, the legs need to be strongly lifted. And again, you should not feel compressed or claustrophobic in the pose. Adding another blanket is awfully nice. Or if you like, as a pre-set up, you can have a chair that you can take the legs down to and rest on the seat of the chair. So wonderful way to start to work into confidence and taking the legs all the way over. The complete pose is to have the hands against the back. Again, you'll see that this supports and lifts the body. And you can practice here for a minute or two. And then to come out, we can hold on to the sides of the mat again, stretch one leg way up and reach, reach, reach up for the wall and bend in the knees and we'll land back to home. And a nice way to take a recovery from this is to scoot away from the wall so that your shoulders and upper back come onto the floor and spend a little time here and let the body regulate itself from the inversion, regulating the blood pressure. Shoulder stand in these inversions are really nice poses to be finishing with. I'll take one extra step here and I'll share with you a few counter poses that you can do because again, the neck has been quite flexed. So we want to take that neck the other way in case there was just too much pressure for that particular practice. We want to get those muscles toned up the other direction. So from the side, I can interlace my fingers and raise the arms up and I want to lift up to look at the hands. Now here's specifically what I'm doing is I'm muscularly firming here behind the neck as though to take the spine bones deeper into the back of the neck. So I feel the musculature holding onto those bones nicely. So again, I take my arms up, I lift up and I feel the muscles of the back of the neck firm and I reach up. What I'm not doing is just falling back. Okay, so it's forward and up with the head. Then you can change the finger interlock so the other fingers are on top. And that's a nice way to finish and you'll see more great restorative poses after your shoulder stand a little bit more and through our seasons. I look forward to seeing you there.