Dhanurasana (Bow Pose)

Welcome back, Lori and I are diving a little more deeply into the back bending adventure with Don Urasina. I'll cover just the basic alignment of the pose first and then we'll look at one hands-on adjustment. Okay, come on down. All right, so we see as Lori rises into the pose, nice and strong through the whole back body. Knees essentially in line with the hips. You can work with that variation or knees base of big toes together. Either is okay as long as the knees are not wider than the hips. Shoulders are wide open and moving down the back and Lori has a slight gaze forward but we see that her neck is nice and long, no scrunching in that area. Feel free to lift the gaze a little but only if you can keep that spaciousness through your neck. Okay, you can come down and release just for a moment. All right, and then we'll move into the hands-on adjustment which is really similar to Shalabhasana. Some of this will depend on your height, the height of your student. You can either step on either side or just kind of be behind and slightly off to the side. Experiment with that. You'll know when you see the proportions at play. Okay, Lori, come on back when you're ready. Okay, beautiful. So given Lori's height, I'm not going to step on either side of her. I'll just come to the side, brace myself with my back leg, get a nice deep squat so that I'm close to her body, drawing my hands to her shoulders, my forearms around her upper arms, and then slowly lifting and gently drawing her arms a little closer together, watching her breath, feeling for that for a moment. Good. And then gently releasing, kind of guiding her back to the earth so it's not a big drop of her body weight. Good, let that go and just rest. Yeah, good. So play with that. Get some feedback, see how it feels. Thank you so much. Namaste.