Supported Child's Pose

Hello welcome to your practice. So today we're gonna do child's pose and we're gonna luxuriate in child's pose. So I'm gonna show you first kind of the basic child's pose. We're going to come on to our mat, have our knees apart about as wide as the width of your mat or if you like a little closer in whatever feels good. Then you're just gonna sit your bottom towards your heels, take your hands and walk the hands forward. So if you're kind of energized you can have a little bit more intention. So you can walk the fingertips forward and already start drawing back with the hips. And as you do that notice that your shoulders will tend to want to bunch up to its ears. In that case don't walk it so far forward and instead just try to soften. So we're trying to yield, we're trying to be children. So we're just gonna lower the arms onto the mat, walking the fingertips forward, gently melting the forehead into the mat. And this is basic child's pose. So basic child's pose is just basically being in this position. And you're simply allowing yourself to feel your breath here, to feel your chest, your side ribs expanding, you're just simply feeling your hips gently drawing down into the earth. So there is a lot of lengthening and when you like a little bit more shoulder opening you might be kind of intentionally making the arms a little straighter and drawing your outer arms kind of in a downward spiral, anti-clockwise on this side. So just drawing it down towards the mat. But when we luxuriate in child's pose, so on days when you have time to do just one pose, I highly recommend that we have tears of comfort. So block, basic. Level two is with blankets and then with a bolster. So with a block, the block would be where you rest your forehead. So same thing that you're doing either gently just flopping forward or intentionally moving forward. Rest the block under the forehead and you're already there. So for different people you might need different heights of blocks. You can experiment with having the block higher or lower and how you can tell if the block is right for you is when you feel that your entire back line of the body is just nicely lengthening from the very back of the head all the way to your tailbone. So you can rest here and feel already the different sensation of being in a more supported child's pose or for some of us even kneeling like this is really a no-no because your ankles are just screaming at you. So in that case you're gonna roll your blanket up and it might be a fatter row or a thinner row again depending on the shape of your body. Then you're gonna take that row either under your ankles like this and see if that makes you feel more comfortable and then once again you come forward whether you have a prop or not under your forehead coming into your child's pose with the blanket. Another way I like to use the blanket is to have it on top of my ankles. So still with your knees apart taking the blanket putting it right in the arch of the back of your ankles just kind of find your comfort zone and then coming forward again. So this is gonna feel a whole lot more supported and for many of us our bottoms don't really quite touch the heels this is gonna give you that release that you need to really get that lower back to kind of let go the sacrum to kind of draw down and let go. So increasing states of comfort this with one more blanket if you can afford it and then once more just going this way and forward but in my favorite way to do this would be with a bolster. So you take the bolster have it between your thighs and you would lay the bolster down and today we have an extra blanket so we're gonna put the blanket on top of the bolster and then we're just gonna get the belly to lay onto the mat the forehead to rest onto the blanket and then pretty much you're in a very sweet zone of letting go. So just allowing your hips to draw back your body to be supported the shoulders to let go and then just allowing yourself to let the breath flow easily sensing the breath releasing as you exhale and as you inhale just feeling again the expansion that the breath brings to your body. So go ahead and choose your favorite variation of doing this child's pose and we're gonna stay in it for a couple more minutes. So you could be in this forward facing child's pose or if this is a day when you feel like having a bit more of a twist through your spine or you simply don't have a blanket we can come and rest onto one cheek. So just resting onto your cheek still drawing back with the hips and just allowing that support to spiral through the spine and after staying here for about a minute you could turn your head and just rest on the other side. So this is a really really nice way to play with child's pose and I hope you enjoy it. Namaste!