One of yoga's gifts to me is the opportunity to experience in my body a heightened sense of both stability and expansiveness. Stability involves a hugging in, a firming of my muscles around my bones and a gathering in of the outer circumference of my body toward my midline. Expansion involves a widening out, a fostering of openness within the hugged-in space, with energy moving from the center to the periphery. It seems fair to say that yoga is, at least in part, about expansiveness within stability and stability within expansiveness.
In this essay, I'd like to explore the play between hugging in and widening out in yoga by focusing on two iconic poses, Tree Pose and Downward Dog. My last article was on Tree, but I didn't address the stability-expansiveness theme in that piece, and I'd like to circle back and consider it now. I've also referred several times to Down Dog in past pieces but without examining the actions of hugging in and widening out. So, this article is a chance to offer an expanded perspective on those two widely practiced poses.
I'm writing this mainly for readers who are in the early stages of yoga and who may not yet have experienced the interplay between hugging in and widening out. But the piece is also intended for experienced yoga practitioners who are interested in examining different ways of thinking about the practice of Tree and Down Dog.
A Background Note
The first time I thought of something like hugging in and widening out was in high school, as a member of the fencing team. I can clearly remember our coach saying in the early days of our training that we should hold the handle (I believe this was called the "grip") of the foil, the kind of sword we fenced with, as if it were a little bird. If we held the bird too tightly, we'd crush it. If we held it too loosely, it would fly away. We were to hold the foil's handle firmly but with enough openness to allow for agile movement.
In a way, what our coach was saying about balancing firmness and openness was a precursor to what yoga has taught me about balancing stability with expansiveness. If we think of our inner body, including all the organs and our various organic systems (and the seat of our soul), as analogous to the coach's young bird, we want to provide enough structure and security to protect and provide reliable support to all that's going on internally. But we don't want the structure and support to become so tight and routinized that our inner life becomes rigid, and we become incapable of adapting to new circumstances and possibilities. In neither fencing nor yoga (nor in life more generally) is the choice between firmness and openness; it's always a matter of balancing the two.
Tree Pose
iStock Credit: Antonio-Diaz
I'm going to zero in on the lower body in Tree Pose, mainly the hips and thighs, even though there is also hugging and widening out in the arms and shoulders. I'll consider the upper body later in the discussion of Down Dog.
In Tree Pose the standing leg is mainly hugging in. I hug the muscles of my inner thigh toward the midline and rotate my hip slightly inwardly. My leg is firm and steady but not tight or rigid.
The raised leg is mainly widening out. I rotate my hip outwardly (externally) and sweep my thigh out to the side. The leg is open and expansive, but not loose or limp.
Yet under the surface, the standing leg is itself widening out within the overall hugged-in space. While my inner thigh is hugging in, I counterbalance this action by widening my outer hip, which presses toward the periphery, as if pressing into a side wall. My leg does not move; my hips widen while standing firmly in place.
My raised leg, for its part, also shows elements of hugging in while remaining wide and open. I press the raised-leg foot into my opposite inner thigh, as if the foot and inner thigh were hugging each other. There's a loop of energy that flows outwardly from the hip to the knee and then back again to the pressing-in foot. The outward and the inward work in concert even within a largely widened-out space.
I readily acknowledge that it wasn’t easy for me to befriend the hugging in and widening out actions on my standing leg. My natural response when lifting my foot off the ground was to roll the inner thigh of my standing leg outwardly and let my hip come forward. But this resulted in my pelvis becoming uncentered; instead of my hip joint being aligned over my ankle joint, my hip was forward of my ankle. Also, with both of my hips outwardly rotating, the space between my sit bones and around my sacrum narrowed unduly. Over time, this created a strain in my sacroiliac joints.
But I was fortunate. With my teachers’ responsive instruction and a lot of independent practice, I gradually was able to make the hugging and widening actions my own.
To be sure, there's more involved in getting into and holding Tree Pose than hip and thigh hugging in and widening out. In my previous essay on Tree, for example, I focused on actions of the feet and exercises to increase the capacity of the vestibular system. But learning to stabilize my pelvis, awaken the strength of my standing leg, and create the wide-open space of my raised leg has been a significant journey.
When I can feel both inner strength and outer openness, I've got the best of two worlds. I'm more grounded in my core values and the commitments I hold close to my heart but also more curious and receptive to emergent ideas and feelings and to new situations that might arise.
Downward Dog
iStock Credit: Olga Litvinova
Down Dog also embodies several mutually reinforcing hugging in and widening out actions. I’m going to focus on these actions in the upper body.
The three forms of hugging I’ll describe are: (1) hugging the earth with the hands, (2) hugging the forearms in toward each other, and (3) hugging the backs of the shoulder blades against the rib cage. These actions help support two main widening out actions: (1) a widening of the shoulder blades away from the spine to allow the arms to move freely overhead and (2) a broadening and an external rotation of the shoulders to assure good alignment of the shoulder joints and neck.
Regarding the hands, one way to think about hugging the earth is to contrast it with what I used to do, which is to lay my hands down flat on the mat. I also used to dump more weight onto the heels of my hands, which tended over time to put a strain on my wrists. Hugging the earth is a way of using the muscles of the hands to simultaneously create more structure and more aliveness and openness.
To hug the earth, I press the base of my fingers, where the fingers join the palms, and the tips of my fingers into the mat. I have to make a special point of grounding the base of my index fingers because they like to float up. Then I draw my fingertips in slightly toward the center of my hands and lift up a bit from under my wrists. Finally, I hug the edges of my palms inward. The combination of these actions creates a mini air cushion under my hands that helps them bear the weight of the pose. Hugging the earth in this way also supports my wrist, so that it is a bit raised rather than sinking down into the hand's heel.
I'd note that hugging in is a gentler action than gripping. If I hug in too tightly, my hand seems to close and turn into a claw. But if I hug mindfully, then I feel a thin dome of space opening up under my palms.
Regarding my forearms, I hug them isometrically toward each other, while turning the creases or eyes of my elbows outward, as if the eyes were looking out ahead and not inward toward each other. My arms don’t actually move, but I can feel my forearm and wrist muscles firming around the bones, and the muscles around my shoulder joint, the rotator cuff muscles, working to keep the heads of my arm bones well cushioned in the socket of the joint. My shoulders broaden, my collarbones smile, and my arms feel invigorated, as if the action gave them an oomph.
Regarding my shoulder blades, I hug the backs of the blades against my upper ribs, fitting them snugly on the back. I hug the lower tips more forward on my rib cage than the upper tips, which encourages me to lift and open my heart.
As my shoulders rotate externally and my heart floats up, I also lift up from under my armpits to help me lengthen from my hands all the way to my hips. There's a brightness and buoyancy in my whole upper torso.
But the hugging in and widening out action of my shoulders didn’t seem natural to me in my early years of yoga. What I had to give special attention and focused energy to was not overdoing the outward turning of my elbow creases and the corresponding external rotation of my shoulders. What I tended to do in this outward facing process was to lock my elbows, which meant that my elbows were turning beyond their natural alignment. Further, when I rotated my shoulders too forcefully, it had the effect of constraining the inner rotation needed to spread my shoulder blades away from my spine and empower my arms to move freely overhead.
What was so interesting to me in this learning process was how helpful it was to observe myself doing the backstroke while swimming. In the water, I felt with remarkable clarity how essential it was in propelling myself with a full and fluid backward stroke to internally rotate my shoulders and spread my shoulder blades away from my spine. If I tried to start a backstroke with my shoulders externally rotated, my arms would get stuck half way into their upward swing. It became clearer to me that the power of my arms to rise originated with my shoulders. If they were widening out in the front at the expense of the shoulder blades spreading out in the back, it was like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The heightened awareness from swimming helped me to appreciate that in Down Dog, as in other yoga poses, rarely was the choice to hug in or to widen out either in the front or in the back. Rather, the choice was more a matter of both...and.
This both-and perspective seemed like so many choices in life. When making a big decision, I do better when I look both outward and ahead to set a vision and inward to connect with enduring values and wisdom I've gained from the past.
In both Tree Pose and Down Dog, hugging in and widening out are like partners in a continuous dance. As I hug in, I find space widening out. As I widen out, I hug in still further. The actions go hand in hand. The impact is not merely physical. Hugging in is a way of firming my own boundaries and getting closer to my inner self. Widening out is a way of expanding the possibilities I'm exploring in any given situation and remaining open to what might arise. Together, hugging in and widening out contribute to a sense of wholeness and fullness.
Acknowledgments. I'd like to express gratitude to my longtime yoga teacher and mentor, Leslie Ellis. Leslie's wisdom is threaded throughout this essay. I also wish to thank my friend and editor, Kasey Stewart. Kasey is herself an accomplished yoga teacher, and I've benefited from her insights about both writing and yoga.
Hugging in and widening out in Yoga could be a metaphor for life's journey. We go forth, widening out, saying yes to new experiences, and sometimes, we get tired or hurt and need to hug in.
Thank you, Glen, for connecting the cosmic in and out of life to the muscular level of being, gently escorting us toward mind-body integration!
Lovely expression of both of these poses Glen!