[Music Playing]
In Yoga, we are trying to stimulate the life force of the body to rebuild and rehabilitate our bones in various ways and the tissues and bones of the lower spinal like every other tissue of the body. If we patiently, sanely, gently and maturely exercise them by slowly stressing them in various ranges of motion, they will stay young and healthy and if they have to generate, they will regenerate.
We now come to the more vigorous of the infant’s movements. To develop the strength of the abdomen and hip flexors and legs that takes to crawl and to eventually to walk takes a lot of strength, particularly when you do not have curves in your spine yet. So, the first of these strong movements is the camel pose, although not a position that an infant would get into, it is a very effective strengthening of the muscles that an infant has to go through. So either standing up on your toes to make it easier to grab the feet, take a nice comfortable width of your knees, the wider the knees the easier it will be. Try to reach back first with one hand and then the other, keeping your chin up in the beginning, tighten up your buttocks and press the thighs forward.
An infant has no strength to do this in the beginning. They could not hold themselves in this position. It needs to struggle and struggle and struggle and struggle, to develop the strength necessary, to do what you are doing. So even all of these and not a posture an infant would do, the muscles that it is strengthening, we adults need to do to regain and to refill what it takes to move with the balance and to stabilize our bodies. If your neck becomes fatigued, you can drop your head back and press your pelvis forward, and by all means if this is too strenuous and difficult for you, do not try to hold it for a long time. And then slowly release, bring your pelvis forward, bring your chin forward, and gently go down and place your hands on the floor and relax a little bit your back in child’s pose.
So now, we move in to the bear pose. Coming up on hands and knees, any comfortable with an angle, some experimentation will tell you what you are going to barrel roll so the speak with the hips and the torso and the spine, great oblong or elliptic circles first one direction than the other, bending the elbows and moving the arms at any comfortable angle.
Typically, beginners keep their arms a little too close together which inhibits their shoulder movement, so you might explore with a wider posturing of the hands so it is easier to dip and move the chest down close to the floor as you circle first one way and then the other. You can explore lateral bends and then finally you can arch the head up and push the rib cage down, or push the head down and arch the rib cage up. These are all variations of the bear, very basic fundamental strength an infant must develop to be able to support itself as it crawls because the spinal muscles and the abdominal muscles does not have a certain minimal amount of strength before standing is even possible.
And then the exaggeration of this is about to come up, the strength of the core of the body front and back side, the rectus spinae muscles and abdominal muscles is strengthened to the maximum in the crocodile. You place your forearms on the floor that will be your feet, stretch your legs back behind you that you balance only on your toes. Now, within a certain range of motion, you can arch your butt up a little higher than normal or you can bring your hips down very close to level, but do not fall too much into an arch of the back. You are really moving from straight or tucked with no arch in the spine to lifting the hips up exaggerating them slightly above the level of the head. Moving from one of these positions to the other is working the same muscle groups of the body. These is pretty much what an infant feels like when he is trying to develop for the very first time how do I hold the top and bottom halves of my body together as I try to stand. Something we forgotten, but this pose reminds us the upper and lower parts of the body are connected primarily by muscular strength which is why we cannot allow our abdomen or muscles to deteriorate or to take too much stress on the spine. Slowly down please and go to your hands palms and push back into downward dog. This does not take nearly the abdominal strength of the crocodile. This is an opportunity now to stretch the ankles, the knees and the back, so you can thread your feet as you wish. You can move and wiggle your hips around from side to side. You can lift your head, you can turn your head, you can push and press into your shoulder asymmetrically, first one side and then the other, it is not a yin pose it is a yang pose.
(Audio cut abruptly at this point)
00:05:38
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services