Hi! I am Patrick and this is Takako our senior instructor at Yoga Garden. Today we are going to talk about lotus pose and try to understand how it works. The lotus plant has one of the most beautiful blooms of all the flowers in the world. So it's only appropriate that this pose which is so elegant, so beautiful is named after it. When you see someone doing a nice full lotus, you automatically feel a little calmed down and relaxed just as it affect the people, but unfortunately when most of us try for the first time it goes something like this.
Okay, let's put this lotus pose and let me put this here and put this here. Oh! It's kind of hurts my knee. Oh, God! I've jammed this leg up here and I am going to take this, get this right up there, really deep, not going to fall out this time. Alright, there we go. Oh, God! What the hell! I can't do this pose 0:43. What is wrong?
People will really misunderstand this pose. So to help me explain it, I invited my friend. You might think I've lost my mind, but actually this is little action figure is really helpful. He is basically model the human anatomy, he moves the same way we do. So let's say we want to put Goku into a lotus pose. First we could try to make his knee force up into that position, but it's kind of locked up thing; it doesn’t move very much. Same with the ankle. This is not a very good way to move, but you can see right here. If he moves from his hip, he really gets a lot of action under the leg. It's a nice full rotation. And if we do both sides, you can see the lotus pose begins to take shape.
So you don't have to jam the knee or the ankle together, you've to move from the hips in kind of a circular rotation just like an action figure G.I. Joe, humans are the same. Check it out. I am going to try to move my knee. But you only get a certain amount of what I am doing out of the knee. And the same thing with th ankle. You can move it a little bit and get a little bit deeper into the pose, but it's not the main action. If you really want to do a good full lotus, you will have to work right here from the hips and the groin.
Using that ball and socket joint of the pelvis to get a rotational action. So we are going to rotate the hip, rest the leg high up on the thigh and the same thing with the other leg, rotating from the hip not torquing the knee or the ankle too much. And there you have your full lotus. This is really important. This is the only way to do a safe lotus pose. You don't want to hurt your knees, your ankle trying to do some stupid yoga pose.
So I know what you all are thinking, that's great, but I can't do that with my hips. Well, here is the solution, wide-angle forward bend. This pose is your first and last stop if lotus is your destination. I mean it. If you just do this pose often, I mean 5-6 times a week for 30 minutes at a time, you will get that lotus pose.
Here is a variation of the forward bend. This time stretching down the length of the leg. You can see in all these poses that the knees are always facing up. You don't want your knees rolling out to the side; you are going to lose the stretch. In addition the back is never curved, you can how flat Takako's back is there. You are not going to try to hump or arch the back and in the attempt to get to the floor, that's not the point. The point is to circularly rotate the hip joint, just like the action figure. You've got to be patient and you've got to be consistent. But if you do this pose often, you really get to that lotus position.
If you are already there where you want to look toward the future, once you have a nice deep forward bend, you can start to work on some of the finer details of the pose. For example, Takako roll the legs even deeper now, forward, back, toes are going to come up to the ceiling. What she is doing is working small muscle groups of the groin. Now this is a really high level of flexibility. But even if you are not here, you can try to always open the feet back kind of as in peeling your foot off the floor. If you can get this level of movement out of the hip joint, lotus wi
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services