What does your Side Angle Pose look like? Are you more of a beginner or an Intermediate student?
What is a beginner anyway?
B.K.S. Iyengar said that we are all beginners for at least 10 years of consistent, dedicated practice. (Maybe more if your practice is on-again/off-again.)
Often, I see students who have been practicing for more than 10 years, but their practices still look very much like a beginner’s practice. By that I mean, when I look at their basic standing poses, they are still doing them as a beginner; there is not the understanding and intelligence in their postures that an Intermediate practitioner should have.
Lots of times when I meet students who are new to me their poses need refinement. To give an example, often their Side Angle Pose looks like this:
When it could and should look like this:
An Intermediate version of Side Angle Pose. That’s a much nicer pose. Now we just have to work the hand to the floor!
Now, Side Angle Pose is considered a beginning posture, but the full pose - with the front knee bent 90 degrees with the shin vertical and the thigh parallel to the floor. The upper side of the body should be a straight line from the outer edge of the back foot to the fingers of the top hand. This has to be learned before you can move on to more advanced poses.
I am offering an 8-week workshop on Saturdays called “The Foundations of Yoga”. It is not necessarily a class for beginners, although beginners could take the class. I was thinking it was also a class for students whose practice may have fallen off due to the pandemic or zoom fatigue, or any other reason. Or, for people who want to deepen their understanding of the postures so that they can advance to the next level of poses. Or, that it could be for students who are new to me and not so used to an alignment-based practice.
Several students have voiced the opinion that they are looking for a more intermediate practice and they fear that this course will be too basic for them. I don’t think that would be the case. More experienced practitioners can work deeper into poses than beginning students and get a lot out of the class.
Did you know that being able to do full Side Angle Pose will help you be able to do some of the Hand Balancing Postures like Crow as well as Handstand? But, without the skills learned in this basic standing posture, making progress in other poses will be harder and maybe even injurious.
In this course, I hope to show you how to improve and refine your postures so you can go deeper in your practice safely and with intelligence. We will cover all of the Standing Postures, plus Twists, Seated Postures, Back Bends, Forward Bends, Headstand and Shoulder Stand.
If you are interested, you can sign up here: