The 3D Pose Viewer shows the muscle model in several different asana:

The animation here is beautiful. I wish I could stop each pose though and enlarge! Guess I’ll have to break down and purchase the 2-Volume set, which was a highly recommended anatomy reference during my yoga teacher training.

The texts do an excellent job of explaining and illustrating the relationship between the muscle groups that work and those that receive the benefits of that work in several different poses. I think my students will love being able to see what I’m constantly talking about in class but can only show them by pointing to my or a student’s anatomy. Go visit, have fun with all the tools and resources and let me know what you think!

Just like school teachers, yoga teachers get to have “staff development” days, too. Termed “Continuing Education Units” or “CEU’s”, these hours for yoga teachers are required in order to keep the teaching cert. For a 200-hour Certification for example, you get to complete 30 hours of CEUs over two years.

Since receiving my 200-hour cert, I’ve been teaching quite a lot of hours, but have tallied far too few CEUs. I suspect this is the case for many teachers. Your teaching hours far outweigh your hours as a student attending classes, while simultaneously, your income takes a pretty serious dip. An expensive weekend workshop seems out of the question.

I bit the bullet (a very nicely priced bullet) last weekend and returned to Tsada Yoga in Dallas (the studio I still consider my “Yoga Home”) for four classes with Kelly Haas. Kelly has been teaching workshops at Tsada a couple of times a year for going on five years now. This was my first experience as a student with Kelly and I want to share some of the amazing things I learned and re-learned over the weekend.

First things first: Kelly teaches from the Anusara Yoga tradition which emphasizes healthy, safe alignment and with that alignment a focus on balance and movement from the heart. Kelly welcomed us with an infectious smile and laughing and an invitation to think about our practice in terms of the four elements – the lower body as “earthy”, the upper body as “sky”, “movement,” or an “airy lightness” and of bringing those elements into balance in every pose. In the first ten minutes I learned a new Sanskrit word: mudya or, “center line” and when we drew our palms together to open or close our practice it was always “to the center line” of our hearts. She reminded us to think of the line that separates yin from yang, earth from sky, upper body/lower body, work and rest, soft and hard, and what it symbolizes: again, that place of balance, the place between two forces where peace and calm reside.

That first evening we worked on “Opening the Lotus Flower of the Hips” and focused on the lower body with lunges, warrior twos, and pigeon pose with strong assists. Kelly reinforced the instruction I see more and more often to allow the natural curve of the lower back to remain soft, not to sharply tuck the pelvis under because that movement hardens the fronts of the hips and the groins. In order for the hips to broaden, to stretch the groins need to remain soft, pliable. The leg muscles do the work, not the groin muscles.

The second day worked the upper body with a lot of emphasis on lengthening the side body. How did Kelly instruct us to do this? “Lift your shoulders up towards your ears.” Really?! Don’t I always and everyday instruct my students to lower their shoulders away from their ears?! Yes, I do. And softening the shoulders away from the ears has the effect of lengthening the spine up through the neck and reducing as much tension as possible in the trapezius muscles on the tops of the shoulders. But following the instruction to lift our shoulders was the instruction to lengthen through the side ribs. That really worked. Then, Kelly instructed us to take our shoulder bones back and press the shoulder blades in toward our spines, engaging the infraspinatus muscles between the spine and the scapulae. We applied this movement to downward facing dog (adho mukha svanasana), mountain pose (tadasana), high plank to chattaranga dandasana, crescent lunge (ajanyasana) and frankly, every other pose for the rest of the weekend.

Another important alignment principle affecting me personally recently is the placement and flexion happening in the hand and forearm muscles. Teaching Sun Salutations (surya namaskar) involves a lot of weight on the hands, wrists and forearms. When we’re moving quickly through a sequence it’s often easy to sacrifice alignment for consistency and a consistent pace in the flow without our even realizing it (until our wrist aches or we have to ice the shoulder a few days later).

Such was the case with my right wrist and shoulder at the beginning of the workshop weekend. By Sunday I felt healed. Strong muscles working in the hands (palms and fingers) and the forearms (the soft-skinned underside of the forearm, not the top) take pressure off the wrist joint.

The same principle applies in the hip joint, where Kelly reminded us again and again to soften our groins and make the leg muscles work more. I went deeper in my standing poses guided by this fundamental re-alignment.

Kelly’s workshop really took me back to my “yoga home,” in more ways than one. From my early days practicing Iyengar Yoga I recall being firmly grounded in a strong emphasis on alignment, and breaking down a pose into its minute, constituent parts so that in every pose I felt the work. From the first pose of Kelly’s workshop, I felt at once like a brand new student, and like I was deepening what I know with new tools and new ways of looking at yoga poses. It was the infusion of yoga heart and soul I needed!

You begin your class by asking your students to “come to sitting.” I suspect that, more often than not many of us leave that calling at sukhasana (easy pose). If that sounds like you, I’d like to encourage you to spend a few minutes exploring “the art of sitting” in your next class.

Teaching a lot of Beginning Yoga classes gives me the opportunity to talk a lot about sitting and to explore the many classical seated postures with my students. If you teach a lot of Vinyasa or “flow”-style classes you may sense that your students just want to get on with their workout. But just those few minutes at the beginning of a practice are plenty to explore a few of the things that happen in the body while seated. The benefits are multiple.

Seated poses will teach students some of the basic anatomy of the hips and legs while in a more comfortable, receptive posture. Letting them sit will also alert you to differing abilities in your students. You can spot tight hips in an unsupported sukhasana: the knees lift up and the back rounds. Students are sitting on the backs of the sitting bones. Forearms might even be resting on the knees. Externally rotating the thighs in the hip sockets is going to be a challenge for this student. If this is as comfortable as your student can be in sukhasana and you don’t have the benefit of working with blankets, have your student try a modified virasana or hero’s pose, sitting on (or between) the heels and feet with the knees hips-width apart. In virasana the thighs want to rotate internally, so go with natural inclination of your student’s thighs to find a comfortable seated posture for him.

If you do have blankets, fold two or three and stack with smooth edges facing in and have students sit with the pelvis lifted up on to the blankets. This support should allow the thighs to more easily begin to rotate out, so the knees can descend toward the floor. Cross deeply at the shins and stretch out through the heels. Instruct the student to feel weight in and sit slightly forward on the sitting bones so the back doesn’t round, and feel the torso lift up on the inhale. The support should stabilize the student’s posture. The spine should feel neutral but lifted.

Allowing five minutes at the beginning of your class for your students to find their way to sitting comfortably and to engage the breath will also help to better direct their attention inward during the more dynamic segments of your class. Setting the foundation for a long, smooth, regulated breath cycle at the beginning of class, when students can focus exclusively on the breath without distraction develops that awareness, that single-pointed attention to the breath as they begin to move into their asana and more vigorous vinyasa work. The breath then becomes a tool that helps to regulate vinyasa and alerts the student to instances where they may be over-exerting, causing the breath to become labored. A deep, full breath is also important for the student’s ability to move deeper in asana, as they use the breath to find space in the body.

A comfortable seated posture also is fundamental for your students to begin exploring the more contemplative aspects of their practice, such as pranayama and meditation. When sitting comfortably in a seated posture, we can more easily focus on and deeply engage the breath. Our attention isn’t constantly pulled back to the tight hip or the compressed rib cage and lungs. If your students are seated comfortably, that comfort, that balance between grounding and releasing the lower body, and breathing through and extending the upper body should allow them to sit for at least five minutes and as their practice grows and deepens, for much longer periods.

Introduce these concepts by way of a truly comfortable seated posture for a few minutes at the beginning of your classes and begin to explore some of the other seated postures such as siddhasana (seer’s or sage’s pose) and padmasana (lotus pose) towards the end, after the hips have had a chance to open. Add an optional 10 or 15 minutes to your class (if time permits) to have your students discover what is required to begin sitting for longer periods of time in a short, guided meditation and then talk about what that felt like; what the challenges were in the body that may have prevented the student from just being with the breath.

Ironically, learning to sit, like learning to lie truly still in savasana, can be one of the most challenging aspects of asana practice. In yoga we strive to harness not only the physical body, but also the mind and the breath together with the body. In the short time so many of our students have for a yoga class, honoring the practice of sitting lets them remember to see and embrace the discipline necessary to bring all three into union.