Devotion to opening up
“The door to your heart opens inwardly. Only you can open it.”
-Dragos Bratasanu
When I first came to practice yoga, I thought of it as a way to open up. So many teachers taught with the goal of helping students open up tight, tense bodies. The thing is, I started my practice as an already-flexible teenager. Throughout the years, my flexibility has waxed and waned. Since becoming a mom, I’ve developed some new places of tension, but I am oddly more flexible and less strong than I used to be, which is not the healthiest combination. Could it be the hormone relaxin, which is supposed to make pregnant and breastfeeding women more flexible? Or is it simply that I have lost some of my muscular strength?
Sometimes what we think of as flexibility is really instability. There is such thing as opening up too much and without a stable, anchoring force, you lose the power and benefit of that opening.
Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you want to stretch your triceps (the muscles on the back of your arm...you know the part that people complain about getting flabby?). In order to do that you have to engage the opposing muscles (biceps). In the same vein, back bends strengthen the back of the body while forward bends strengthen the front of the body. Something has to contract for something else to relax; it just takes a little creative visualization to know what to engage and what to let go.
I want to bring your awareness to a specific opening: your chest, where your heart beats and your lungs breathe. There are plenty of dramatic, visually striking poses in yoga, but I think that the tiny adjustments we make to our posture are much more helpful in keeping us balanced and healthy. Drop the shoulders away from the ears. Relax the jaw. Give a slight bend to the knees. Those types of actions go a long way.
Just as in last week’s post, I want to encourage spontaneous awareness and deep, gradual change through small movements. These types of movements - like the ones mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph - can usually be practiced while doing other things, like standing in line at the grocery store (as well as during many of the traditional yoga postures on the mat). That way, you never have the excuse that you don’t have time for yoga! It’s just a matter of shifting your mindset and becoming aware of your posture and breathing in any random moment.
The video below is just a small offering I have to help you bring some openness into your chest and shoulder area.
How can we remember to incorporate these small movements and moments of spontaneous awareness throughout the day? It depends on what you do during your day. Some moms might use dishwashing time to relax their shoulders and breathe (I believe I read somewhere that some practice kegels during chores like this!). But whatever it is, let it be something you do regularly.
So almost 2 decades later, I still think of yoga as a way of opening up, but now I know that opening must be balanced by strengthening and a devotion to breath awareness. I also have realized over and over again that, even though I started my yoga journey already flexible and open, it’s up to me to keep that openness. I’ve been trying my best to devote short bits of time to maintaining that open feeling in my chest so that it becomes a natural habit, not something for show, but something that keeps me holding my head high and my heart open.