How to do Padmasana | Full Lotus Pose

Transcript

[Music] hi I'm David hi I'm Elena Welcome to our YouTube channel channel channel it's not our YouTube My Wish yeah well maybe one day um we're getting close we're almost at 50,000 subscribers my parents are impressed but are they subscribed no they're not yeah see there's still so many more people we could get that should be here but you're here so thank you we appreciate it so before we go any further remember to like our videos to comment uh what you guys are doing and we really appreciate it and we read it and um and maybe send it to someone like share it share it that's it okay so today's tutorial is on Full Lotus pose we just recently did a quick little uh Instagram tutorial on this and uh you know the that Medium is you have to be pretty brief so we thought this would be a chance to kind of talk it out a little bit more spoiler alert I can do full Lotus I'm in it now that's how you know I'm a very advanced yoga person yep but how did I get here well that's what that's what Yellen is going to tell you so Lotus it's interesting because it takes time and takes patience but it also it's important for those of us that maybe through whatever you know you want some kind of a human Lottery and your hips are open from the day one and you can get into the Lotus or you've done some other kind of a physical activity in your life like for me being a dancer that allows you to get into the Lotus almost from the first day you show up to a mat you still have to be careful as to how you get into it or how you teach others to get into it especially if the Lotus is a new thing yeah good technique uh is important I think for all ranges of motion um probably especially when you're tight you know you have to be extra careful but even when it comes really easy for you um you know you you still do need to get the alignment correct because uh knee joints are fickle like they they'll uh if if everything isn't perfect then problems can start to show up over time um one of the interesting things we've noticed kind of teaching around the world um is how uh cultural um uh this the ability to do this is so places where people squat a lot or sit on the floor um can get into full Lotus and you know generally speaking generally speaking but it's true we just came back from Saudi and almost all of the room was able to uh do half Lotus and sit in full Lotus and uh they eat in Saudi culturally people will eat on the floor often and they'll sit and they even told us like this is considered like a a Saudi way to sit on the floor and so things like that do show up on the mat uh and influence our ability to do certain things including a full Lotus yeah yeah and even like um just recently and when we're in Saudi people might have tight hamstrings or you know like tight shoulders whatever other things that that we all get but but just that habit of sitting on the floor gives you open hips so interesting you know that that uh how where you're born can kind of shape you as well but you you might be watching this because you're you're not born there you're not from s or somewhere that sits on the floor and um a lot of our students in um in the west especially sitting on chairs um have problems with the half Lotus and the full Lotus so this is for you mhm okay so uh when we're trying to do it first let's talk about the KNE we actually have a whole healthy mes uh video um I'll put the the link there you can check that out too some of this will be repetition but we're going to really focus on getting into full Lotus with this video so the the knee is a hinge joint and the hip is a ball in socket okay and does all this stuff yeah goes all the way around from the thigh not from the knee right the knee basically just folds the shin and the thigh together right closes the the joint or opens it up so it either um uh comes into uh extension like that straight leg or I guess what do they call it contraction bending the knee bending the knee and um and that's it that's all the knee does quite boring I wouldn't really go out with it anywhere if uh you know if it invited me it's like do you want to extend you want to contract no I would like to go all the way around like a hip joint see the the hip joint big circles so much to do so what we need to do when we're getting into a half Lotus or a full lootus is close the knee joint do what it likes and then keep the knee joint Clos closed and get the movement to come from the hip joint from the femur in the hip rotating out to lift the foot up okay so the first thing that we do closing the knee joint pretty simple usually this is accessible to everybody unless there's some kind of damage in the knee if you can't close your knee because of like a meniscus tear something like that then I wouldn't go any further with this kind of work right now but if you can do this if you can close like janas ASA you know just folding the shin and the thigh bone together this is closing your knee joint and you see how Yelena did that she dragged her foot along the floor this is good technique because she's keeping the thigh and the shin in line as it closes so she's not closing the knee joint by pulling it up and towards her this would be a torquing action she's torquing not twerking torquing the knee joint by lifting the shin higher than the thigh and this is something that I encountered um about maybe two years into my practice uh because I didn't really pay attention too much to how I closed my knee joint for half Lotus or full Lotus because it was easy for me I kept doing this and then as I kept doing that day after day after two years I started to feel like a a funny sensation here in my knee and all I had to do is back off for some time and then reappropriated more mindfully where at first I had to be really formal about this movement because that was the only way to overcome this habit if I wasn't formal about it my body would just go into this kind of motion so then I had to do this kind of be careful to close by dragging the foot on the floor and avoid void any kind of lifting of my shin yeah if you're a yoga teacher um and for us when someone tells you their knee hurts and you know they're doing a half Lotus get them to do that get just watch them close their knee and come in you know into half Lotus or whatever but if they're lifting the shin without rolling the thigh out that's going to be causing the pain over time it's super common it's almost it's almost always the answer right at first and it's a small movement but do you see where my hand is it's below and it's kind of holding and lifting my shin so what we want to make sure is that if we're using the hands we're using them from the top in the front and we're just using it to drag and bring the heel as close to the pubic bone without any of this lift it's so small but it makes a huge difference okay so one we Clos the knee joint two now we're going to externally rotate the the thigh and we want the shin to stay with the thigh as we externally rotate so basically it's all moving like one piece so again Yellen is not going to use the uh the strength in her arms to pull up on the shin she's going to use the strength to pull the shin against the thigh to keep the knee joint closed as she rolls the femur out maybe even rolling a little bit towards the back of the hip okay that lifts the foot high enough that when you adduct when you start to bring that leg in towards the center line the foot is going to come onto the top of the opposite thigh in Ashtanga we always do the right leg first okay right leg first and actually this comes from the yoga pra which says right leg first as well so it has a a textual Source but it doesn't say why and then there's lots of different if you want to look around for different uh explanations for it but usually they'll just say uh like Pabi Joyce in asanga yoga would say because the shastras say so because the texts say so that's enough okay so we squeeze the right leg in a little bit until the right foot is on the top of the thigh and this is care this is a like an important part too we have to get the right foot into the right place so we want to get the right foot high enough on the thigh that the foot is supported really the ankle is supported by the leg but there's another thing we need to be careful of a lot of the time when people put the foot too high or high where it needs to go they start to feel pain in the quadricep so one of the ways actually as I bring this leg um or this whole foot up one of the things that I do is I let this leg roll out it needs to go into an external rotation anyway you'll see in a second but when I do that and I bring this foot up here I kind of move the muscle my quad I move it out of the way here so that I can find find the proper placement for my foot and then as I rotate the leg back in then all of this muscle is sort of out of the way and I don't feel that pressure which can hurt quite a bit and it can even cause bruising and then sometimes you can even use your hand to kind of move the meat out of the way so you can find that perfect place for the foot to rest in and you can see maybe hopefully you can see the the foot has this nice uh or the ankle has this nice straight line here so yela was demonstrating it before just be careful that you're not going into a sickle position you know letting the the outside of the ankle collapse cuz that's like it's like spraining the ankle it's going to stretch stret the ligaments and the tendons in a way that they don't want to stretch okay that was step two wow we're only at step two okay step three yelen already kind of started that she's externally rotated the uh the leg to put the foot into the right position on the thigh so she's going to maintain that external rotation and then bring the left heel in towards the right knee like that okay that's the first part of step three step 3 a and then step three B now she can use her hands she's going to again not lifting don't do that bad for the knee she's going to use the hands to to uh Slide the heel up the shin or really it's down the shin towards the ankle of the right foot but you see how when I do that it closes the knee joint and this is really the reason why we're doing that so instead of here torquing you first want to close your knee KNE joint and then as you do that you have to be really careful to keep reminding yourself to not let this foot slide off because if you just let go it kind of comes off so all the while I'm doing this I keep gently squeezing this knee towards the center line of the body yep and so we're here yeah and you can see right on Yelena that her she's drawn this up to close the knee joint it doesn't fully close like this one does cuz it doesn't have as much room but it does you do feel like it's closing it's closed yeah and then the heel on her is just at the bottom of the calf muscle and that's going to give her like a little bit of space to slide the heel in and then she can addu squeeze that other leg back in to get into position with that left foot as well and then speaking of the position of the feet see how yelena's left heel is kind of pressing into the inside of the left hip or around there same with the right heel that's ideal so the heels are close to the belly or pressing into the belly and so when I'm in the full Lotus I don't really ever completely relax because if I relax then the knees start to come apart and and the ankles start to um what's it called sickle sickle but there's always this gentle pressure which is squeezing the knees but it's also coming from my feet so you can see that my feet are flexed and that helps trap the foot in the correct place and then it feels like it feels nice and connected and it feels so much better to be holding it here there's no no discomfort no pain except maybe some numbing after a while General numbing but numbing is okay numbing is just part of the journey well uh so this is a magic pose too like the the Hat yoga par which I mentioned before about the right leg first um says too that this posture is going to I don't destroy um ignorance and uh and sickness in the body but this is our base for um for doing a lot of uh meditation poses I mean you can sit anyway and do do uh meditation but this is is a really nice contained way to sit and you can train yourself to sit here for a long time yeah I remember though the first time that I ever did Lotus I I uh I kind of exploded out of it like I I pulled myself into it and then I could feel all the muscles like you know working and my legs came out and it was like that for a while and that's a that's an important message because if you're going to sit like this and especially if you're going to do um a seated meditation practice when you're done and especially if you know that you are numb you're aware of that be careful how you come out so don't let this happen because it's not really good for your for your for your legs for your body so when you're coming out of it come out with that same attention that you came in and then slowly move your you know legs use your arms and then maybe just stay here for a few seconds regain the sensation before trying to get up and walk yeah eventually it does become comfortable um I've been sitting like this throughout the whole tutorial and I'm only uh mildly numb uh through the legs um no there's no there's no pain after a while but if there is pain especially in your knees you have to listen to that so don't ignore it um come out of the pose and then you could try to get back in if it's still hurting just stop for the day because you can't put any stress on the knee joint you know the hip you can kind of work with the the tension but the knees they don't they don't give at all so if you feel anything in your knees back off yeah we mentioned that in the previous tutorial about knees specifically that you can look at but don't don't sit with knee pain yeah you can sit with numbness numbness is it's kind of the absence of pain yeah exactly um I think that's it uh I hope that was helpful I want you be safe um work on it oh if there's a reason that you can't do uh full Lotus you know and you need to modify then the easiest modification is just to stick with suasana here we call the sukasuka is like easy easy pose or um you can try to stack something like this this is a great hip opener so for some reason maybe like we mentioned your meniscus or something like that doesn't let you close your knee then something like this gives you a ton of steadiness and a lot of benefit in the hips okay I think that's it we hope this was useful and if so please let us know by commenting liking and maybe subscribing to our Channel yeah maybe you'll be um number 50,000 MH yeah all right bye bye