Mini Workshop: Cow Face Pose / Gomukhasana with Jessica Napier

Transcript

hi my name is Jess and I'm from zuda yoga in Sacramento California and today I am going to be talking about both double pigeon and cowface pose and different ways to get into them different ways to prep for them and then modifications so usually if I know that I'm going to incorporate these poses into my class I like to start the class in a butterfly pose so just taking the soles of your feet together and your knees out wide sitting up really nice and tall and then like reaching back and removing whatever extra is underneath you and we all have a little bit of extra so just getting really tall in your spine and then folding forward and your forehead does not need to meet your feet like just letting your forehead land wherever it naturally does another Preparatory pose to come into both double pigeon and cowface pose would just to be coming into a dragonfly twist so you can take one foot forward and then curl your back seted toes under your inside hand so the left hand will go down to the inside of the right foot and get really tall in the back leg but then drop down into your hips you're opening through your hips you're prepping for those two shapes if it feels good you can take your arm up look up and so those are two shapes both dragonfly twist and binasa that I like to do for preps on those shapes so now we'll move into some of the method to get into both cowface pose and double pigeon so for double pigeon you'll take your shin and for the purposes here we'll start with the left shin as close to parallel with the short side of your mat and you're going to dorsy flex your left side of toes and so when you do this you're protecting your left knee you'll take your right foot and you'll bring your right foot to the outside of your left knee and then what tends to happen is then the teacher says well now stack your shins and so we end up like here instead you'll take your foot down keep the foot so the ankle doesn't move from where it is and you're just going to bring your knee down so you can see my ankle I can actually see the little bone here it's still on the outside of my left knee and then to as much as you can you'll sit both hipbones down so you can really create the Str stretch across the backs of your hips and then even my right set of toes dorsy Flex so both feet flexed and if you need a reminder for that as you start to fold forward you'll just take your hands down on your feet and just press your hands into your feet and it will intensify the stretch across the back of your hips now some folks this just like does not work and you can even tell I have maybe an inch or so in between my knee and my shin other folks will be way up here and it just the way your hips are oriented the way your femur bone sits into your hip hip socket a lot of different things happening so if this is you you don't feel a stretch here you can start to come into cow face pose and so I like to prep for this by coming onto both knees and then crossing my right knee on top of my left so like I'm as close as possible here and then I work my feet out away from one another once I'm here I sit down again Point both set sets the toes back toward my face or back towards my knees take my hands and I fold forward so if neither of those two shapes are accessible in your body so cowface pose double pigeon it just doesn't work you can't feel the stretch instead of trying to force your body into a a shape that you're not even creating a stretch in the Target area like there's so many I like to think of it as family of poses and so there's so many different poses within a family that you can do to create a stretch in your hips and so you could go back to the very first pose that we started class with which is just taking the soles of your feet together and you can choose like if it feels better to take your feet out closer from the center of your body or further away or closer and then folding in half bringing your arms up until you can create a stretch across the backs of your hips and letting your head and your neck go all [Music]