Puppy Pose Tutorial - Anahatasana Melting Heart Tips & Tricks

Transcript

namaste welcome to my channel my name is cassandra and today i'm going to take you through a quick tutorial on puppy pose also called melting heart pose in yin yoga this is anahata asana so this pose focuses mainly on the upper body as the name of melting heart says it it's really about lowering our heart and chest towards the floor this is a pose that can help you get deeper into your back bends so working on spine flexibility and it's a great way to stretch into your shoulders into your upper back your chest as well as the back of the upper arms so there are lots of different ways to do this one and it's one of those poses where i'll regularly get comments from students saying that they get discomfort in their neck or they can't quite figure out how to make the pose work for them this is true of any yoga pose but especially for this one i find that people really feel it differently so for me it's very much of a shoulder opener and i feel it in my upper back but for other students they might feel it more in their chest and in the back of the arms and that's all fine so regardless of how you're going to be going into your puppy pose we all begin from tabletop on all fours and what's important here is that we have our foundation shoulders over the wrists hips over our knees so especially this alignment of hips over knees is what we want to be mindful of so this is not like child's pose where our hips go towards our heels puppy pose is about keeping this alignment and instead we start to walk our hands out in front of us keeping the palms about shoulder width distance apart and we're trying to again melt the heart down towards the mat so for me this is usually where i find that people get some discomfort so i put my forehead directly down on the mat if you're doing this in a hatha or a vinyasa class if this pose is done as an active pose you would be pressing your palms into the floor and engaging through your arms so that the elbows are hovering about an inch or so off the ground from here i'm drawing my shoulder blades down my back i'm pulling the ribcage in slightly and drawing the lower belly up so rather than dumping and creasing into my low back so what we don't want to do here is to load into our lower back we're really trying to open through the chest and the upper upper back and upper part of the body what tends to happen for a lot of us myself included is that when we're getting into back bends we'll lean on the part of our spine or we'll kind of rely on the part of our spine that's already flexible to be doing the work for us rather than instead focusing on the parts of our spine that actually need a little bit more range of motion and that actually need a little bit more mobility so for me my lower back is very mobile my upper back has almost no range of motion whatsoever it's the tightest part of my body truthfully and my shoulders so if i'm not mindful in this pose what i'm tempted to do is to not engage at all through my upper body and to just dump right into my lower back which is completely minimizing of the stretch so if you have a lot of mobility in your lower back for you i would recommend just like what i do is to tone the lower belly a little bit so that you're not completely dropping your stomach towards the floor not having an excessive lumbar curve so in the active version of this pose your arms would be engaged you're pressing your fingertips into the floor drawing your shoulders down and away from the ears now i have a limited range of motion in my upper back and in my shoulders so for me this is the way that the pose feels the best and this is how i get the most amount of stretch for others if you are quite flexible you might find that you don't really feel anything and that it's hard for you to get a good stretch and it might not be comfortable for you to rest your forehead on the mat some people do this by resting their chin on the floor instead this is way too intense for me so i'm just going to show you it like just a little bit because it's not an appropriate variation for my body but for some people instead of having their forehead down in the back of the neck long they'll instead bring their chin down on the floor and rest in the pose this way so again this does not work for me but it will absolutely intensify the yoga pose if you're feeling like you're not really feeling that much in the stretch now one difference between the active version of puppy pose versus let's say the yin yoga version of melting heart in yin yoga we are not contracting our muscles so we are not trying to use muscular strength we're trying to relax our bodies fully and let gravity do the work for us so it would be slightly different i'm still keeping my hips over my knees walking my hands out in front of me shoulder width distance apart for me i'm putting my forehead on the ground slightly tucking in my chin a little bit just because my nose is not the smallest and it can be uncomfortable if my nose is directly on the mat so i just do a little tuck so forehead to the ground and now from here this time i am going to allow my arms to relax so that my elbows rest on the floor and melting heart pose this is a great one to really visualize internally so every time you exhale can you feel your rib cage melt down towards the mat getting a little bit closer now notice this is not about dropping the belly and lifting the tailbone up my lower back is not doing much i'm really just trying to soften a little bit into the upper back as well as into the mid back now for some students if the range of motion is quite limited they might not be able to even get their forehead to the floor maybe there's a gap here some teachers and even myself i'm sure i've recommended this before have said like you can put a block underneath your forehead and that's certainly an option but to be honest it's just not really comfortable and i wouldn't recommend it if you're going to be holding the pose for an extended period of time if anything you can put something softer like a folded up blanket or you can even bend into your elbows and rest your palms underneath your forehead it is going to change the pose a little bit but you will still be able to find the emphasis of relaxing the chest down i just think we need to be careful with these options when the head is not quite touching towards the mat yet we're still trying to attempt the pose because it can leave our neck quite vulnerable and we tend to kind of crease a little bit into the cervical spine so another option that you can do in this puffy push stretch is to play with the distance of your arms so um i've also gotten feedback from a lot of students that they get tingling in their fingertips or they go numb in their hands and in their arms this is usually an indication that you're pinching a nerve somewhere and more often than not just changing the distance of your hands and maybe bending a little bit into the elbows can help to alleviate this so we always want the blood to be flowing we do not want to impede on our circulation we want that to stay just perfectly fine so there should not be any kind of tingling no numbness whatsoever especially in a yin yoga class because we're in a pose for like three minutes or so so you can play a little bit with this distance with the arms and the other variation that i really enjoy in whether it's a hatha or a yin based version of this pose is to press the hands together bend the elbows and to bring the thumbs towards the back of the neck this is going to go a lot deeper into your shoulders as well into your triceps if it's too much of course you'll probably feel it right away in which case you can reach your arms back out in front of you playing a little bit with the distance between your palms so the last thing i want to talk about here in puppy pose is your breath because this will change the sensation of the pose quite dramatically normally in yoga most of the time we're breathing in and out through the nose and we're trying to send our breath all the way down deep into the belly when i'm doing a pose like puppy instead of focusing on my belly i'm trying to focus breathing into the ribcage so not just breathing in a way where the front of your body is going out and down but really the rib cage in all its 360 degree fullness so if you place your hands along your ribs here and you take a big breath in you want to feel that breath expand front to back and side to side and then when you exhale it's almost like a little corset action where your ribs draw in towards one another so really avoiding this kind of front body breathing and focusing on you know really expanding in all directions while you're in puppy pose focusing on this kind of upper back and upper body breathing is a great way to really feel the effects of the pose especially on the exhale whenever i take a big breath in in this way and then i let all of the air out i always find that i'm able to relax a little bit more and eventually improve on my flexibility in this area bit by bit often we're instructing puppy pose as an alternative to downward dog they do have similarities however i wouldn't say that puppy is easier than downward facing dog puppy pose is still a challenging activating pose so if you're practicing again in the context of a hatha based practice you want to keep the engagement through your arms you're really going to feel this in your shoulders and your upper arms all the way down into your fingertips and you always want to remind yourself this is for any pose where your arms are reaching up over your head whether you're standing or whether you're on all fours we want to soften the shoulders away from the ears so sliding the shoulder blades down our backs and even though it's tempting to just focus on the expansion forward we're also trying to open up through the sides and also trying to open up into the back body so hopefully this helps a little bit with your puppy pose melting heart anahata asana if you have any other requests for post tutorials that you'd like me to do here on youtube please leave me a comment below i have a nice list running but it's always good to get more from you guys and i'll post a link in the description box for all of my other tutorials that i have here on my channel if you want to check out the ones that i've previously done thank you so much hopefully i'll practice again with you soon namaste