Yin is Your Friend - Butterfly pose yoga teaching tutorial

Transcript

good morning empowered yoga teachers welcome to today's episode of Yin is your friend you know that I love some yin yoga and it's such a great balance to our busy lives today is one of my all-time favorite postures period in yoga but especially in yin yoga you may know it as cobbler and baddha konasana in regular yoga but here we call it butterfly so you want to have or I like to have something to sit up on so I'm just sitting on the edge of a blanket and you might have students who want to elevate their hips even a little more it really just depends but if you elevate them too much it can create a deeper sensation so it kind of just depends what you're looking for so feet will come out and front and I'll show this from a couple of different angles and we have the feet further away from the bottom then we would like in a regular hot that yoga class and then knees come out to the side so we're creating this diamond shape here I start a lot of yin yoga classes with this posture or close to the beginning because it's a very calming it's very soothing and relaxing and sometimes we do it forward sometimes we do it leaning back and sometimes we do both the personal show you the forward option and then as we always talked about me and yoga we want to look at what joints are floating when we come into this my legs go almost all the way down to the floor but they're still floating a little bit and it sometimes feels good to just create a little support under there under the knees so if you have students whose knees are way up here it's okay as long as it doesn't hurt then you can just place the blocks to help support that so we're looking for some sensation in the low back and then the hips so I'll leave these here just for purposes of this demonstration so a lot of times people just want to stay here sitting up especially if the psoas muscle is tight and the hamstrings might be very tight so let your students know that they don't have to pull forward here it really just depends on what is working for them there's so many options for this posture and once you give you as many as I can think of so hang in here with me today so you can bring a bolster here what I really like to do is have it on that now I'll turn the show you from the side and then lean the forehead toward the bolster so that you'll be able to see that a little better when I turn to the side but remember in in yoga we're not looking at the length in the spine we're actually trying to get the grounding in the low back so the way I like to do that with a forward fold here is just think breathe in as you breathe out take your chin toward your chest so it's like yours you were sitting against a wall and everything's coming forward but it's rounding so chin goes down head goes a little down rounding in the back shoulders are soft and I could just be here you could have a bolster here with elbows here it's less about how far they go and more about where sensation is felt hips and low back is typically what we see another way to set this up with support for the knees is to take a blanket and kind of make like it's it's you roll with that and just place it over the feet and then under the calves you could even make that longer you could do it on the longer edge pull it all the way through and then again can be just rounding forward here so let me show you from the side what this looks like so I'm here let's stand doing the blanket option and that feels pretty good even though my thumbs are floating I still it's not hurting so you want to look for if something is pinching or tingling or sending some sort of like shooting pain these are things that we want to offer an option of different kind of support because you want to set the student up in a way they can stay there for a while so this Glenn and I was showing you with a regular yoga mat their bolster should stay pretty good and then just lean forward I'm not rounding a lot yet but it's just a place to start and then again here you can see from my neck to my lower back and rounding or as in a regular yoga it would be more this here we're wanting that safe compression in the low back and we want some sensation here in the hips and then we have reclined options so everybody knows I love a good ramp especially for young yoga so if you're starting at bus with this it's a great way to warm up the hips and then you just lean back and if you watched the prenatal yoga videos that I do for a moment nurture many of these are similar or the same options that we do there because we do really like butterfly for prenatal yoga because of the massager on the joints for the hips and everything that's going on there so this is pretty heavenly I started a lot of classes this way and other things that you could do here students will experience this differently in their hips depending on whether they're leaning forward or back so for me today I've been moving and my hips are pretty sore so this actually feels better for me to have this support today so you could almost if you start like this you could almost put this up just more in a restorative way and also much worried about getting into that deep tissue and Indian yoga we're looking at the tissue around the soft tissue around the joints so the fashion of the connective tissue and we're wanting to if that tissue is healthy that tissue means to be healthy for us to be able to work it in this way and it be safe then we're looking for that place where somebody can feel something so it's this sensation like something's going on there it's almost it doesn't hurt but it's a little nagging and you've heard me say a million times if you practice in yoga with me he'll still stay so you want to feel something little sensation something going on something working and to get really still as still as you can and stay for a lot so it feels still stay feel free to use that in your classes the other thing on its fake here as you could do this at the wall and I don't have a great option at the wall here in my new office to show you like I did before but I actually will just use the window so you can lean just like you would or legs up the wall and then bend the knees feet on the wall and then knees can come apart and you can be here this is actually nice because I have the window ledge to hold my feet and then the feet can slide down now this looks more like a regular cobbler setup at the wall but you can put a block here or maybe even a bolster or a couple of blocks to keep the heels away the most people just like that they like gravity working and if that's too much for both legs you could just have them do one at the time this is actually half butterfly that we'll do in another video so this has been a butterfly pose with your second episode of Yin as you're free in yoga teaching tutorial you see if it was here hey Lisa hi Pamela how's everybody doing today you have any questions or anything you want to pop in the comments for a help off it's great to see you all and I will be back next Monday with another in yoga teaching tutorial have a great one