Day 2
Balasana: ( Childs Pose )
(Muscles that are working in this pose are shown in red)
Anatomical Focus
• Thighs
Therapeutic Applications
Benefits Contraindications and Cautions Kneel on the floor. Touch your big toes together and sit on your heels, then separate your knees about as wide as your hips. Kneel on the floor. Touch your big toes together and sit on your heels, then separate your knees about as wide as your hips. Beginner's Tip
• Stress
• Gently stretches the hips, thighs, and
ankles
• Calms the brain and helps relieve stress and
fatigue
• Relieves back and neck pain when done with
head and torso supported
• Diarrhoea
• Pregnancy
• Knee injury: Avoid Balasana unless you have
the supervision of an experienced teacher.
Exhale and lay your torso down between your
thighs. Broaden your sacrum across the back of your pelvis and narrow your hip
points toward the navel, so that they nestle down onto the inner thighs.
Lengthen your tail bone away from the back of the pelvis while you
lift the base of your skull away from the back of your neck.
Lay your hands on the floor alongside your
torso, palms up, and release the fronts of your shoulders toward the floor.
Feel how the weight of the front shoulders pulls the shoulder blades wide
across your back.
Balasana is a resting pose. Stay anywhere from
30 seconds to a few minutes. Beginners can also use Balasana to get a taste of
a deep forward bend, where the torso rests on the thighs. Stay in the pose from
1 to 3 minutes. To come up, first lengthen the front torso, and then with an
inhalation lift from the tail bone as it presses down and into
the pelvis.
We usually don't breathe consciously and fully
into the back of the torso. Balasana provides us with an excellent opportunity
to do just that. Imagine that each inhalation is "doming" the back
torso toward the ceiling, lengthening and widening the spine. Then with each
exhalation release the torso a little more deeply into the fold.