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| Are you pulling a face mid-pose? |
The Short Of It
When I look around in class sometimes, I’d swear half the
class had just eaten a lemon or were engaged in facercise.
Your tongue has nothing to do with lifting into
handstand. Squinting like you are a
sniper looking through a lens won’t help either. There is no facepullasana.
Tension in your face and throat will make your poses harder,
not easier. It restricts the flow of
blood to the head and your mind will not be at ease.
As you practice, keep your face soft, the breath soft, and
give your mind a break.
The Long of It.
My niece enjoys copying me doing yoga. She loves to do a one legged version of down
dog, easily transitions to a full cobra (feet on head), and gracefully rolls
onto her back while hoisting her legs to her face to fold herself in half.
We have also recently discovered she can do ‘bums up’ pose
(a bit like bridge), which really helps when changing nappies. This latest pose has come after I realised
she had somehow learned the word ‘bum’ and could go around pointing at
everyone’s backsides to entertain us.
Since she knew ‘arms up’ I figured she knew enough to generalise to her
rear end and she quickly mastered bums up/bridge.
Anyway, nowadays I just have to start doing something that
looks vaguely like yoga (basically meaning things she does not see adults
normally do like sit on the floor, stand on one leg, reach both arms overhead,
put my hands on the floor) and quick as a flash she’s either in her one legged
dog or running to fetch my yoga mat.
The other day I was in the back yard trying some arm balance
poses and she rushed over. As you can
see from the photo below, I’m about to bite off my lip. I believe I was actually laughing but let’s
say I’m pulling a face since that is a weird looking buck-tooth laugh I wasn’t
sure I had. My niece is hard at work
about to lift her back leg up (like mine), recruiting that all-important tongue
to help.
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| Are our faces helping us here? |
Flicking through the family photo album reminded me of the
dangling tongues and contorted faces that sometimes crop up in yoga class. Little kids often poke their tongue out when
they are trying something new or challenging.
And, after teaching yoga for the past 8 years, I have
developed a theory (based on hard scientific evidence of course) that tongue
poking and furrowed brows must be some sort of hard-wired response that emerges
from humans when we do something tricky.
It is good every now and then to state the obvious, so here
goes.
1) Your tongue is not going to lift you into handstand.
2) Knitted brows are not going to help you hold longer in a
squat.
3) Buck-tooth lip biting won’t help your arm balances.
4) Squinting your eyes and hardening your eyeballs as though
you are trying to send lasers through the floor are not going to helping you
balance either.
5) There is no such pose as facepullasana.
Relaxing the face is important throughout your yoga practice. Hardening and contorting your face definitely
has some effect on mental state. Furrow
your brows and your brain somehow feels tense.
Relax them and it feels instantly calmer. Try it now.
The same goes for your tongue. Doing funny things with your tongue while
practicing yoga stifles the free flow of energy and rather than making your
pose easier it will make it feel much, much harder.
Think about your tongue now.
What is it doing? Can you close
your eyes relax it? Feel how this affects the jaw, cheeks, and throat?
Tensing muscles restricts the flow of blood to an area. Tension in your tongue and face is often
accompanied by tension in your neck.
If you hold tension around your throat and face you are
going to restrict the flow of blood and energy to your brain. Generally, this is not what we are looking
for.
Yoga is very much about activating a global awareness; feeling
and responding to the tiny changes that are going on throughout the entire
body.
When you are in the learning stage of anything you tend to
focus on what seem to be the ‘major’ elements.
Since the face is never really involved in moving you or
holding you in position it is easy to forget and unless you remind yourself to
feel what is going on there you will often find it doing its own thing.
In class I will constantly remind you to feel what is going
on with your tongue, throat, neck, the little muscles around your eyes, your
eyebrows, and even your eyeballs. But
perhaps you can also start to make a mental note to remind yourself to check in
on this too!
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