Downward Facing Blog

You know about the three bandhas already, here’s one you might not know of.

Yesterday I took a class with Paddy McGrath who is, predictably, humorous. Her instructions employ the use of varying styles of grunts and ‘hmmms’ to indicate desirable states of the body and collapsed ones.

I begged her if I could just pull her aside for a half hour and jot down four or five main principles of practice in clear English but she refused. She insists that we must understand asana from your body’s own intelligence, not intellectual mind.

So she comes about twice a year and in the interim period I teach my understanding of what I’ve learned only to discover the rationale behind my technique is way more sophisticated than I had realized.

There are endless numbers of yoga teachers who just imitate and parrot what their teacher had told them. Paddy may be the only teacher I know that really “gets it” from her own experience. She seems to have extremely high physical intelligence. It’s from that perspective that she discourages note taking  to gel these techniques into a “style”. So while it can be frustrating for the analytical side of me, it remains a continually fresh and dynamic teaching.Physical intelligence does wake up with practice and it is indeed something that goes beyond words.

We work with many of these points again and again already; uddiyana bandha, dropping the chin forward to the chest as long as possible when coming into a backbend, using the outside of the hands and feet…  but knowing asana as rehearsed instruction versus understanding from inside your body makes all the difference.

This round Paddy had a new teaching that took us all by surprise. It was named on the fly even, my own alternative label to Paddy’s mysterious “pull in here, hmm… uhh, yes!”  kind of instructions.

The Secret Bandha

 -Pull in the breast bone on your way to a back bend-

Pull the chin in, gaze downwards towards your nipples while lifting the arms, engage the abdomen to pull up and inwards to separate the torso from the pelvis… to encourage the upper spine to take more of the bend as opposed to the more flexible lower spine. All of us in the room are advanced students, and we practiced this instruction by really lifting and expanding the chest… going UP then dropping back.

Yesterday however, it was using all these points AND pulling the breast bone in, like a secret fourth bandha. What was amazing is, it shot up energy up the back of my spine and created an upward lift that you don’t get from just expanding the upper back.

Try this the next time you drop back from standing.

 Happy twisting, Adrian Cox