Improving Your Yoga Stretching : Yoga Cobblers Pose

Alright, so in these clips I'm going to do pretty basic, beginner, simple yoga postures that I feel like a lot of people do incorrectly simply because they don't have the knowledge, and they don't have the intuition to stretch properly. If you do these incorrectly you're building an incomplete foundation for your entire yoga practice. You won't like yoga, you will injure yourself doing yoga and it won't be good for you. That's not the goal, believe it or not. Yoga needs to be healing, it needs to be fun. Through this practice you can have radiant energy and perfect joy. So let's learn to do these correctly. Baddha konasana -the cobbler's pose. You'll do this in every yoga class. Placing the feet together...here's mistake number one: people's hips aren't flexible enough to do this. If you sit in a chair all day, and you're sitting in your chair typing, your hips, your soas, all of that is going to be really tight and this pose is going to be challenging for you. Use a block, number one, to drop your knees down, and if you're not feeling it, bring your heels all the way into your groin. Don't do that, if a teacher tells you to do that in class and it doesn't feel appropriate for you, don't do it. You can let the heels come out in front of the body a foot or so or even 2 feet. Here's mistake number two: when people begin to fold forward into baddha konasana, they slump and bring their head forward. Believe it or not, that's incorrect. Here's how I like to do baddha konasana. I'm going to bring my heels out a little bit in front of my body, I'm going to plant my sit bones on the floor and rise through the crown of the head so we've got lots and lots of space in the spine. I'm going to inhale, and as I exhale I'm just going to gently begin to fold forward over the feet, leading with my heart, not with my head -I'm keeping my head and my tail bone in the correct alignment. That's going to open you up, it's going to be effective and it's going to be safe. You try it using whatever props you need and just be sure to respect your body as you stretch. Don't forget to breathe.