Warrior Pose Two (Virabhadrasana II)

In asana practice this tendency to disconnect from felt inner experience and to attend instead to outer reference systems plays itself out in myriad ways. The common pitfall is to make the accomplishment of an idealized form the primary imperative of asana practice, even when it means ignoring key warning signs that all is not well. What would our asana practice look like if we turned that inside out? What if the primary imperative of the practice, first, last, and always, was to find an inner alignment and attunement that allows our body to express its own innate integrity—right now, at this moment, in this body, rather than Swami Somebody Else’s body? What would happen if we made ourselves and our self-discovery more important than the pose? What new insights would we glean if we were willing to listen to subtle cues—to pause, adjust, or come out of a pose—regardless of what others thought of our actions?

When self-discovery is the primary imperative, inquiry leads, paradoxically yet inevitably, to impeccable form. On the other hand, starting with a set form into which we must puppeteer our way frequently leads to stilted, dysfunctional, and injurious ways of moving. And when there is only one way to do something, that one way tends to eliminate any possibility of an ongoing playful inquiry that would allow for the evolution of our practice as our body and our needs change. I find that students are amazingly adept at discovering alignment from the inside out when confidence in the self is restored and when they are guided by a self-positive intention. The key is to learn how to recognize the pattern of sensations that add up to a feeling of being ‘together’ within the form.

There are a few guidelines that can help us define what ‘feeling’ we are looking for, regardless of the posture and our level of experience. The first, and most important, is that the body should be able to breathe, and by breathe I mean that the subtle yet perceptible oscillation of the breath should be able to travel everywhere: in the floating spaces of the joints, throughout the soft center, along the undulating spine, and through the alternation of tone and release in the musculature. If you are not feeling a continual swelling and receding motion in a posture, prana is not able to circulate freely. Said another way: if the form of the posture impedes global respiration in the body, it’s poor form. It’s that simple.

Second, the structure of the posture should allow a strong and clear movement of force through the body. This can be tested—as you will see—just as we might test the stability of a chair before we sit on it. Force generally follows the line of the bones, and should be able to leap across the floating space of the joints, from limb to limb. As we consciously direct force through the body in asana, we want to be as efficient as possible so that this impulse sets up a chain reaction of force, catalyzing a powerful flow through the body. When you get a feel for finding the optimal place and position in asana, it’s like kicking a soccer ball in one swift action through a goalpost. Conversely, when the conditions are not optimal, we kick the ball here, we kick the ball there, in a disconnected series of actions that have no energetic continuity. This is especially true when we enter a posture from a series of discrete instructions, rather than finding the natural organic unfolding of the movement as a whole pattern.

Finally, when alignment of the body is good, stress is distributed throughout so that no one part tires before another. And when mastery is achieved, effort and release are balanced in such a way that we feel a neutral or translucent sensation of spaciousness throughout our whole being.

The posture I have chosen for this column, Warrior Pose Two (Virabhadrasana II), is commonly practiced with excessive strain on the hip, sacroiliac joints, and lumbar spine. The primary intellectual misconception about this posture is that the movement exists in only one plane; thus the all-too-common instruction ‘to imagine you are standing between two plates of glass’ or ‘in a narrow corridor’, the ideal being that both the left and right hip will be perfectly level with one another. Because so many of us find our way into asana by visual cues, it is understandable that many students struggle to perform this posture as if it were a two dimensional Egyptian hieroglyph.

Let’s walk our way through both the preparation and practice of this pose to see if we can find an alignment that makes sense to the body, and to see if we can reopen our feeling function to discover just how powerful the body can be when we make alignment an ‘inside’ job.