Teaching Forward Bends: Cues That Help Students Find Support and Release

How to bring students into awareness of the cycle of resourcing and receiving, with gravity and breath both participating in the unfolding of the pose.

Apana is the downward-moving, connecting force that anchors us through the lower body. In yoga’s subtle anatomy, it moves from around the navel down towards the earth, bringing qualities of rooting, release and replenishment. In a forward bend, we can explore these qualities by allowing the weight of the pelvis and legs to become a resource for the rest of the body.

Often, our attention is elsewhere. We become absorbed in what the upper body is doing and how much further it might go. The chest, shoulders and hands take the foreground, while the legs receive relatively little attention.

It is through the lower body, and its relationship with the ground, that we can find the support to release more fully.

Resourcing gravity begins with sensing the heaviness of the bones. The pelvis can settle, the legs can become heavy, and the lower back can find some length and availability. There is also a sense of the ground rising to meet us. As we become more aware of this contact, we can observe how the rest of the body responds.

This relationship was central to our recent practice exploring prana and apana. Prana brings the qualities of lift, opening and expression, moving from the chest up and out into the world. Apana provides the anchoring through which that expression is supported. We explored being as fully rooted into the ground as we were expressing into the space around us.

In forward bends, this balance can be surprisingly revealing. We may discover that the upper body has been maintaining an effort that becomes less necessary once the foundation feels secure. As I described it in class, the connection below gives the upper body feedback that it can relax. There is something beneath it to draw upon.

Practice:

Take Janu Sirsasana, the seated forward bend with one leg extended and the other knee bent. An inhale brings us upright; an exhale takes us forwards, with a small turn towards the extended leg. Once the pose begins to take shape, we can bring the lower body into focus.

Feel the heaviness through the sitting bones. Notice the weight of the extended leg, and the sense of length and drop through the lower back. Give this part of the pose time to become clear.

How is the lower body meeting the ground?

What happens above as that contact becomes more established?

The cue I used was to sense ourselves “really rooting down, so that the upper body can just start to melt into the pose”. This is the practical value of attending to apana. The upper body’s release is supported by something we can feel: the weight of the pelvis and legs, and their connection with the earth.

It also changes what we are attending to. The distance between the chest and the leg becomes less absorbing when we are noticing the relationships within the whole pose. We can feel where we are holding, where there is availability, and whether the breath has room to move.

The breath itself expresses this relationship between prana and apana. In our forward bends, we explored the inhale taking the chest forwards as the femur bones moved back, followed by the exhale inviting us into the space we had created. Each phase had its own quality: the movement and opening of the inhale, the softening and release of the exhale.

Once we reached a range of motion that brought some resistance, the invitation was to remain there. “Letting go of trying, letting go of going further. Just enjoying. Witnessing the pose as it unfolds.”

There is a subtle distinction between arriving at that point and continuing to seek the next one. Staying gives us time to notice whether we are still bracing, whether the belly can soften, and whether the support beneath us is actually being received. We cannot hurry that process of settling.

At the end of class, in a supported restorative pose, we returned to these same qualities through the breath. With the legs supported and the lower back long and soft, we could notice the tendency to brace. Sometimes this was a protective holding in the body; sometimes it was a bracing against the next thing we had to deal with.

The questions were direct:

Can the shoulders fully soften?

Can the breath flow well?

Does the belly relax?

We watched prana, the breath of life, moving in through the nostrils and down into the lungs, then sensed where it seemed to move next. The exhale brought an apanic flow: helping us to anchor to earth, to release and root, so that the yielding towards the next inhale could be balanced.

It is sometimes said in yoga that if you look after the exhale, the inhale will look after itself.

This gave us a further enquiry:

what happens when we root, when we release, when we allow the body to find earth?

We can bring that enquiry into a forward bend. As the pelvis and legs settle, and the exhale releases, we can observe how the next inhale arrives and what becomes available through the trunk.

Process brings us into that balancing, self-sufficient cycle of resource and receive. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away.