Advanced poses aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and they aren’t required — the measure of a good yoga practice isn’t what you do on the mat so much as what your practice helps you to do during the rest of your life. With that said, however, I think all of us are fascinated by the more intense postures: what does it take to be able to get into a particularly difficult shape? How can the rest of us use the concept of a particular pose to enrich our personal practice? And of course: why would anyone want to attempt something so contorted?
Hanumasana is the yogic version of forward splits. In a “perfect” manifestation of this asana, the legs are straight across, flat on the floor. I have to be honest here: I sincerely doubt that I will ever be that flexible. Yet the pose fascinates me on an allegorical level. In the Ramayana, that great Hindu epic, the monkey god Hanuman leapt from South India to Sri Lanka in order to help rescue Sita from abduction. What happens if we stop thinking of this pose as splitting our legs apart and focus instead on its ability to help us make great leaps, whether physical or metaphorical?
If you’re practicing asana, you’re probably prepping yourself for Hanumasana. Poses such as Janu Sirsasana and Paschimottanasa, staples in most yoga classes, help promote the needed flexibility, as does Baddha Konasana. In your classes, maybe think about these poses as helping you to be more flexible in your daily living, able to approach problems by bounding through them rather than practicing avoidance. Keep in mind that your ability to touch your toes doesn’t significantly impact the people around you — but your ability to stay calm and loving, improved through your asana practice, does!
Another way to incorporate Hanumasana into your life, ironically enough, is to practice stillness in preparation for the great movements. Life isn’t a steady trek up the mountain; to get to our goals, we often find ourselves moving backwards and staying in place for frustratingly long times. Maybe, rather than jerking our bodies into the most extreme form of a pose, we can practice taking a gentle stretch and holding it steady for a longer amount of time?
I must confess that stillness has been hard for me to learn. When I first started to practice on my own, I found myself going through a series of poses up to three times faster than what we did as a group. It’s taken years for me to be able to see this impatience as a negative — in my rush to get from one thing to another, I don’t seem to enjoy or fully experience anything. By stopping and breathing in a pose for an extended period of time, I’ve been able to slowly — oh so slowly — increase my levels of patience. I’ve also learned how to tune into and enjoy the moment.
Most of us are familiar with what’s known in gym classes as “runner’s stretch,” and all of us have practiced lunges at some point. Take these two ideas and put them together, and you’ve got Hanumasana: both legs are moving away from the midline. From here, it’s not a stretch (pardon the pun!) to think of these movements, and poses such as Kapotanasa, or Pigeon, as a ‘half Hanumasana.’ Most great leaps don’t occur in a short period of time; instead, many little choices add up to a huge change in our lives. Instead of focusing on our inability to move into the full pose, why not focus on the small gains that we make in the front and backs of our legs?
Monkeys aren’t big animals; they don’t command respect in the same way as the great apes. Yet they are able to get from one place to another because they can flex and leap when necessary, and stay still when the obverse is necessary. In practicing this pose and its preparatory postures, we can learn a great deal about how we approach life off the mat. And remember — how we do one thing is how we do everything? If we move slowly, respect our current limits, and work on transcending them, we may find great leaps occurring when we least expect them.
Yoga Cielo Stellato 