Why You Need Root Power to Progress in Your Yoga Practice and How to Access It.
As the world around us awakens with the arrival of spring, now is the perfect time to take a moment to check in with our yoga practice and see what's starting to blossom. Spring energy has an upward movement, just like lotus blossoms finally reaching out of the mud to open their happy faces to the sun. In order to maximize spring's rising energy on the yoga mat and in our lives, we must first strengthen our roots.
In yoga asana, a key aspect of every posture is a connection to the earth. Some body part must be connected to the ground, sourcing energy and balance from the root power of Mother Earth. In our lives, finding security through a blanced root chakra provides a firm foundation from which to grow.
In this blog, we'll explore the meaning of having strong roots in each asana, why being grounded in each posture deserves our unwavering attention, and tools for tapping into root power that will blossom your endurance, balance, and confidence during your very next yoga class.
Grounding Down to Rise Up
When I began my own practice, I interpreted the lessons I'd read about yoga and energy rising up the spine to mean that an upward rising energy should be my visualization during practice. I did everything I could to focus my intention on connecting to this invisible, inner force, and imagined it rising up my spine, illumination my chakras with every breath. (Admittedly, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I believed then and still do now, that intent, when working with the subtle body, goes a very long way to creating the desired results.)
As I deepened my knowledge, thanks to a fabulous meditaion teacher I began studying under, I cultivated an understanding that without being rooted first, that upward movement could never reach its potential, if it was able to get moving at all.
Once I began cultivating the idea of grounding my physical body first, I tapped into greater stamina in my postures, deeper mindfulness, and better balance in my one-legged postures. When I moved onto arm balancing postures later and additional postures that were more advanced for me in my personal practice, I applied the same grounding technique to tap into root power for inner strength.
Here is what I learned that you too can apply at your next yoga class:
Create a Flow-through of Energy
Just like you can't successfully and safely access the electricity in your home with out strong grounding wires, you can't acces your own electricicty - prana or qi - without being grounded either. And lets be totally real: the subtle body energy can be pretty elusive, intangible, and hard to access with confidence.
The physical body, however, is right where we are, on the yoga mat with us! So during your next yoga practice, focus your attention to where and how the physical body is touching the mat in each posture.
What body parts are physically connecting with the mat?
How is the body weight distributed along these areas?
Can you notice you push downward on these areas to access balance when you feel shaky?
Next, start to notice that for as strongly as you must root down to access the stability of the earth, you must also lift upward because balance is a dance of the enery rising up and the energy rooting down.
This may feel like one or a combination of these things:
Lifting your pelvic floor.
Pulling your tummy upward and inward.
Reaching up through the crown of the head.
Pulling your muscles inward toward your spine, inward toward your core.
Engaging the Mula and Uddiyana Bandhas (don‘t worry if you don’t know what that means — we’ll explore it in a later blog)
I notice that when yogi students struggle with balance, it’s often becasue they are not appliying the physics that every action has and equal and opposite reaction. The more strongly you can root downward, the more energy you have flowing upward. Harnessing these two energies gives birth to the strength and balance of the posture.
I understand this may be tricky to apply from the page to the mat.
In Tree Pose, for example:
First notice what is the touching the mat. Specifically feel the areas of the foot connecting downward: is it the ball of the foot? The outside edge? The toes? When you really notice your body, the energy of the mind flows to the physical body part.
Next, notice that the downward energy isnt enough. If you allow for your full attention to go downward, you‘ll start to wobble, and then maybe lift your shoulders or flail the arms upward to counterbalance that downward energetic focus. In doing so, you are accessing that upward energy, that pulling inward toward the core, albeit not in as focused a manner as can be helpful to you in the posture.
Instead, deliberately and mindfully engage the core and lift upward from deep within while simultaneously keeping awareness energy also flowing downward, physically pressing down throug the foot.
When you can connect to both the upward and the downward energies and create a focused equilibrium between grounding down and lifting up, you've created an energetic flow through and started to access root power.
Balance isn't a fixed point — we constantly readjust to maintain the balance and manage the equilibrium. So, next, notice the combination of mindfully connecting your foot to the floor and mindfully connecting to the movement of pulling your core muscles upward and inward around the spine.
Energy wants to move — that's why the flow through is so important. The body and the spine now can become a vessel for the flow through of energy. Sometime more energy needs to be directed downward to root, sometimes more needs to pull upward and inward to rise. Manage the flow through to access the root power of Mother Earth to support the upward flow of rising Skakti within. Once you start to source and direct this unlimited well of energy, you’ll struggle less in your postures.
In Closing
When we can channel these equal and opposite energies by grounding physically first, we will step into more endurance, better balance, and greater ease in our postures. Understanding this really opened up new postures for me. My daily practice took on a greater depth of ease and steadiness. I found myself more often “in the flow” during practice.
Off the mat, my confidence in my body expanded. As someone who navigated the physical distress, uncertainty, pain, fatigue, and discomfort of Multiple Sclerosis as I was growing my yoga practice, finding a way to access a root power that was greater than I provided me a renewed confidence in my movements both on and off the mat.
I believe you will discover this in your own way as well.
Please comment with any questions, observations, or success stories. Balance is a bit of a tricky topic for a blog becasue we must experience it for ourselves, putting the theory to practice.
I hope this helps!
Namaste,
Lara
PS: We have lots of great things coming up! Retreats, teacher trainings, summer solstice events and more! Stay connected here on the blog, website, and IG.
