For Beginners: Balasana

More than a rest stop, Child's Pose requires you to surrender to gravity and a state of nondoing.

By Peter Sterios

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In his classic book Mastery, American aikido expert George Leonard details the beginner's approach on the journey to mastery: Start with something simple. Try touching your forehead with your hand. Ah, that's easy, automatic. Nothing to it. But there was a time when you were as far removed from the mastery of that simple skill as someone who doesn't play piano is from playing a Beethoven sonata.

For most students, this simple example is analogous to how you begin a yoga practice. If you're lucky, it's in an introductory class in a room full of similarly inexperienced students. The teacher's first instruction sounds like a foreign language, and although you consider yourself relatively healthy and intelligent, dyslexia attacks: You forget where the left hand is, or the right foot, and look around the room, suddenly frightfully aware of your limited faculties of perception.

Having taught an "Intro to Yoga" class for years, I know this is a familiar scenario. So familiar, in fact, that I have simplified the initial instructions I give in class to vocabulary and movements that are recognizable to most beginners. But even after you are not a beginner anymore, going back to basics—doing less, but with more awareness—allows you to find the essence of the most fundamental poses and touch "beginner's mind."

The first pose I teach is Balasana (Child's Pose). For many of us, this asana possesses a deep physical and psychological memory of our time as infants. The shape of the pose is useful for many reasons, but in particular, it forces you to confront your attitudes and patterns of breathing, the health of your organs, and your level of awareness in moving from the abdomen. It is a very simple pose to begin with physically, yet it requires patience and the ability to surrender to gravity and a state of nondoing.

In Balasana, the shape of the pose forces the front of the rib cage to compress and causes an internal resistance to full, frontal breathing, which is the adopted pattern for most of us. In this resistance you will confront—possibly for the first time—the notion of breathing somewhere other than the front of your lungs, or in such a way as to avoid distending your belly as you inhale. As the frontal ribs are compressed, the unyielding presence of the internal organs and the compression of the abdomen trapped against the thighs limit the diaphragm, sometimes resulting in feelings of claustrophobia, nausea, or even fear. This further precludes soft, even breathing.

In "Salutation to the Teacher and the Eternal One," a paper written by T. Krishnamacharya and distributed to students at the Yoga Mandiram in Madras, he says: "One important thing to be constantly kept in mind when doing asanas is the regulation of the breath. It should be slow, thin, long, and steady: breathing through both nostrils with a rubbing sensation at the throat and through the esophagus, inhaling when coming to the straight posture, and exhaling when bending the body."

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