For Beginners: Urdhva Hastasana

Mastering Upward Hand Pose can help you move into more advanced poses like arm balances and backbends.

By Peter Sterios

Being There

When practicing Urdhva Hastasana as an individual asana, the depth of the pose is plumbed by repeatedly letting go or dropping down the inner body, the shoulders, and the frontal ribs. With practice, you begin to notice how from your vital center in the abdomen, strength builds and energy rises straight upward through the back.

Once in the pose, on an exhalation, soften the top of the lungs and feel the space around the heart increase. This energy creates a drop in the inner body, softness in the ribs, and more space to breathe. The extension in the neck improves, and the spine naturally straightens without excessive muscular effort. As you inhale, visualize the breath entering through your navel—slow, smooth, and rhythmic. Each time your weight shifts and takes you away from your center, return by paying attention and making the necessary adjustments.

Exit This Way

When all parts of the body are brought together in the culmination of this pose, you should feel a deep sense of connection. In this state, you can come in contact with the force that creates all things and causes them to grow—by a union of complementary opposites. This is the creative energy of harmony.

When you are ready to exit the pose, slowly exhale, pulling the hands down with palms together in Namaste. As the hands draw near to the face, let the proximity—the energy—of the hands pull the face down until the head returns to a neutral position.

Continue to let the hands descend together, feeling the energy as they pass the throat, the heart, the solar plexus, the navel, and the genitals. As this energy moves down the front of the body, feel the stillness and lightness in the spine. Close your eyes and feel the calm resonating from the deepest corners of your awareness.

The Yoga Sutra gives many clues about how to cultivate the right attitude for practice. In its simplest translation, sutra means "thread." Like a thread, each sutra represents the absolute minimum necessary to hold a concept together. The brevity of the sutras allowed practitioners of times past to memorize the entire work and then elucidate meanings through discourse with other practitioners and sustained personal practice. Though they may appear simple on the surface, the sutras often have compound meanings, with both literal and hidden interpretations.

The metaphor of a sutra will serve you well in your approach to Urdhva Hastasana: It is a pose that requires a resolution of literal and hidden forces, and the less one elaborates, the more it reveals.

Peter Sterios is the director of Yoga Centre San Luis Obispo on the central coast of California. He can be reached at psterios@ix.netcom.com.

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