Asana Column: Virabhadrasana III (Warrior Pose III)

Find your star power by gathering energy in and radiating it out in this dynamic standing pose.

By Beryl Bender Birch

One cold, sunny April morning at a retreat for writers and artists in Vermont, I was poking around in a popular book on cosmology. I had just finished reading a chapter on the life of stars when I noticed I was getting hungry, so I pulled on a sweater and headed across campus to the dining room, pondering star behavior and looking for signs of spring.

If I understood the book correctly, it was saying that every healthy star pulsates. Stars are dominated first by one and then the other of two opposing energies: the inward pull of gravity and the outward push of radiant heat that's created by thermonuclear fusion. Gravity pulls the star in toward its center, increasing the density of the core; as a result, the star's heat increases. And as it gets hotter, thermonuclear fusion increases. All the little particles start flying around faster and slamming into one another at higher velocities. This releases yet more heat, which expands the star's core, thinning it out. Consequently, fusion slows down, the core cools off slightly, gravity gets the upper hand, and the star begins to contract again.

"Oh, I love this stuff," I was thinking. As I was getting more and more jazzed about stars, I happened to run into a young painter I occasionally sat with at breakfast. "How's it going?" I asked.

"I didn't sleep at all last night," he said, somewhat dejectedly. "I've been struggling. When I'm painting, I feel like I don't know enough and I should be studying, filling myself, learning more about painting. But when I do that—when I'm taking a course in art history or watching a master painter—well, then I feel guilty that I'm not creating. I get tired of being pulled back and forth. How do you ever know which you are supposed to be doing?"

"Oh, my God," I exclaimed, "you're acting just like a star!"

"Huh?" he said, looking at me blankly.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I've just been reading about stars. They act like you; they go back and forth between expanding and contracting. The only difference between you and the stars is that they seem to be perfectly in tune with the arrangement. I bet they don't feel guilty when they're contracting! They need to do both, and so do you. You can't just keep putting out energy without recharging. You'll burn yourself out."

Finding the balance the young painter was seeking is a challenge most of us face in nearly every aspect of our lives. "How can I know," we ask ourselves, "when I need to push out and when I need to pull back in, when to expend energy and when to recharge?" That's not an easy question to answer. And with all the pressures of work, family, and friends, it's easy to spend too much time expending energy and not enough time regathering our resources.

Yoga practice has been crucial in helping many of us balance between expansion and contraction. Every posture demands both. In a very tangible way, finding stability in any asana requires us to develop an exquisite internal feedback device; we must become so present to our circumstances, moment by moment, that we can sense exactly where we need to draw our energy in and where we need to radiate it out. And as we develop this awareness on the physical level in asana practice, we also find ourselves applying it to everything else in our lives.

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