Bhekasana (Frog Pose)

Push against the walls of your limitations and expand your perspective with this challenging pose.

By Beryl Bender Birch

There is a whimsical tale I first read more than 10 years ago in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche. The story tells of an old frog who had spent his whole life in a tiny well. One day, a frog from the ocean came to visit him.

"Hello there," said the frog from the ocean.

"Hello there, brother," said the frog from the well. "Welcome to my well. And where, may I ask, are you from?"

"From the Great Ocean," answered the ocean frog.

"I've never heard of that place," said the frog from the well. "But I'm sure you must be thrilled to see my magnificent home. Is your ocean even a quarter this big?"

"Oh, it's bigger than that," said the ocean frog.

"Half as big, then?" asked the well frog.

"No, bigger still."

The well frog could barely believe his ears. "Is it," he continued skeptically, "as big as my well?"

"Your well would not even be a drop in the Great Ocean," answered the visiting frog.

"That's impossible!" cried the frog from the well. "I'll just have to go back with you and see how big this ocean really is."

After a long journey, they finally arrived. And when the frog from the well saw the immensity of the ocean, he simply couldn't take it in. He was so shocked that his head exploded.

Most of us tend to think much like the frog from the well. Trapped inside the box of our own belief system, we think we know exactly what's happening. We act as if the view from our well is the only valid one, as if our tribe, our club, our state, our political party—whatever group we happen to be a part of—is the best. As long as something is ours, it's cool, it's legitimate, it's bloody righteous! We're sure that all the other views out there in the world are the ones that are so screwed up, uncool, and evil.

So we blissfully go along in our little world. Meanwhile, the universe nudges us, trying to get us to open our eyes, expand our view, and notice what's really happening. But we keep our eyes tightly shut, not wanting to look past the boundaries of our secure, known world. When we don't take the hint, when we don't consciously choose to open our eyes , the universe nudges a little harder. One day, if we keep ignoring all the hints, something happens that blows our mind. Just like that, whoosh: The bottom drops out. Maybe it's the bottom of our family structure, or of our church or corporate community, or of a treasured relationship, project, or belief. Something we thought was absolutely indestructible suddenly falls to pieces. How could this have happened, we wonder? We were on such solid ground!

Many times, there is nothing really sudden about the catastrophe—or solid about the ground we were standing on. Like a house being eaten by termites, the structure had been degenerating for years, but we didn't notice. When the house finally collapses, it's a huge shock. We stagger. We fall down. We retreat. We grieve. But then, slowly, we begin to recover. And the shock, although painful, moves us forward into a new and broader way of seeing.

Taking on yoga as a discipline is a way of consciously agreeing to open our eyes and ourselves, of knocking down the walls of a tenuous shelter before it collapses in on us. Our practice forces us to acknowledge our restrictions and our limited perspective, and teaches us how to expand the boundaries of our world so that the first time we stick our nose out the door, our mind doesn't explode into a million pieces.

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