Four ways balance poses support a centred calm
EXPLORING BALANCE - Four ways balance poses support a centred calm
In the Exploring Balance theme of classes this month, we have been working on some specific elements of the balance yoga poses, including:
integrating and challenging our three balance systems - via consciously challenging our field of vision and vestibular capacity with dynamic movement.
mobilizing the feet and ankles - aiding proprioception, our ability to sense our feet, and our limbs moving.
working on strength in the lower body chain connections from toes all the way up to hips.
You can check out some practice videos and five great ways to improve your balance in yoga here.
Alongside these movement explorations, interesting shifts have been noted. Such as,
Balance-focused movement can effectively and quickly shift your emotional/mental state towards one of centred calm.
Understanding how this works can guide you to needed-in-the-moment intentional choices in your yoga practice. Most of us come to yoga for a degree of stress relief, after all.
So how does it work?
Balance moves support feeling calmer by requiring focused attention
“it's amazing how completely focused I feel doing this!” (student comment this term)
In yoga you can be holding your pose, or even move continuously through a sun salutation, and still your mind can be somewhere else. In balances, you have to focus, or else you fall out of it. They necessarily demand all your concentration. You can’t think about the usual stuff or stresses going on in your life while you're trying to balance. The good news is, you don’t need to be ‘good at’ the poses at all, you just need to be trying to balance and doing the necessary wobbling around.
Emotions and thoughts have to shift to the background, giving you a mental and emotional break. So this concerted attention holding can be quietly emotionally regulating.
Also, part of how we focus and maintain balance is via exteroception, the external focus of moving through the space around us - focusing on our connection to the ground, how are limbs are moving.
This proprioceptive awareness is regulating, because while paying attention to and relating to our external environment with a sense of urgency in balancing, we are less internal in the all thoughts and feelings. So the whole-body attention of balancing type movements can lead to a feeling of focused calm.
Balance moves can have a calming effect via grounding
“I’m much more aware of my foot shape and weighting down into my feet as I walk“
A key part of balance work is to feel your feet grounding more than usual, especially when you are on one leg for a while and then return to two feet. Working on widening and making the foot more pliable, feeling all the little movements and engagements in the intricate feet and ankles, strengthens the connection to sensations in our feet and the feeling of grounding.
We can then also use our breath and intention to drop down into the sensory awareness of the feet, to feel our body weight and gravitational force dropping downwards. This feeling of grounding can be an effective calming method. To literally get out of your head and all the busy activity of the mind and right down into your connection with the earth.
TRY THIS
It's something you can access anytime. If you can catch a moment of emotional upset or anxious thinking, you can pause, take a slow breath in through your nose, and exhale your body weight down into your feet. Dropping your attention there. The idea is that there is an instant release of physical and, following that, mental tension, leaving you feeling quieter and more ‘balanced’.
Balancing moves support downregulation via centering
“It feels calming coming back to centre and standing still after the dynamic moving balance exercises, even though I’m a bit out of breath.”
Dynamic balance practice, where we are not holding a pose but constantly moving from a one-leg balance position to another, gives us a chance to feel movement around our centre of mass. In the human body this centre of mass is about a hand space below the navel. We can tune into a feeling of having a centre as we move our limbs in different ways away from this centre in the trunk and then return back towards it.
This sense of returning to centre can give a locus of security and safety in the body. Similar to grounding through our feet, a physically sensed place in our centre can help shift the locus of our attention from the fast-feeling patterns of thinking and processing, to real, physical, in the moment experience in the body. Feeling secure is also downregulating or calming to the nervous system.
There is some interesting research on the possible connections between anxiety and poor balance, or conversely a sense of safety and steadiness with good balance. There are various hypotheses for this. But one reason suggested is the feeling of subtle, constant, physical insecurity if our balance is poor. Also with poor balance and proprioception, it's likely that the body creates patterns of muscular tension throughout the structure to provide needed stability. Then, constant low grade tightness and vigilance can affect your breathing (with faster shallower breathing linked to anxious states), and how relaxed, or not, you feel in yourself. So it could be argued that working on balance supports conditions for more physical ease and easeful breathing patterns and physical ease supports psychological ease.
Balancing poses can have an uplifting and positive emotional effect via playfulness and an exploratory approach
Balance work can be playful and feel exploratory, often using task-based moves, with a “see what happens when..“ open-ended approach rather than trying to achieve a specific shape/pose. It feels like play as we wobble around, hover on the edge of balance, starting over many times. In contrast to the all too common frustration with balance poses, of trying with grim determination to not be the one who falls out of it…
Instead, people can shift to being interested in feeling connections in the body, having fun together focusing on a play-like task rather than trying to hold something static. Movement skill improvement happens with repetition and practice, and the psychological effect is more positive, uplifting and self affirming.
Enjoy exploring yourself for better movement and better balance
Balancing is one example of how yoga is our self-directed laboratory for exploring our mental and emotional habits.
Trying to walk from one end of your mat to the other with your eyes closed, to stand on one leg and pick up a block placed somewhere on the floor nearby, gives us the experience of trying something (just a bit) out of our comfort zone and for that to actually be fun and positive. For it to be ok to just try something without a success/failure outcome or a specific delineated goal of a specific successful shape. Why not offer ourselves opportunities for this?
A crucial aspect of a movement practice is building awareness and confidence - in our unique body and how we move through our lives. Bodies are complex, and at various, random seeming points in our lives, can give us uncomfortable feelings and pain. Often our self talk around our body can be negative, mainly striving and top-down directive. All the ‘shoulds’! Having the option of task-based fun, starting easily enough and then adding progressive challenge, is a wonderful way to flip this.
The regular practices of feeling more focused, grounded, centered and playfully open to explore, can guide us towards a feeling of freedom in body and mind.
Resources
The Science of Movement, Exercise and Mental Health, Jennifer Pilotti
This is an excellent book, discussing how balance and anxiety/ mental health interact, with a wealth of studies for further reference.
A Guide to Better Movement, Todd Hargrove
BodyMind Movement, Jennifer Pilotti
Definitions:
Centre of mass is the point at which the distribution of mass is equal in all directions and does not depend on gravitational field. Centre of gravity is the point at which the distribution of weight is equal in all directions and it does depend on gravitational field.
