Tādasana

This is a fabulous pose to start an asana practice. It looks so simple but quite works the entire body and wakes it in a gentle but conscious way. I love to start with this and I can feel how it works on my body. I also have to add that I have not seen this sequence in any other “style” of hatha yoga, except at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram. This is the asana that made me realize how a mild and easy looking asana can work so well.

Keeping your feet together, as you inhale, begin to raise your hands sideways and come up on the toes. While on the inhale, lifting the arms should make you realize how your chest opens up and the lungs expand. As your hands rise up, one can feel the lungs expand at the same level of the arm, as an indicator. The lungs go all the way up to the neck.  Or at least, internalize this and visualize the lungs expanding and the shoulders working. Towards the end of the inhale one can even clasp their palms and invert the clasped palms. This adds an additional movement on the arm joints. One is standing on the toes and hands clasped on the top. You can feel the toes, the ankles, the shins, the knees, hips, spine, shoulders, arm joints and more. You can feel the expansion of the chest and the lungs. This is a great exercise for ankles as well. This inhale when it is done in KYM style  is a minimum of 7 seconds or so. Seasoned yogis can inhale for longer. One should not try to do this in 7 seconds or longer if it is not naturally possible. This can be easily learnt over time. The idea is never to force, but observe.

No matter how long the inhale is, this sets the tone for the entire asana practice. It also teaches you how to breathe and coordinate your movements with the breath. You can really feel this work if you practice in the morning. The body gets to be more flexible in the later part of the day and the subtleties are harder to observe. Morning practice helps one feel what joints are brought into the equation and of course without music. The breath is the music. This seemingly easy asana gets very difficult when the mind is not focused. If there is a lot of turbulence in the mind, too many thoughts, the balance gets tricky. There is no need to feel bad if the balance is not happening in a particular session, just observe and notice the messy mind. One can induce some calmness artificially just by observing and make a decision to breathe better. Focus on the breath. There is so much to learn just from this basic of the asanas. And, this must be repeated a few times, 6 is a good number.

I could not come up on my toes for a long time when my knee was injured. I would practice it just with the arm movement. Now that I have gained some strength in my knee, I am back to the classic.

When I learnt this at KYM, I got to know that tāda in Sanskrit means palm tree. This pose looks like a palm tree when the arms are raised over. In Iyengar’s book, samasthithi (equally balanced) is termed tādasana. This is why most yogis mean tādasana to be mountain pose, but the actual Sanskrit meaning is palm tree pose.

I found an entire set of asanas that come under tādasana krama in Srivatsa Ramaswami’s “The complete book of Vinyasa Yoga“, which is one of my favorite books. This book is so awesome, it deserves a separate blog post.

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