Backbends are a category of poses that people react to very differently, often it involves extremes, they either love them or hate them, often they are scared. It’s impossible to be indifferent to backbends as you could to other categories of poses. I love backbends! I practise them every single time I do a yoga practice. I have done so many backbending classes and workshops with many teachers over the years and so many self-practices. In the backbending workshop, I have condensed some of my knowledge of this practice, and based on my experience, I am sharing with you the techniques I use and that have proved to work for me. The workshop is now uploaded in the video library of my website and I hope many of you will practise it. Until Sunday 3 January 2021, use the discount code FREE5! Once purchased you have access to it for 60 days.
“You can take trials and errors in other poses but in backbends you must be very, very sharp. Sharpness means discriminative power. Backbends demand sharpness of the intelligence. (…) It’s meant for those who can bear it. Then it is right.” BKS Iyengar
Here are just a few testimonials of some students who attended the workshop
“Alix’s beautiful knowledge and kindness made backbends enjoyable even for those who apprehend this category of yoga poses.” Sophie (200-hr YT)
“I really enjoyed the workshop and started to implement many techniques already! I will join the next one!” Nataliia (regular practitioner)
“Backbends are my favourites and I loved Alix’s backbend workshop! Alix explained into detail how you need to work with your body & breath to go into deep poses. Alix is an extraordinary & talented teacher, I cannot wait for the next workshop!” Brenda (200-hr + YT)
“This was really intense and enjoyable. The intensity was because I hadn’t ever achieved backbends like I did in the workshop and I thoroughly enjoyed.” Bernard (regular 5-yr practitioner)
“Thank you Alix, my stiff back feels great!!! It was excellent.” Ivana (Yoga and pilates teacher)
A few words on backbends
We spend so much time bending or hunching forward that it is very important to practise backbends daily. Think of your position when you are sitting at a desk, typing, looking at your phone, eating, tidying up and so on. Too much forward folding can result in poor posture, restrictive blood flow to vital organs, back pain…. I have also read that chronic back pain, which can heal through backbends, has also been linked to the lowering of grey matter in the brain. Save your brain and practise backbends daily!
So what happens physically when we practise backbends? And as it is Yoga, what happens deeper within?
I. Physically, backbends involve all parts of the body. They not only involve the back as the term suggests, they are primarily a front extension of the body. This is why very often backbends are called ‘heart openers’. Backbends are meant to expand our thoracic cavity, the location of our heart and the diaphragm. Over time if we don’t expand that space, we overuse our lower back and neck, which can result in pain in those areas of the body.
As we expand the heart space, and therefore the ribs, we allow more air within, deeper inhalations and deeper exhalations. Deeper breaths, and thus more oxygen through the body, have many benefits: they help decrease anxiety, increase energy level, help digestion and improve sleep quality; it results in better mental and cardiovascular function.
Backbends involve our hips, something that is sometimes overlooked but so important for the full expression of the poses. Hip extension is an important point of focus in the workshop.
And finally of course: the back and the spine. When we bend backwards, we lift the body against the force of gravity, which helps build strong back muscles. As for the spine itself, when we bend back, the posterior part of the spinal column is compressed, which helps push the disks away from the spinal nerves and it decompresses the front of the vertebrae, counteracting the damaging effects of too many forward folds.
So there are many elements to have in mind when we practise backbends: strong legs for stability, hips that extend, opened chest and shoulders and a strong back - every part of the body is involved. BKS Iyengar goes further, saying that backbends, which he considers as the most advanced yoga postures, allow us to touch the human system as a whole and access invisible parts of the body, namely the anterior part of the spine, which elongates (the posterior part compresses). And the anterior part of the spine is unknown: “The moment you start the backbends you are in the unknown world. Your body may be known, but your inner spine is unknown. (…) It’s the subconscious mind which is awakened in backbends (…) Only in backbends the unconscious or the subconscious mind works. That’s the beauty of it.”
II. This takes us to the deeper and subtler effects of heart openers. In Yoga philosophy, our conscious mind (which includes our emotions and our intelligence) is an extension of our body. Anything we do on a physical level will have an impact on our mind and wellbeing. The mind in Yoga has four components, one of which is the discriminative mind, in other words, our discernment, our intellect, called Buddhi in Sanskrit. In Yoga, Buddhi is said to be situated at the heart center. This is the part of the mind that we want clear, so that we have good discernment, to see what is important, what to avoid, what to do, what to let go of. In that process, backbends, by creating space and by improving the flow of prana at the heart, can help reveal a clear picture of what is beneath the surface. We connect with the thoughts that surface from this exercise. The practice helps us get rid of emotional patterns that are not serving us, that are obstructing our vision of what truly is.
As I hope you will experience when you practise the workshop, backbends make you feel great. They stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. The happy feeling at the end of a backbending yoga practice is priceless, the feeling that anything negative doesn’t matter anymore.
“[Y]ou create tremendous depth and vastness in the chest through the backbends that the emotional centre accommodates [absorbs and withstands] all types of pressures and strains. There is no chance for a person who does backbends to get emotionally depressed or distressed.” BKS Iyengar.
I hope you will make backbends part of all your Yoga practices and enjoy their many benefits.