The Yoga Journal archives series is a carefully chosen set of articles that were first published in past issues, starting in 1975. Yoga Journal published this article for the first time in its November-December 1990 issue.The Wheel Pose, or Upward-Facing Bow Pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana), is a deep backbend. We need to go deeper than just opening the spine to get to it. We need to face the deepest levels of fear and holding in the nervous system.This helps us find the real limits on openness. Then we need to find a way to heal these wounds inside so that being open is easy and natural.
The Wheel Pose and Opening Up
When we let ourselves feel our own pain, denial, and repression, we see that they are directly connected to the release of tension deep in our nervous system. Geeta Iyengar, the daughter of B.K.S. Iyengar, calls the “center of the fear complex” the solar plexus, which is in the middle of the body. Anxiety and fear can make our stomachs and intestines feel like they’re tied up in knots.
This kind of opening, which is needed for full freedom in Wheel Pose, is something that happens all the time and gets better in every area of life. The asana practice is a strong and unique part of this process. It honours the wisdom of the physical plane and lets the student feel how consciousness is changing in the nervous system. In Wheel Pose, this unfolding must eventually happen in the fear complex and the center spine.
How to Practice Wheel
Wheel Pose is an intermediate pose that most new students shouldn’t try. You can learn how to open up your shoulders and upper body by doing Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). You can also learn how to open up your hips and groins by doing standing poses and simple groin openers. Mountain Pose (Tadasana), some inversions, and beginning backbends like Upward-Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana) can help you lengthen your spine.
You can start doing the pose when your armpits and groins are strong and flexible enough. Lay down on your back. Bend your knees and bring your feet toward your buttocks. Keep them parallel or slightly turned in. Put your hands on the floor just below your shoulders, with your fingers pointing toward your feet and your elbows shoulder-width apart. Students who are musclebound should lessen the strain by moving their hands and feet farther apart to make the arch less intense.
Lift the pelvis off the floor and strongly extend the buttocks and coccyx toward the heels. Keep your hands and elbows steady and use your shoulder blades to lift your chest until the top of your head touches the floor. Take a breath or two.
Next, press down hard and evenly on the arms and legs to lift the pelvis, rib cage, and spine into the finished position (Figure 5). You need to use your leg muscles to lift your pelvis, not to push the weight onto your arms. To relieve pressure on the lower back, lift the heels, widen the sacrum, and raise the outer pelvis. As you lower your heels, keep this height and width.
To come down, slowly let go of the muscles’ grip so that the body can fall to the floor.
As you go down, keep the lumbar and cervical spine getting longer. Take a few deep breaths. Do it five to ten times. For the first few times, stay in the pose for just one or two breaths. You can hold the pose for longer when your body is warm. If you can’t move your body to ease the pain, don’t stay in Wheel.
A lot of students can’t move around freely, which makes the finished position painful or impossible. To get around shoulder limitations, lift the hands up onto blocks (Figure 1). Put the blocks against the wall for support, using as much height as you need, and pull the rib cage away from the shoulders. Lengthen as much as you can through the armpits, but don’t push the thoracic vertebrae into the body.
Putting your feet up on a chair can also help with tightness in the pelvis and groins (Figure 2). Raising the feet takes the pressure off the lower back, allowing the coccyx, buttocks, and groins to work properly. This change makes the arms work harder to get enough lift.
When you press up from the floor, keep your pelvis close to the chair. This will make it easier on your arms. As you lift, move your pelvis, coccyx, and torso toward the chair, and use your legs and buttocks to lift the weight straight up. This lift will be hard if you push the pelvis away from the chair with your legs, which puts the weight of the body on the arms. Use the extra space in the groins to stretch out even more from the shoulder joints.
Beginners often turn their feet out and let their legs splay because tight groins make it hard for the front of the spine to open. These habits will lead to two clear issues. First, the back of the sacrum will be pushed together from both sides.
Second, the adductor groins (the upper inner thighs) will be pulled up and away from the hamstrings (where they belong) and will fuse with the front groins. This will lock the pelvic floor and make it hard to breathe. Use a block between your thighs to hold the adductors in and down to fix these problems (Figure 3). Hold the block tightly and roll it toward the floor. Don’t let the front spine lose its extension or the buttocks, coccyx, and heels lose their grounding action.
When the position is finished, the arms and legs slowly move toward vertical, sometimes over a period of years. The armpits and groins need to stretch as far as they can. The center spine can only start to open when the arms and legs feel like they are connected to the lower and upper torso, respectively. Figure 4 shows that the legs and pelvis are lifting and the armpits are extending a little, but the upper and lower torso are not connected.
The center of the body sinks and locks, making the pose look like a table across the stomach. Figure 5 shows that the front of the spine opens more, the diaphragm relaxes, and a rounded dome shape starts to form. To make this dome, the muscles in the back of the midspine need to be activated and pulled down toward the coccyx and heels. The psoas needs to let go and stretch into the arms. As you breathe in, pull the diaphragm down into the pelvis. As you breathe out, let the diaphragm go and keep the height and length of the spine.
Improving and Deepening Wheel Pose
When we do backbends, we tend to work too hard on the parts of the spine that are naturally bent (the inward curves in the lumbar and cervical sections) and not enough on the parts that aren’t naturally bent (the outward curves in the thorax and sacrococcygeal areas). The first problem area we can look at in Wheel Pose is the sacrolumbar spine, which is where the lower back meets the sacrum.
In Wheel, the postural prana (the natural flow of muscular energy) should go up the front of the spine and down the back. But in this pose, the back part of the sacrum and coccyx often can’t move down because the gluteus maximus and hamstrings are weak. The front part, on the other hand, can’t move up and open because the front groins and iliopsoas muscles are too tight. So, the pelvic spine stays tight and closed, the lumbar spine bends too much, the back muscles get stiff, and pain, not opening, happens.
To fix this, the gluteus maximus, hamstrings, and legs need to work hard to make the back sacral coccyx area wider and longer, reaching toward the heel bones. The muscles in the groin and front of the spine need to relax and stretch up.
The back-bending curve can be spread evenly along the vertebrae because these actions happen at the same time. (To tighten the back muscles without letting the front muscles go up causes more compression and back pain.)
The cervical-thoracic junction, where the neck meets the upper back, is another hard area. The cervical spine tends to arch too much, just like the sacrolumbar region, and the thoracic spine tends to stay tight and closed. If you don’t fix this habit, it could cause headaches and neck pain. The shoulder girdle and arms must work together to make the right move in this area. The shoulder girdle (the collarbones and shoulder blades) is where the arms start to fully extend in Wheel Pose.
The inner shoulder blades need to move away from the neck (following the downward motion of the back body) and stay in place by pressing hard against the back ribs. The collarbones should spread out from the sternum. The arms should reach down to the ground from the achromioclavicular joint, which is where the collarbones meet the shoulders.
When the arms are stable and grounded, the rib cage can move away from the shoulders, and the upper vertebrae can relax and stretch, safely opening the cervical region. You can learn this move in the Downward-Facing Dog Pose and then improve and strengthen it in the Full Arm Balance to make it easier to do Wheel.
Putting the Dome Together
The thoracolumbar junction is where the center spine and the fear complex meet. B.K.S. Iyengar calls the opening of this area through backbending asanas “building the dome.”
It’s not easy to build the dome. It is very hard to get to the spinal vertebrae in the middle of the torso with conscious intelligence. We can easily move the upper spine with our arms, and that movement makes it easier for us to feel that area. The pelvis and legs also help us move and feel the lower back. But you can’t get to the center spine with that kind of leverage.
The diaphragm, which is the main muscle used for breathing, also attaches to the middle spine. This carries psychological baggage in the form of physical tension. Our breathing changes right away when we think or feel something.
To open this area and build the dome, a number of things need to happen at the same time.
The posterior erector muscles in the middle of the spine need to keep moving down in the right way. They get the movement from the shoulder blades and upper body and send it to the coccyx and heels. The psoas must keep releasing upward from the inner groins and pelvis, through the upper lumbar and lower thoracic spine, and into the arms.
It connects to the front of the spine, and the muscles in the front of the spine move up into and through the thoracic cavity. However, the diaphragm moves down toward the pelvis with each breath. The diaphragm and the pelvic floor both need to breathe. When you move your groins and sacrococcygeal spine the right way, the pelvic floor and respiratory diaphragm can move together.
The dome’s construction frees the diaphragm from its entanglement with other muscle fibres in the mid-anterior spine, enabling the vertebrae at the lumbar-thoracic junction to relax and breathe. This calms the nerves that come out of the vertebrae and wakes up deeper areas.
Fear and tension that have been held onto for a long time will naturally come out as this happens. Fear comes from many places in our lives, but they all affect the nervous system in the same way: the breath and the organs in the middle of the body tighten, and the muscles in this area tighten as well.
We must be ready to deal with this fear as we free up the breath and muscles in the middle of the body.
Sometimes it’s easy to see what makes you afraid, like facing a new and hard situation. For instance, when learning Wheel, you could really get hurt. But you can get over this fear by getting your body ready with simpler poses, using props for support, and being patient and persistent with the pose.
Sometimes, though, the fear comes from deeper parts of the mind. To deal with these fears, you need to be more aware of yourself and your thoughts. Many of the supported abdominal opening positions, like Reclining Bound Angle Pose (Supta Baddha Konasana), Reclining Hero Pose (Supta Virasana), or a simple supported backbend over a bolster, will help the body and let these deeper fears come to the surface more slowly so they can be looked at. You might have moments of emotion and insight that connect the physical blocks to things that have happened in the past.
The energy that is released during the asana can be used to look more closely at one’s own mind. Our culture ignores our mental and emotional pain because we are stuck in the physical world. We escape into intense activity to avoid facing our own reality.
Some of us run away by spending a lot of money on things. Some people escape into a spiritual practice, like meditation or a very intense hatha yoga practice, that doesn’t look at the deeper psychological drives and motivations that are behind their actions. We are currently developing the tools and insights required to convert these more nuanced obstructions into positive development. It is crucial for Western spiritual practitioners to engage in this significant phase of our development.
