Problems with Head Stand

[ELNINO]

Namaste Emil,

Can you be more precise on your absolute affirmation saying thatHeadStand shoudl never been practiced against the wall?

It is the way I practice it so far at this time of my life and honestly there is no other way I could practice it, as I am not advanced enough or my core and mental focus on the different point of contraction in the body is still in the observing process... I tried Head Stand without wall (with my teacher assuring i won't fall and holding my legs while I'm in) and it is obvious that i wouldn't be able to hold for half a second, so using the wall as support helps me to locate the parts of the body my mind has to focus to activate the right muscles and find my balance!

I would appreciate more details about the right technique how to launch headstand without a wall, the way you teach it then.
Thank you,
Peace

Many people are capable of balancing on their head in this way and except for the most advanced yogis, THIS IS NOT SIRSHASANA! For this reason one should "NEVER" practice Headstand leaning against the wall. Nor should there be any jumping or kicking-up from the floor. This is evidence of one who is not ready. (My apologies to those of you who teach in this way.)

[Pandara]

Elnino,

As I ahve stated I struggle with the headstand and I am a teacher and I use the the wall. Point is not how well you do the asana or not, but your awareness is crucial here. Some people will do the headstand without troubles, but no awareness, that is the practice of a beginner for me, but doing the headstand with awareness, no matter what the difficulties and how many props you must use, that is the practice for me of an advanced yogi.

Good luck with the headstand and remember, we cannot be always good at all the asanas.

[orchid]

Hi Ananda,
Regarding your fear of falling out of the headstand, I'm wondering if your fear of physically falling translates to other areas of your life. For example, are you at all afraid of heights? How do you feel during times when you experience falling or a sensation of falling - e.g. jumping off a diving board, going down-hill on a roller coaster, experiencing turbulence in an airplane? I for one have always disliked the sensation of falling. When I feel that sensation, it elicits other emotions. I feel that I've lost a slight amount of control, that my feet are no longer planted firmly on the ground so to speak, that I've stepped from the known and predictable to the unknown and unpredictable. In order to open myself up to experiences in which I feel a sensation of falling, I have to remind myself that life is full of uncertainty and that uncertainty brings new tests and new opportunities to work out the karmic bondage of past lives. I hope this helps!

[spyrotone]

Om Elnino,

It's important to first differentiate "being in headstand" from "getting into headstand." These are two separate exercises. The third is holding it, all asanas being comprised of these three parts. You build the strength and control from the ground up. Let's first take a look at the setup, and then I have a test for you.

1 Measure the distance between your elbows (fingertips to opposite elbow) placed on the floor in front of your knees.
2. Clasp the hands in front, interlacing fingers. Place your head on the floor, cupping the back of the head with the hands, thumbs extended up along the the back of the neck. (And it's important here to have placement on the very crown of the head and NOT the forehead. Ask your teacher to check it for you.)
3. Inhale as you straighten your knees and raise your bottom up. Exhale.
4. Holding that position, inhale, pushing the elbows and shoulders directly into the floor, lifting the upper-body, creating a slight gap between the floor and the top of your head. Hold and breathe. Can you do this? Can you maintain the gap without your elbows spreading? This is your first objective. If you can do this, you're ready to go on to half headstand. If not, more leg lifts and dolphin pushups.

Half-Headstand

Steps 1-3 from above.

4. Inhale, tip-toe feet along the floor towards head, raising the hips up. Exhale.
5. Pull one knee into the chest. Inhale as you pull the second knee into the chest and hold it. Breathe.
6. Come down with exhalation. Rest in child's pose.

You want to time your inhalation with the moment the second foot leaves the floor. NO LAUNCHING! Don't kick-up or jump. Doing so represents a gap in your strength and control which will be very difficult to fix from the top down. Take your time. Find the strength to leave the floor smoothly, come down the same. Like a feather. If you're unable to pull the second knee in in this position, then practice alternating pulling in one knee and then the other, until the strength is there.

The majority of your weight here is on your arms. Focus keeping the elbows in place, driving them into the floor, lifting weight off of your head. Keep your knees into the chest. Resist the temptation to raise them and stacking your weight into your neck. This will build the strength and awareness.

Practice half-headstand for several weeks (or longer), along with leg-lifts and dolphin pushups. I can help you with more after then.

Good luck my friend. Don't rush. Listen to you body.

Peace
Emil

[Ananda]

Originally Posted by spyrotone

Om Elnino,

It's important to first differentiate "being in headstand" from "getting into headstand." These are two separate exercises. The third is holding it, all asanas being comprised of these three parts. You build the strength and control from the ground up. Let's first take a look at the setup, and then I have a test for you.

1 Measure the distance between your elbows (fingertips to opposite elbow) placed on the floor in front of your knees.
2. Clasp the hands in front, interlacing fingers. Place your head on the floor, cupping the back of the head with the hands, thumbs extended up along the the back of the neck. (And it's important here to have placement on the very crown of the head and NOT the forehead. Ask your teacher to check it for you.)
3. Inhale as you straighten your knees and raise your bottom up. Exhale.
4. Holding that position, inhale, pushing the elbows and shoulders directly into the floor, lifting the upper-body, creating a slight gap between the floor and the top of your head. Hold and breathe. Can you do this? Can you maintain the gap without your elbows spreading? This is your first objective. If you can do this, you're ready to go on to half headstand. If not, more leg lifts and dolphin pushups.

Half-Headstand

Steps 1-3 from above.

4. Inhale, tip-toe feet along the floor towards head, raising the hips up. Exhale.
5. Pull one knee into the chest. Inhale as you pull the second knee into the chest and hold it. Breathe.
6. Come down with exhalation. Rest in child's pose.

You want to time your inhalation with the moment the second foot leaves the floor. NO LAUNCHING! Don't kick-up or jump. Doing so represents a gap in your strength and control which will be very difficult to fix from the top down. Take your time. Find the strength to leave the floor smoothly, come down the same. Like a feather. If you're unable to pull the second knee in in this position, then practice alternating pulling in one knee and then the other, until the strength is there.

The majority of your weight here is on your arms. Focus keeping the elbows in place, driving them into the floor, lifting weight off of your head. Keep your knees into the chest. Resist the temptation to raise them and stacking your weight into your neck. This will build the strength and awareness.

Practice half-headstand for several weeks (or longer), along with leg-lifts and dolphin pushups. I can help you with more after then.

Good luck my friend. Don't rush. Listen to you body.

Peace
Emil

Namaste Spyrotone
Always find your tips very useful. You really come deep into the understanding behind the asana. You are helping me in reaching my goal with headstand, specially the breathing technique of when to inhale i.e. exhale that hs been a big step forward. Almost there now at half headstand.
I do the three part breathing in all asanas bt did not know the mechanics in heatstand.
Om Shanti
Ananda
Ananda

[ELNINO]

Om Emil,

Brilliant explanation, thanks a lot for the detailed text, it is very helpful especially on the breathing aspect.

I am at the point where I can now follow your process and raise my legs up, but still against a wall,

However, i can stand in half HeadStand without the wall, so I might follow your advice and stick to this first step and find my balance, my peace in the pose and focus on the important points to respect before I can go further

Thanks a lot

Namaste

[spyrotone]

Jai Ananda, Jai Elnino,

My pleasure sharing this knowledge with you my friends. I give thanks to my teachers: Om Bolo Sad Guru Sivananda - Om Bolo Sri Vishnu Devananda.

Patience. Enjoy the hard work of each moment along of the way. Build your headstand from the ground up with strength and control and don't rush. When you eventually reach the top, you will be "king." And it won't take long, but there is no getting there by propping oneself up. Resist balancing on the top of your head longer than you can hold it yourself. In my experience, I've seen little benefit in this and mostly only injury and strain.

In making the transition from half-headstand to full, keep the knees bent until the hips are straight and your knees are at the very top, (you reach this point on the initial inhalation, your feet now hanging behind you). Then lastly, straighten the knees and raise the feet up with exhalation. Follow the same sequence in reverse on the way down, bending the knees first, then the hips, exhaling all the way. You will find, you can't do this against the wall and then you won't want to use it anymore.

Blessings, Peace and safe practice.

Emil

[Hubert]

Generally, I'd say, use a wall or a other helper until you are secure enough not to fall.
Why rush something you are not ready to do ? Especially on the risk of hurting yourself.

But the issue was of that of fear. That I do not know. It is you, who have the fear who must face it, identify it, and deal with it. Your personal karma has intricacies what you alone are able to know. Surely there are a few people advanced enough to shed light on this, but most of the time they will not do that exactly to respect your freedom, or, if they'd do that they would have to ask very unpleasant things from you to perform as "payment". Not for them, but for your own self ... the wisdom in you cannot be cheated. When your Self, togheter with the forces what guide karma, decides that you need certain experiences, your ego - or other's - has very little chance to avoid them, and if you'd somehow manage to do that, in the eyes of your higher Self, this would mean a failure, so you'd sooner or later would arrive to a similar situation.

Life shows that we learn through intensive, stressful, and painful experiences, while in comfort we tend to be less conscious of our path. We should be happy for any pain, or bad situation, as most of the time it is required for us to learn. In fact, if one is greatly affected by suffering and pain, this is one of the signs that there is still much to learn.

I dare to say these things because today we have so many ways to alleviate suffering, our materialist civilization is one of comfort, and one of the reasons of the popularity of "yoga" is that it is a powerful way to escape suffering, be it physical or on other levels. Various pains and sufferings show our attachments to various levels of our existence. But learnig to become unattached is only half of the picture, this way we only avoid too much harm being done in our future.

As we are free, and noble spiritual beings, (in our Selves), we cannot accept that someone suffers as a result of our actions. In the time between death and the next birth (what is much longer than a materialist or traditionalist view might believe), we will clearly see what we have caused, a great sorrow and regret we will feel, and these feelings will make up the factors of our next incarnation. This is the law.

Now, there is grace also ! Grace does not nullifies our errors, and the harm we have done, BUT makes possible for paying them in our chosen manner. If we do something good, even if we do not do it to the persons whe have harmed (as perhaps for that we would need more time, or a future incarnation), that would count as payment, too. This is Grace.

Exactly because of this, a certain path of selfless service of others is called karma yoga. This is a safe path, and immediatly available to anyone. It does not require a young and healthy body, fitness, or high mental faculties. It is there for even the most backward, illiterate, sick and miserable human, be it the greatest sinner of the world.

Excuse me, if I have dwellt on this subject too long ... but the notion of karma, reincarnation, and divine justice, I feel one cannot overemphasise this in today's world.

[yogabond]

I had trouble with headstands too. Ultimately I focused on strengthening my neck and once I got more comfortable with my neck strength the headstands followed.

[ELNINO]

Namaste Yogabond,

How do you strengthen your neck? Is holding half-headstand for 5 breaths or so on a regular basisi a good way to do it?

I find it easier now to reach the half position without the wall, it is a good core strengthening and focusing position, and also good find one's balance in this reverse position...

But at some point I can feel that the neck still holds lot of body weight, even though my core, arms and shoudlers are fully engaged... could it be that my neck is really weak due to lack of exercise in that area?

Thank you
EN

[Bridgette]

Not being a teacher I can't fully address alignment however I would like to comment on fear. Fear is the reason I started yoga. I suffered from severe anxiety that was not able to be controlled by meds. I experienced problems in tree pose, the crow, and headstand. I attributed all of this to the general fear. It's a natural instinct but can also be over-come when necessary through one important tool...

BREATHING!!!

A good powerful breath will carry you. I started against a wall of course and felt rather weighted down both physically and mentally. I had alot of self doubt purely because like mentioned earlier extra weight in the thighs and butt can make the pose difficult. While this is very true if you envision yourself as a blade of grass simply rising after the weight of rain had fallen off you can defiantly accomplish it.

I'm still working on doing a free-standing head stand with fairly good progress. One thing that helps is laying a bunch of pillows behind me. It makes for a comfortable landing.

Before you can walk, you must first learn to fall.

[yogabond]

Originally Posted by ELNINO

How do you strengthen your neck? Is holding half-headstand for 5 breaths or so on a regular basis a good way to do it?

I also come from a martial arts background so some of what I do I take from that course of study. I find the best way for me to work out my neck is doing kip-ups. Be careful with it, you will only need to do 5 or so every few days when you are getting started. You may not realize how much you work your neck out like this when you don't do these often.

Basically you lay down on your back and kick up onto your feet. At the most basic stage you will use your arms heavily. To work out your neck use your neck and head to help push your self up. Eventually you can work up to not using your arms at all and just your momentum and a neck strength to kick yourself up. Has a lot to do with your overall core strength.

If you don't want to start there a lot of gyms offer specific equipment for resistance training the neck muscles.

Here are some clips:

YouTube - Kip Up Tutorial
YouTube - No hand KipUp

[suryadaya]

Originally Posted by Ananda

Hari Om
I hv been practicing Integral Yoga for five years and I still hv this problems with the Head Stand. I wonder if it brings memories of a past life because the "fright" I feel cannot be normal. If any of you hv tips, adv or comments they will be most welcome.
Love & Light

Hello Ananda! I'm not sure how far you've progressed since you originally posted, but I thought I'd offer you some advice on what works best for me.

I don't practice against the wall. I rarely get up there if I try. I practice against the front of the couch and now sometimes just freestanding since I've gotten better. I theorize that when the wall is there I am too conscious of trying to space myself far enough so I don't hit that wall because it will mean that I have gone too far -- and then pushing myself back off the wall will usually overexert and bring me back down. When that support is not there, I wave upside-down in the air in freedom until I find my balance, or if end up going to far back then I land in an sloppy backbend on my couch cushions and am perfectly fine.

I used to have the same irrational fear of going up into the inversion that you have - fears that I wouldn't make it, that i'd fall off to the side and land on my head, that my neck would crack into pieces, that I was a weakling etc etc)... and nothing like that has happened yet. I've had the same irrational fears about most backbends too. Each time I overcome them its as though suddenly I understand the whole world for a while until the next obstacle arrives. There is a quote from Vivekananda that says "It is fearlessness that brings heaven in a moment".

Sometimes it also helps to think of all things you have done that you never thought you could before, or that other people cannot surpass because of their own self-limitations. For instance - I can lift a couch, change the fuel lines on my car, work 70 hours a week, be compassionate in the face of adversity and learn to speak Hindi but for some reason I am scared to death of bending over backwards into chakrasana. Now - if I can get into chakrasana from the floor with ease and comfort, even crawl around sorta in it - why can't I just slowly lower into it? A great internal burning fear that occurs somewhere halfway backwards where I suddenly just can't go any further and I sit down or stop.

Guess I'll have to take my own advice and go try it in front of my couch.

[YatraYoga]

I think one of the keys to headstand is to Relax into it. For years, I thought my arms were simply not strong enough, or my core, so I'd strain. I wasn't able to get into the pose until 1) I dropped my fear, and 2) while against the wall, literally focusing on relaxing the upper body while in the pose. So much is about surrender in this practice, no? All the best to you.

[spyrotone]

Om to the wise,

All due respect to you Yatra, this is highly inadvisable. Please! The only thing we want to "surrender" in asana practice is ego, and NOT THE RULES! I do not write here to criticize anyone, but only for the safety of those seeking fulfillment in their practice.

Propping oneself up against the wall and stacking weight into the neck and relaxing in this way is unwise, neglectful and a gross misinterpretation of the posture, completely missing the potential it offers.

Whichever way one chooses to practice sirshasana, it's important to understand, injury sustained by performing this asana incorrectly may not show up today or tomorrow, but rather next year or the next, or even in ten, after which correction becomes quite difficult or maybe impossible.

Rules are rules. Don't underestimate their significance. Or, why would we have them?

Om Shanti,

Emil

[YatraYoga]

Thanks for your response my friend. I swear I read that very instruction in a yoga magazine this winter... Maybe what really happened is that I surrendered the ego first, and had a bit more success? Regardless, safety is always first, and I appreciate your reply, as I grow into my practice and learn, literally, every single day. Namaste!

[Hubert]

Originally Posted by yogabond

I also come from a martial arts background so some of what I do I take from that course of study. I find the best way for me to work out my neck is doing kip-ups.

YouTube - Kip Up Tutorial
YouTube - No hand KipUp

If I had the agility, spine condition, and strenght to do a kip-up, I would stop doing asanas alltogheter and concentrate on meditative practices.
To use kip-ups to strenghten the neck muscles, in order to perform headtsand ... seems a bit far fetched to me. But each to his own.