Yoga instructors love to come up with creative ways to explain what your body should be doing as it completes a series of poses. The language can be evocative and poetic, as well as whimsical or funny. Sometimes – especially for beginners – it can be very confusing. Here’s what it’s really all about.
“Breathe into your ____” (back, hips, etc.)
According to many practitioners, yoga is all about your breath. You hold each pose for a certain number of breaths, or you breathe as you enter or leave the pose. Sometimes an instructor will tell you to “breathe into your back” or “breathe into your hips”. Your breaths only reach your lungs, so what do they really mean?
If they name a body part in your torso, they are usually referring to a part of the breathing movement. We actually have a number of different ways to make room for our lungs. One is to expand the chest cavity outward in all directions. Another is to allow our chest or shoulders to rise. Another is to keep our chest stationary but allow our lungs to fill the chest area and squeeze our organs down into our abdomen. (You can do all of this at once, or focus on one area more than the others.)
Breathing into your abdomen therefore means breathing in a way that moves your abdomen. Breathing into your back can point outward to expand your rib cage.
What about other body parts, like the hips? This is usually said when you are in a pose and you want to stay there for a few breaths. As you breathe, your body moves subtly, so this is an opportunity to see if there are any ways you can get more stretch or movement into the parts of your body that the teacher names. If you don’t feel your “breath” flowing there, try to imagine a whirring sound of energy, or pay more attention to the sensations coming from that body part.
“Stand up one vertebra at a time.”
Your vertebrae are the small bones in your spine. Each one forms a protective ring around your spinal cord, connects to your various back muscles, and supports your body weight, among other tasks.
If you bend over, for example, and fold forward, you may be asked to stand up “one vertebra at a time. (To be pedantic, one of the bones is the vertebrae, and the plural form is vertebrae. Sometimes you’ll hear “vertebrae catch vertebrae,” but that’s not grammatically correct. (Just saying.)
What they actually mean is to tuck your pelvis so that it’s more or less upright (since you’ve done the forward lean) and then keep your back rounded as you return to a standing position. This may be a gentler way to stand than simply hinging upright from the hips, although there’s plenty of room for yogis to argue which is the “better” way to move.
“Jumping, stepping or floating to the top of the mat”
The top of the mat is the front of the mat. Jumping and stepping may make sense. But how do you “float” from a flat support position to standing?
Floating is actually a fairly advanced form of specific movement. It’s like a low-profile handstand, where you put your weight on your hands so you can lift your feet and place them in different positions. Here is a video showing the progression of learning how to float.
Yoga Technique: Elvis Garcia’s Floating Exercise
“Let your anus bloom.”
In beginner classes, they don’t usually talk much about your asshole, but if you do enough yoga, you’ll eventually hear the cue to “blossom your anus” or “send your sunflower into the sky. This could be a cue to relax your hip muscles – for example, to stop clenching your cheeks – or in some cases, they want you to do what a redditor calls a “reverse Kegel ” that actually relaxes the sphincter itself. In any case, Yoga Journal confirms that it’s perfectly normal to giggle like a child when your instructor talks about your asshole.
“Activate your toes.”
To “activate” a body part is to contract the muscles within and around that body part. If you are activating your toes, you may be spreading or clenching them, or even trying to do both at the same time. Take a peek at your trainer to get a sense of what they want you to do and do your best to tighten the muscles in the body part they’ve designated.
“Let your muscles fall off your bones.”
Don’t take this literally. Your muscles are attached to your bones, but letting them “fall off” means relaxing those muscles. On the other hand, “pulling muscles into bones” means flexing them. Or, to use the word we just learned, activation.
“Go deep into the floor.”
This means using your balance and foot muscles to make sure your connection to the floor is stable and strong. You’ll be pulling the muscles in your feet tight, possibly spreading your toes, possibly activating your calf muscles to make sure you’re holding your feet in place and not letting them get cold underneath you.
If you’ve heard of foot “horns,” consider wearing a pair of old-fashioned four-wheel skates. You have four wheels; if you lean too far forward or backward, you’ll fall. If you lean too far to the right or left, you’ll find yourself skating around corners. Try distributing your weight evenly across the four “corners,” or think of your foot as a tripod (big toe, little toe, heel) and aim to apply the same amount of weight to all three parts.
“Fold yourself like a Japanese ham sandwich.”
If you go to hot yoga, you’ll probably hear this phrase. It comes from a script written by the questionable (to say the least) master Bikram Choudhury, who wrote about hand-to-foot poses: “Touch your abdomen on your thighs, your chest on your knees, and your face on your legs below your knees. From the side, you should look like a Japanese ham sandwich, with no seams anywhere.” The hot yoga practitioner sometimes argues why he chose a Japanese ham sandwich over peanut butter and jelly. I don’t have an answer for that.
