Transcript below of: Why don’t my hands reach the ground in dandasana?
Hey everybody! Welcome to this month’s question of the month. You know me, David Keil at yoganatomy.com, where we try to answer your questions. And of course, you can submit your own question. Go to yoganatomy.com/myquestion and we’ll get it answered on video just like we’re doing today. This month’s question comes from Majalt and it’s about why the hands sometimes don’t reach the ground in dandasana.
The Question:
“It seems impossible for me to do dandasana pose with [a] straight back and palms flat on the ground. If I press my palms to the ground, my back gets rounded. If I try to keep it straight, only my fingers can touch the ground. Why is that? Do I have unusually short hands? Thank you!”
The Answer:
So of course Majalt, I’ll assume by hands you meant your arms are too short. Proportions are important. And, proportions are relative. Relative to what? Relative to your own body. So in this case, more specifically, that means your arm length relative to the length of your torso. That means, when you sit down on the ground, how long is your torso? How long is your spine? Okay, so relative to your torso, you might have short arms. Or, you could say that you have a long torso relative to shorter arms. So that’s the main reason why we see that the hands sometimes don’t reach the ground in dandasana.
But of course, this brings up the bigger point. When we do postures, it’s not about making the posture look like everybody else. It’s about how we express the posture. How we’re doing the posture is our expression of that posture. That’s true regardless of whether your fingertips touch or your hands go flat on the floor. As nice as that would be to feel like you’re like everybody else, in your expression of the posture, you may not see the hands reach the ground in dandasana.
Dandasana is about the quality and energy that you create when you’re in that position of being like a “danda”, which is a stick or a staff. It’s about creating that kind of energy through your torso and down through your arms, even if it’s just your fingertips touching, and then sending that energy out through your legs to make a staff. You could always put a block there if you wanted to feel what it feels like to put your palms down and press into something.
Okay? So, once again, if you’ve got a question that you’d like me to answer, go to yoganatomy.com/myquestion.