Week Three - Mula Bandha and Bealtaine
Hello everyone,
Thank you all for being there last Sunday for yoga at Thrive :) With the perfect weather to celebrate, I find myself today excited and eagerly awaiting the fire season - Bealtaine, this Friday May 1st - the official beginning of Irish Summer, and an extra special event this year due to the auspicious alignment of a Celtic fire festival with the howling and full flower moon!
While our days of living off the land and pouring fresh milk across the doorstep to ward off faeries may feel long gone (for some), it's hard not to look out today and see the fertility and exuberance that people have been celebrating in Ireland for over 5,000 years. Bees are buzzing, flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and all that was asleep has finally finished yawning and is now ready to dance.
Our theme for this Sunday's two yoga classes will be Mula Bandha, a powerful technique of lifting the pelvic floor muscles to stabilise the spine and core in strong yoga postures; inviting energy to flow upward from your base. If you get creative with it, which is always fun, you could think of mula bandha intuitively as the energy that is all around us now during Bealtaine season, the Celtic fire festival. This is because the Sanskrit word mula means root, and bandha means to lock or bind in order to align energy and lift. In other words: to rise from your roots and direct energy upwards. In yoga tradition, this lift is considered a reversal of apana vayu in the body - the conscious shift of downward spiralling energy (the energy of open release, surrender, grounding, resting, menstruating, excretion) to instead flow upward for a time, where appropriate. A balance of surrender and action; to feel rested and alive - an antidote to lethargy.
Bealtaine marks a time in the Celtic calendar when what was once heavy and trapped in the earth suddenly finds the light and enthusiasm to rise up and make great shapes in the world. I think the trees and plants and flowers and animals are practicing a little mula bandha magic right now. Let's join them!
But what does it actually mean to activate Mula Bandha in your yoga practice? You will occasionally hear teachers ask you to 'do a kegel exercise', or to 'pretend like you're holding in your pee', or even to 'try and squeeze your anus' in order to engage your mula bandha - this is all in the name of stabilising your core. While over-simplifying mula bandha in this way can be momentarily helpful for beginners - in so far as you are in the general area of your pelvic floor if you're squeezing your butt...there is a much more subtle body awareness that we can explore to activate mula bandha correctly and find the intrinsic muscular lift that truly allows energy to flow upward.
To do this, you can use your breath as your anatomy teacher.
Did you know that we have not one but TWO diaphragms in the body that optimise your functional and healthy breathing? If you don't know what the 'main character' diaphragm is, it's a large dome-shaped muscle that sits below your lungs and behind your rib cage. Ideally, it releases and stretches downward so that the lungs can fill with air, and then it contracts and squeezes upwards to push the oxygen out again. This is an automatic function of the body - to breathe - however, most people have an unconscious tightness and/or weakness in their diaphragm. This constriction forces them to breathe only using the higher registers of their chest and lungs, causing a shallower and shorter breath, which encourages the nervous system to live in a constant state of fight or flight - i.e. high stress levels - even without apparent cause. Which sucks.
Slow, downward belly breathing is functional breathing. We are designed to feel relaxed when we are safe.
However, what's even more interesting is that there is a mini diaphragm muscle in the pelvic floor that also helps with optimal breathing! Just the same as the diaphragm in your chest, the pelvic floor diaphragm is a hammock of muscle that ideally moves downward when you breath in, and contracts upward again when you breathe out. And just the same as having tightness in your chest and belly that constricts your breath and stresses out your nervous system, you may have habitual tightness and/or weakness in your pelvic floor muscles - which can effect fertility, sexual health, menstrual cycles, continence, core stability, and even organ function. It can also make you feel heavy, out of balance, tired, and frazzled.
This hammock of muscle in the pelvic floor is the area of mula bandha, and can be felt and discovered by exploring your exhale to the very last movement, where you may feel a subtle contraction and lift within the bowel of your pelvis and at the base of your spine. We will work gently with this area of the body this Sunday in both the Hatha Flow and Soft Stretch classes, breathing and moving together to find intrinsic lift and support from within and celebrate the arrival of summer!
I hope to see you there :) This is an all levels friendly practice, beginners are absolutely welcome :) Both Sunday practices are fun, accessible, and invitational. I currently have three drop-in spaces available for the Hatha Flow at 5pm, and four spaces available for the Soft Stretch at 6:30pm. Please let me know if you'd like to book in!
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
"Beannacht"
By John O Donohue
Le grá,
Macha
