Pigeon Pose Quotes

Now we’re going to transition into the pigeon pose,” the female instructor said serenely. “I don’t know what that is!” Lacey yelled at the TV. “Why don’t you ever explain it to us?” With that, yoga was over.

The next half hour was devoted to a series of painful yoga positions. Gwendolyn, for a woman in her sixties, was disturbingly limber. As the minute hand inched toward the nine, she straightened up from her King Pigeon Pose with an ecstatic sigh that must have made someone besides me uncomfortable.

History suggests that few things stimulate human imagination more than the challenge of killing. This is most evident when the intended targets are other human beings, for no other organism poses anywhere near the severity of threat. But, as a species, we are not slackers even when the adversary is an eighteen-inch bird

In the last thirty years, I’ve read, heard, and seen the world’s most creative, gruesome, distasteful, and well-performed threats. I’ve learned that it’s important to react calmly, because when in alarm we stop evaluating information mindfully and start doing it physically. For example, a death threat communicated in a letter or phone call cannot possibly pose any immediate hazard, but the recipient might nonetheless start getting physically ready for danger, with increased blood flow to the arms and legs (for fighting or running), release of the chemical cortisol (which helps blood coagulate more quickly in case of injury), lactic acid heating up in the muscles (to prepare them for effort), focused vision, and increased breathing and heartbeat to support all these systems. These responses are valuable when facing present danger (such as when Kelly stood up and walked out of her apartment), but for evaluating future hazard, staying calm produces better results. A way to do this is to consciously ask and answer the question “Am I in immediate danger?” Your body wants you to get this question out of the way, and once you do, you’ll be free to keep perceiving what’s going on. The great enemy of perception, and thus of accurate predictions, is judgment. People often learn just enough about something to judge it as belonging in this or that category. They observe bizarre conduct and say, “This guy is just crazy.” Judgments are the automatic pigeon-holing of a person or situation simply because some characteristic is familiar to the observer (so whatever that characteristic meant before it must mean again now). Familiarity is comfortable, but such judgments drop the curtain, effectively preventing the observer from seeing the rest of the play. Another time people stop perceiving new information is when they prematurely judge someone as guilty or not guilty.

Continuing to improve flexibility, the body gets to a point where it is no longer stretching muscles—it is stretching ligaments and joint capsules. These structures aren’t supposed to be stretched. If you tend to be someone who is really flexible and can, for example, easily go over into a forward fold and put your hands flat on the ground, or rest your stomach on your thighs in long sitting, that is plenty of flexibility. Similarly, you don’t need more flexibility if you can go into the splits or lay all the way down in a pigeon pose. All these examples are way past what is needed for a healthy amount of flexibility. You will end up making the muscles tighten up around the joints to stabilize you or pinching and straining the joint itself.