Pose of the Week

Thanks to my fabulous model Mercedes, I will be attempting to post a Pose of the Week on a (hopefully) weekly basis!  This week's pose is a very simple cross-legged comfortable seated position.  In my kids yoga classes, when it's time to listen, we all come to a comfortable sitting position.  In school, I call it "criss cross applesauce."  This pose is a grounding pose and helps the children focus.  We also sit in this position when we do breathing exercises.

To get into this simple pose, we ground our bottoms to the mat and bend our knees, crossing one leg on top of the other.  It's important to practice good posture, as a lot of the students I work with have low muscle tone - this can lead to breathing problems and back problems down the road.  We reach the top of our heads toward the ceiling and practice shrugging our shoulders up to our ears and then rolling our shoulders back and down a few times before finally settling into the pose.  To get class started, I also like to do a few audible exhales - we breathe in deeply through our noses, then breathe out loudly through our mouths.  Here's Mercedes having some fun with this: