Our family recently rescued a beautiful Australian Shepherd named Sydney from a family who had 7 dogs in a postage-stamp sized yard with no place to run. There she had spent the first 2 years of her life having 2 litters of pups, and competing for food and any morsel of attention she could get. No walks. No playing in the park. No playing fetch. Just lying in the dirt.
Our hearts went out to her.
After a stop at the vet (her first visit to one), and the dog wash (also a first), we brought her home. And this is really where our story starts.
We’re all in the kitchen getting everything together for her dinner, and she’s looking up at us expectantly. “Sit.” I say. And she does, never taking her eyes off me as I lift her food bowl off the counter. Then, ever so slowly, her front paws begin to move forward. She’s sitting on her haunches, so as the front legs slide forward, her belly is getting closer and closer to the ground. After a few seconds, she’s almost in a lying down position – then, with a quick scamper of backpedaling paws, she’s sitting upright again. She can’t hold herself up! She’s a downward sliding dog!
Think of her history. She’s spent the majority of her life lying down so she’s never really had the opportunity to develop the “drawing in” muscles required to hold her upright on a slick surface like our kitchen floor. These muscles, for example, the chest, latissimus dorsi, and abdominals normally develop in dogs by lots of running and playing, but she lacked these experiences.
In yoga class, our teachers encourage us to “hug the midline”, or “hug in”, or draw in to our center”. These phrases are cues which when followed, allow us to contract muscle groups that otherwise would not be working very hard in certain poses. When we “draw in” this way, we invariably improve our stability in the pose.
Here’s an example: In Warrior 1, with our legs spread wide apart, the force of the stance causes us to put an outward pressure on the feet. So, imagine if at that moment the mat turned to ice; the feet would slide outward further until you were doing the splits. When we hug in though, we contract the muscles which were, up to this point, just lengthening (the hip flexors on the back leg, and the butt and hamstrings on the front leg). So, if we think again about our mat- turning-to-ice model, because of the hugging in, our legs would come together. This is a subtlety often missed by people who learn yoga from a book, or video. The outward form of the pose doesn’t change, but on the inside, everything changes. In my opinion, asana practice done without “hugging in” loses much of its strength-building capacity.
Sydney’s becoming a better yogi now in her new life. I bet that after even just a few weeks of hiking and running she’ll be strong enough to maintain her sitting posture in the kitchen without being a “Downward Sliding Dog”.
