New short practice: Glide like an eagle

In yoga, we always look for balance between effort and surrender. How much effort is enough, and at what point do you stop trying and go with the flow?

In any yoga pose, effort is required to arrange the body parts and hold the position. But once you are there, you have to let your breath move you in subtle ways to help you embody the pose. Similarly, sometimes you need to put in effort, going out into the world, taking up space, and spreading your wings. Other times, you need respite, which means conserving your resources, folding in, and recharging. When we get stuck in one mode or the other, we miss out on its opposite.

For inspiration, let’s look to an eagle. The eagle puts in effort to rise up high, and then finds a rising current and surrenders to its lift. It glides with its wings spread wide, with minimum necessary effort. And on cold nights, the eagle joins others in a sheltered roost, becomes compact and still to conserve its energy until it’s time to rise again.

In this 15-minute practice, we follow the example of an eagle: spreading our wings wide to glide in some poses, then folding our limbs in tight to perch in others, alternating between opening and settling. We use the breath itself as the current we glide on, with slight pauses after the inhale and the exhale to highlight the expansion and the repose. We finish with Garuda mudra and a short visualization of riding air currents.

Channel your inner eagle and see how it feels!