I've been practicing wheel pose, or urdhva dhanurasana, a full back bend with hands and feet on the floor. This is a difficult pose for me, that has improved a lot with persistent practice.
I had an image in my head of what my pose looked like, based on how it felt, but it's not possible to see in this upside down position where the eyes are looking away from the rest of the body.
Yesterday, I warmed up for a while, and then had Pam take a photo of me in the pose.
Whoa! I looked little like the image in my head. My feet were too close to my hands, keeping my knees bent at an acute angle, rather than pushing towards straight, and my shoulders were not nearly as much over my hands as I thought.
Having the different perspective entirely changed my mind about how I should set up for the pose and work on it. I lengthened my feet out quite a bit. The pose felt less cramped, and another photo revealed that it was just barely enough to get good alignment of knees over ankles, though to me the pose felt like my feet were extended much farther away.
Though how a pose feels is ultimately more important than how it looks, I needed this outside perspective to point me in a different direction. Otherwise, I would be continuing to fight too much to make an overly tight pose feel spacious.
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