 How I Hated Triangle Pose
Yoga Journal, March/April 1999
I’d had about enough of triangle pose. I rarely did it at home. And when I mustered up the discipline to teach it I had trouble climbing out of my half-hearted box: Turn your leg 90 degrees, watch your kneecaps, reach your arm.... blah, blah, blah. No doubt about it: from any angle, triangle was just plain boring.
In a fit of desperation one morning I decided to try direct confrontation. I unrolled my yoga mat, lit a candle and vowed to stare this pose in the face for an hour. We’re going to sit here together, I thought, until we can find something to love about each other.
In hopeless situations, my mother once suggested, play a little game: ask yourself if you can learn at least one interesting morsel about the world. I took her advice and found my way into triangle. Aha, I thought, I’m gonna do every triangle variation in the book, every one I’ve ever learned. Out came blocks, straps, walls, ledges, the whole parade. Arms out, arms up, arms over, arms revolved.
I tried it the Vanda Scaravelli way, with my legs practically in tadasana. I tried it ala Iyengar, jumping my feet three-and-a-half-to-four-feet apart. I heard Manouso Manos shout, "Wider, wider, your legs are so long!" and came full circle back to Larry Schultz: "What are you trying to do, the splits?" That’s when it finally dawned on me, after years of triangles, that maybe there’s no right stance after all. Maybe every day "right" feels a little different. Maybe it just depends on what we’re looking for. The rules began to crack. A little angularity melted from my pose.
As I began to play with all these subtle shifts inside, I noticed the obvious: Each variation did feel different, changing the sensations in my hips, my spine, my belly. No one was there to tell me how or why or what to do next, so I was forced to pay attention. What is this pose doing for me? Why would anyone want to do trikonasana with one leg on a block against the wall? I had to climb inside to figure it out.
I exhausted all my known triangle variations and then, without even noticing slipped into a new world, one where my triangles took their own form. Where am I stuck, I asked? How effortless, how full, how vibrant can I grow? As I climbed out of the formal, well-baked asana, my playfulness bloomed. The pose began to breathe and shift and move. Triangle and I smiled at each other.
I began to understand where all these crazy ways of playing in poses came from. Ancient yogis weren’t born with wooden blocks at their sides, or with straps or balls or bolsters. The were never handed a list of 108 triangle variations or maybe even poses at all. They climbed inside their skin, played around in forms we now call asanas and watched what happened.
These yogis took life as their playground and found a way to make use of what they had in their explorations, in their attempts to open themselves to the Big Soul of the world. All the variations we learn in classes come from somewhere, either from our teachers’ creativity or from their teachers. There’s no reason we can’t do it ourselves, when we grow sensitive and true enough to follow our inner yearnings.
Isn’t this what yoga is all about after all -- exploring the movement and feelings and energy inside so we can live more vibrantly and truly? It’s not just doing poses, putting ourselves through the paces, but climbing back into them and exploring inside of them, playing with them. It’s about watching how our inner life shifts with the movement, the body, the breath. Sometimes other people’s rules just get in the way.
With this realization, a funny thing happened. Triangle pose disappeared. I disappeared. Everything fell away ... the rules, the form, the effort. All that was left was movement, energy spiraling in and through and around the playground of my body. No grand design, no big motive or fireworks or epiphanies, just lots of space, lots of freedom. Play. Energy rolling and rippling and laughing through me. Just like a kid in a playground, jumping and swinging and dangling and exploring.
This discovery brought to life a word I first heard a few weeks ago: lila. In Sanskrit it means divine play. Some philosophers say that’s really all there is -- this endlessly shifting, shimmering play of energy. It expresses itself in the world through colors, shapes, people, nature. The forms we take as so solid -- our homes, careers, families -- may be just the shifting stage for this lila, the canvas across which its colors are strewn. I like that image a lot. Maybe life is just a verb and not a noun after all.
Perhaps yoga at its heart is meant to be lila, too. The poses are just playgrounds -- slides, merry-go-rounds, jungle-gyms -- that help us give form to the free flow of life. They help us open all the spaces inside so the illuminating, generous, revitalizing life can make its way into all our nooks and crannies. So that when we run home from the playground our cheeks are rosy, our hair is tousled, our belly is tingling and we shine everywhere.
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