Dvipada Pitham

Dvipada pitham, two foot support, is a pose that I really disliked for many years. I always had lower back pain after performing it. But I kept on in the blind belief that it must be good for me.

This isn't a posture that Diane teaches - she works with the full backbend urdhva dhanurasana (see an earlier posting for a clip of me working with Diane in this pose) - but since working with Diane what I have learned from other poses has helped my understanding of this pose.

The first big thing was the realisation that the movement of the spine is towards the head and that nothing is being pushed skywards. Previously I was pushing the hips and back up to come onto the shoulders. This realisation made it a lot easier on my back but it still wasn't entirely comfortable. Still, I came back to the pose from time to time, largely as a warm up before urdhva dhanurasana when I was practising in the morning.

Recently however the pose has been showing me a lot about how to use the shoulders. This has helped my shoulderstand immensely... and vice versa. In the pre-Diane years teachers would sometimes say to hold your heels while doing this position. I couldn't even touch my heels and figured this must be because either my arms were too short or because I couldn't get my heels close enough in or a bit of both. And I couldn't see what having hold of the heels did for the pose anyway.

What I have come to realise is that the variations of the postures help us to understand the postures more. Now that I use the shoulders to come up into this posture, the shoulders move towards the heels as the spine moves towards the head. This brings me on to the top of the shoulders. Coincidentally it sends the hands towards the heels making it possible to hold them if you so desired. And another interesting thing happens. The thighs become parallel to the floor. I always wondered how people did that!