The Bridge in Yoga: How to Experience Urdhva Dhanurasana |

You know the bridge in yoga? I have been gradually over the past year and a half, naturally developing a clearer understanding of managing my mind and body by developing, practicing and studying Urdha Dhanurasana, which has always been a very challenging pose for me.

I spent many years with severe abdominal diastasis (which ruptured my rectus abdominis from the pubis to the sternum), without being able to develop this asana in much deeper layers.

Regarding the power of bridge in yoga – of bringing out the deepest material of the mind – fits perfectly with a larger theme that I have been witnessing and managing since my father’s passing.

With countless themes that I already expected to live due to the inventory process, I realize the richness of challenges of thematic windows that parade lately on my “to do list” shelves.

Management of companies of a different business nature, management of a new family dynamic as we are a business family, management of a new personal routine to overcome the chronological time factor, management of unexpected trips and intellectual challenges, which require a new global way of rationalizing and live the emotions.

Stability at all levels

Fortunately, I am able to see, amidst the apparent external turmoil, all the gift and gains in general terms of maturity that have been coming to me with the practice that is naturally consolidating itself in a dedicated greater attention to Urdhva Dhanurasana.

I observe that the “bridge” asana locks, stabilizes and binds very differently under all levels in all bodies. I could exemplify some here.

How much my limbs, arms and legs unite in greater rhythm and harmony to give my spine a more cohesive and balanced arch. My hands and feet, legs and forearms, thighs and arms tend to coordinate better to make room in the inner spine.

There are days more favorable than others, when the asana really “shuts up” inside my body, watering the mind for more clarity and greater silence.

I observed, with this process, how, through rescues in mourning, it was possible to make a beautiful bridge with the lineage of my Japanese ancestors, whose patterns, whose stories and lives I revisited on a large scale of resignification.

I observed how much better it has been possible for me to “audit” the other (whether that other is a person, a group, a thought), removing many pre-existing layers of projections and false concepts.

The power of a more intimate inner bridge

I noticed how this union of forces of all the vertebrae of my spine, supposedly exposed in Urdha Dhanurasana, is teaching me to go inwards in a more sensitive, delicate, respectful and rhythmic way.

How much the quality of the arch, of the bridge, is genuinely connected to something greater within my Being and my spirit.

How much this most intimate internal bridge has the power to bring me new jewels to be contemplated in the countless hours of the day when, added to the seasoning of the posture, they confer lightness, belonging and a genuine state of introspection.

They free me from the cocoon of self-absorption, promoting a calm alliance with the most varied alien arcs that I come across at every moment.

In summary: I feel that the approach to Urdhva Dhanurasana not only strengthens the nerves, but also leads the practitioner to dedicate himself deeply to his most intimate processes and to put in check the dynamics and emotional triggers caused by deep-rooted, frozen patterns and, therefore, times, traumatized within our particular wheel of samsara.