I’ve noticed in both my personal practice and my teaching lately that I have shying away from chair pose (utkatasana). This is a very common pose and part of the surya B sequence so I encounter it in every class I take and teach. Utkatasana is sometimes referred to as “victory pose.” Lately, this pose has not been feeling very victorious.
I first noticed my aversion to chair pose this summer. In my years of practice I had never disliked this pose and I used to teach it frequently. I create my classes from my practice and I did a lot of cycling this summer. I began to incorporate more front body stretches and a lot of quad openers (which I believe to be lacking in most classes). Chair pose is a quad strengthener and I began to reduce how often I included it in my classes.
In class a few weeks ago, the instructor had us sit back in chair pose. A very common instruction, but as I sat there in my chair pose I found myself growing irritated. She then instructed us to fold forward and the irritation dissipated. Round 2 of surya B: same problem. Each time she had us come to chair pose, I found myself coming into it with progressively straighter legs; my level of irritation and the angle between my thighs and calves seemed to be inversely related. I kept at this experiment for the next week or two, playing with how irritated I was compared to how deep my squat was. I finally decided that if I didn’t want to be irritated I should just avoid the pose (avoiding the problem rather than solving it). I began only teaching one chair pose in each of my classes and practicing it with such minimal flexion that my legs probably appeared to be fully extended.
I’m not sure why I decided that this pose was going to irritate me and I’m not sure that it matters. I believe that I need to re-incorporate it into my practice and simply allow these feelings of irritation. I need to sit with my irritation and acknowledge that some poses just don’t feel right sometimes. What I need to remember is that avoidance is not a good long term coping mechanism. I have done this with other poses before, most notably pigeon pose. I hated pigeon and avoided it at all costs. I still tend to shy away from teaching pigeon but I have come to terms with it and will practice it in class without cursing out my teacher too much.
My practice will always present challenges. Today my challenges are manifesting themselves in chair pose. These challenges will not go away, but my ability to handle them is in my control. Just as I worked through my frustrations with pigeon pose, only to have them reappear in my chair pose, my frustrations will appear again someplace else once I am comfortable with chair pose again. Dealing with these frustrations is where my practice really begins.
