September 12, 2016, updated a little on November 6, 2025
“Three Things You’re Doing that are Holding You Back in your Yoga Practice.” -approximate headline for an article on FB that Nikki, my wife, read to me a couple weeks ago
“What would progress look like in this pose?” -a student a couple of weeks ago asked in class about the current Pose of the Year – the “Twisted Hitchhiker” (a student suggested that name for it)
(Those are the inspiration for this writing.)
When Nikki read that above quote to me, I answered, “Not doing yoga, and what are the other two?” in all seriousness and partly in jest. Truly, not doing yoga is probably the best way to not progress in yoga. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Beyond that, there’s probably a number of things that we could argue are stymying further progress, though next on my list would probably be “not doing it ‘enough’,” perhaps an obvious next choice.
Isn’t that true of anything? For example, long ago, before I made the terrifying leap to “full time” yoga teaching, I had to come to the—obvious—realization that what was holding me back from doing it was simply not doing it, meaning that to do it, I just needed to DO IT! (So yes, Nike was onto something with “their” slogan.) After seeing that fact, I could more easily make the jump. I’m sure each one of us has some personal example of that in our own lives.
(If you find that you are needing to make the leap—again?—to more regular yoga practice, I had previously written around this issue and you can [re-?] read that here.)
Then that same week, while in the Twisted Hitchhiker pose, one long-time and often very regular student asked that great question, “What would progress look like in this pose?” Even if you don’t know the pose, the answer may apply in other poses as well.
If you don’t know that pose yet, it may be because it’s one of many that “I” “made up” and that show up in classes regularly. In 2016, it was the pose of the year, and the year after that, it was the pose of the two years. Because only a couple people had gotten it down, then it was the pose of the half-decade. The final year when all was looking well for everyone finally getting it by the end of the year, Covid happened! Even though I still guided regularly during those many months of online-only classes, when people came back in person, it was as if they had never done it, and we were back at square one. Now I refer to it as the pose of the decade or the pose of the half decade for the many who started taking yoga with me post-Covid.
It’s a challenging pose to do, even with the very simple instructions, so if you want, you can come to class and ask for it, and I’ll help. It’s an on-the-back twist focusing on the arm/shoulder that you are turning away from. You attempt to 1. strongly externally rotate the arm with the elbow bent toward the hip, while 2. strongly shrugging the shoulder blade down the back, and eventually adding 3. reaching the elbow out and away in the direction it is pointing.
The first part of my answer to her question is that physically, it may look very much the same as where a person starts in it. For that pose especially, from an outside perspective, progress may not really look like anything—or at least nothing dramatic or easily noticeable as in some other poses. However, inside one’s body, the experience will be very different from what it was at the beginning! (There are parallels with this process in life in the world, too.)
The full answer to this question lies in what I wrote previously about The Essence of Physical Yoga Summarized. There an answer is in a more general form applicable to all of of the physical practice. In the first stage of the twisted hitchhiker pose specifically (#1. above), we try to tell the body to do what we want it to do, yet it doesn’t cooperate, so we think that “nothing’s happening” or “I don’t have that muscle,” comments that I heard from many students throughout the first year of guiding it. But with repeated practice, the muscles will first come into our awareness, then into our conscious control. After that they will continue to get stronger and more functional, eventually to the point where we notice them in other poses and possibly even other times in our daily life. All of this occurs, even though in the first part of the pose, there will be little if any physical movement in the direction we are aiming.
In the second movement (#2. above) of the pose, the initial thought and experience may be the same as with the first, but there actually can and most likely will be tangible physical movement in the direction of the effort, though the movement of the scapula (shoulder blade) may only be 1/2” – 3/4”—a small amount from the outside but a very significant amount in one’s bodily experience. The subsequent increased conscious connection and strengthening also will occur.
The implications and possibilities of moving from no awareness to more full awareness and then to actual CHOICE should be obvious. Consider that same possible journey not just in a yoga pose, but also in our own life and in the life of society and of the World. Certainly there will always be resistance to this movement, whether internally through our “unconscious projects”—borrowing Steve Cope’s idea from the reading last week—or from those parts of ourself or society that have profited from the lack of awareness and choice. But the growth can still happen, if we continue to show up and work in that direction! (Hence the Just Do It part at the beginning.)
The effects and probable result of the third movement of the pose (#3. above), I’ve been describing as ending the painfully codependent relationship of the shoulder blade with the neck in which the shoulder blade “thinks” and acts like it is one with the neck. Progress in that final phase of the pose will involve movement of the shoulder blade away from the spine possibly as much as a couple of inches, depending on the size of one’s shoulder blades. This final part I suggest beginning to put in only once the first two parts of the pose can be done fairly strongly and confidently.
This pose is a totally unnatural set of movements largely centered around learning to work things together that never work together. Surprisingly, in the end, it will feel like this is exactly how a shoulder wants to move to feel happy. If we can go through this process in our own body, then maybe there’s hope for our political system. We might even be surprised by how great it can be when seemingly antagonistic parts know each other and work together. Now wouldn’t that be a great way to see progress in the pose!