- Two words: Subtle Body. If you ever doubted its existence before, have yourself a waterworks pigeon experience and BOOMSHAKALAKA! Thouest arteth noweth a Believer!
- Further expanding on #1, we store buried emotions, past hurts, and tough experiences in our cells, so deep within our physical bodies. The story of, “There I was, innocently taking pigeon (or often a similarly deep hip-opener) and all of a sudden, I found myself bawling!” is a common one. When you really get in there, what has been buried will be freed, like a powerful underground spring.
- This is one of the most common poses in which students injure themselves. It can be murder on the knees and you’re in for a serious tweak if you don’t go slowly and respect your limits.
- Think of all the bad dancers you know. These people are confused by their hips. They don’t ever have the opportunity to get IN them. To BE in the hips. Unless you dance like a mofo or you get a lot of acrobatic horizontal, ahem, hip action...you’re probably going to be caught off guard by the physically-not-so-subtle nuances of pigeon.
Deep hip-openers are good for us in a number of ways - the most potent being that these poses bring up the things we most want to hide from and ask us to face them. Pigeon asks us to work these hurty blockages out with gentleness, mindfulness, and intelligent pacing. You can do it. I believe in you. Working it out is a must if you want to FLOW.
Know that if you aren’t up for pigeon on any particular day, it’s okay to give yourself a break. You have the option of taking another gentler pose for the time being. Or...you can take the lightest pigeon possible and pretend you’re pigeon-poop-bombing your troubles. Take that! You won’t be the girl/guy crying during pigeon...you’ll be the loon who laughs kookily in the pose. I don’t know about you, but I’m 100% okay with that.
