If you’ve ever heard your yoga teacher refer to your center, you might be wondering exactly what they mean. In the world of yoga, they could be referring to a number of different things depending on the context they are creating in the delivery of your yoga class. You might find they mean your core, or the physical center of your body. You might find they’re referring to the act of centering, or trying to achieve a calm state of mind. They could even mean your spiritual center, where you understand who you are, your belief system, and what you’re up to in the world. When connected to your center through spirit, you’re less likely to sway off course—you’re centered.
Many of these approaches focus on the mind and use concept as a tether to steady the mind or provoke further understanding of one’s self. As with any concept, it doesn’t become reality until we understand it through real life experience. Luckily, we have the physical asana practice that provides access to this understanding any time we need it off of our mat. That is what we will focus on here.
The many words for center
When practicing yoga, you’ll hear a number of words to connect you to your physical body, specifically your center. Below are a list of phrases that often address the same goal—to engage the deeper muscles of the torso.
- Connect to your center
- Engage your core
- Hug your midline
- Pull your belly in and up
- Uddiyana Bandha
- Draw the sides of your waste in
- Descend your tailbone
- Create a corset around your abdomen
There are many more, some very creative, but these are some of the most common.
Understanding your center line
To understand the importance of the center line of your body, we must first visualize our physical structure.
Most of our big moving muscles are connected to big moving bones. Consider your legs for instance. Your quadriceps and hamstrings are connected to your upper leg bone (the femur) and to the pelvis. There is a lot of bone underneath of the quadriceps and hamstrings to provide structure and support for the muscles. The same idea applies to the upper region of the body where your chest, arm, and back muscles are all supported by a significant amount of bone that provides structure for the muscles.
Now consider your torso, specifically the space below your rib cage and above your pelvis. What bone lies there? About 5-7 stacked vertebrae in the low back. That’s it! The rest is muscle and guts. So it’s important for us to strengthen and tone the muscles we have to promote structural support here in the center of your core and also to support the connection of the upper body to the lower body.
Now the center line.
The center line is an imaginary line that runs the entire bottom-to-top axis of the body. The center line or midline, divides the body into right and left halves.
To picture it, imagine a person standing upright, with their feet equally standing underneath their hips. The center line begins at a point on the floor between the heels and goes straight up until it meets the floor of the pelvis, runs in front of the spine, through the center of the neck, and out the crown of your head.
It’s natural to have a dominant right or left side and it’s natural to have asymmetry in the body. In fact, we’re asymmetrically designed—for example, our heart occupies one side of our body while our appendix occupies another. We’re also habitually designed—if you are a baseball pitcher, your throwing arm will be more developed than your non-throwing arm. Or if you lean on one hip frequently, it’s bound to be less stable than the other hip. Lastly, we may be traumatically designed—an injury such as a broken bone or torn ligament will affect the strength and stability through the whole body. Regardless of your asymmetries, hugging to our center line is beneficial in three ways.
- It integrates the whole body, allowing for all systems to work together optimally
- It can move the body toward balance and prevent aches and pains due to compensation
- It can alleviate aches and pains resulting from compensation
When you become aware of your center line and hug into it, your body naturally aligns without needing to know anything about anatomy. It’s the most simple and effective concept I’ve learned to date in my personal yoga practice and is the premise for many of my teachings.
Apply it in every yoga asana
Hugging to your center line is easy to do in every yoga asana and is just as it sounds—you contract your muscles toward the center line of your body. (okay, it’s not an actual hug, but it can feel like one!) This may seem counterintuitive to those that believe yoga is all about stretching, which is often described as stretching out. But I can assure you, hugging-in is the foundation for safe and effective stretching. But first, you need to know how to do it.
Hug your center line in Mountain Pose
Legs
- Stand in a Tadasana position and place a yoga block between your inner thighs.
- Keep your knees soft with a slight bend, and lift the front of your pelvis until you feel your low belly engage.
- Hug your inner thighs equally into the yoga block with about 20% of your full effort
- Maintain softness in your knees and lift in your belly. Take 10 full deep breaths.
- Relax and remove the block.
- Repeat without the block, but imagine it is still there. Recreate the action of hugging-in to the imaginary center line between your left and right legs.
Center
- Stand in Tadasana with your knees soft with a slight bend
- Place one hand on your low belly, just below your belly button
- Find the mirror point on your low back, and place your opposite hand there
- Press your hands towards one another and try to pull the belly muscles away from the front hand and towards the back hand. This is best paired with an exhale.
- Repeat 5-10 times
- Then repeat again without the use of your hands
Arms
- Stand in Tadasana with your knees soft.
- Place a block with the widest width between your palms with your fingertips pointing away from you and ensuring the base of your palms are on the yoga block.
- Press your palms equally into the block with about 20% effort. You should feel both arms immediately tone, including the muscles within the shoulder girdle.
- Begin to slowly lift your arms while continuing to press your palms into the block
- Hold overhead for about 5-10 breaths
- Relax
- Repeat without the yoga block and recreate the same sensations along the center line of the upper body
The above principles can be applied in all yoga asana. Here are two approaches you can try. See which one works best for you!
- Take the shape of the pose and then apply all the integration principles listed above (without the block).
- As you are moving into the pose, see what it feels like to integrate (or hug-in to the center) while you take on the shape.
Regardless of the approach you choose when encouraged to find your center, as a result of hugging into your center line, you’ll begin to feel stronger and more stable in your joints and in your core. Stable joints are the cornerstone for healthy flexibility and movement. Furthermore, consider that in most of our days, we hold a lot of our attention and energy in our limbs to get things done. By hugging into the center line, you bring the energy and attention out of the limbs and back into the core of the body, which is known to create renewed energy and vitality.
When you experience the physical center of your body, you gain access to a deeper sense of understanding of your center as an emotional or spiritual concept. With your body in balance, you can begin to explore what it means to practice centering emotionally, or achieving a calm state of mind and extending the time between stimulus and your response. You can also begin to explore your spiritual center and discover who you are at your core. (deep stuff, I know). Whether or not you take it deeper, hugging into the physical center line can have a massive impact on your well-being. So give yourself a hug and enjoy!
Justina
