Understanding Urdhva Dhanurasana

In this drawing, I am expressing another one of my yoga teacher’s interpretations of this throat chakra opening yoga pose.  Urdhva Dhanurasana opens up the throat chakra and blasts open the heart chakra which you can feel if you come fully into this pose.  This pose serves as a link, or bridge between the rational, masculine understanding of the world, and the emotional, feminine understanding of the world.  It is not healthy psychologically to rely on one’s feelings alone and to experience the world entirely through one’s heart.  This leads to much heartache and pain. Nor is it healthy to experience the world thinking entirely with the brain, a rational instrument that often gives faulty readings and gets in the way of our true experience of life.  Instead, we must learn how to straddle these two realms of understanding and maintain a balance between them.