How to Use a Wall in Yoga for More Stability and Better Alignment

Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article about wall yoga first appeared in the May-June 1981 issue of Yoga Journal.

Walls are a wonderful yoga prop because they are so commonplace. Of course, there are a few drawbacks to using walls for yoga practice, but they’re not that serious. For one thing, footprints will eventually appear on your walls five feet above the floor. (These may be difficult to explain to guests or the landlord.) Although I have given up on keeping my own walls clean, I do make a point of washing my feet before practicing in other people’s homes. Not everyone views dirty foot marks marching up their walls as an admirable sign of dedication.

How to Use a Wall in Yoga

A wall can be used as a prop for the practice of warm-ups as well as standing poses, twists, and inversions.

Headstand

Students who are beginning the practice of Headstands will generally have difficulty in maintaining their balance.

Practicing these poses while supported by a wall, as shown in Figure 1, prevents tumbling backwards. The wall should not become a crutch. When confidence increases, the fear of falling needs to be conquered and practice in the center of the room mastered.

But even after the student can balance, I feel that occasionally working at the wall still has benefits. I like to walk my heels a few inches further up the wall after I have come into the pose. This helps to create extension of the spine and reminds me how the pose should feel. Too often we think of Headstand as a pose in which all the body’s weight comes crushing down on the head.

Actually, the pose can be one that stretches the body up towards the heavens: the shoulder lifting away from the ears, the pelvis away from the ribs, and the legs ascending out of the torso. When done in this way, Headstand is safer for the neck and more inspiring to the psyche.

Shoulderstand

Yoga students who have difficulty with Shoulderstand may be helped by using a wall as shown in Figure 2.

The model lay on the ground first, then pivoted her legs up the wall. Pressing the soles of her feet into the wall, she then rolled her spine off the ground and brought her hands onto her back until she came into this partial pose. (Remember to bring the hands onto the back, not the waist.) A few of the advantages to working in this way are that the wall lends stability so that it is easier to move the elbows closer together, which helps straighten and extend the spine. Also, the feet pressing into the wall gives the student leverage from which to straighten a rounded back and move the chest toward the chin.

Twists

Twists are difficult poses. When we do a revolved standing pose, we may lose our balance and fall. When we do a seated twist, our brains may be sending messages to our spines that say “Stretch and rotate!” but the spine seems to have a mind of its own. In both cases, the wall can be a friend in need. Parivrtta Trikonasana may be practiced with either the chest (Figure 3) or the back (Figure 4) against a wall.

Working in this way, both balance and alignment are improved. To create maximal twist in the spine, the model in Figure 3 is concentrating on bringing the underside of the torso (left side of the chest in that photograph) to the wall. In figure 4, she is working to bring the upper (again, left) shoulder into contact with the wall. The effects of these two ways of working differ slightly from each other, but both are beneficial.

In seated twists, the hands are pressed into the wall to give the student leverage; by twisting away from a fixed point the student is not tempted to rotate the spine, in mid-air. The model demonstrates the practice of Marichyasana I in Figure 5. She is pressing harder with her right hand to help herself twist the torso away towards the left. This way of working is particularly helpful for women who have recently given birth and are introducing the practice of twists into a program for getting back into shape.

Seated Poses

Walls can provide a variety of other useful supports for the practice of seated poses as well. In poses where it is important but difficult to keep the back straight and perpendicular to the floor (e.g. Dandasana and Baddha Konasana), try sitting with the back against the wall. See Figure 6, Baddha Konasana. Poses may also be done lying down on the floor with legs up the wall, which will keep the back from rounding. Figure 7 gives an example of this way of working. A nice stretch is given to adductors (muscles of the inner thighs) in a fairly restful position.

This exercise could even be done outside the context of the day’s yoga practice, with the student reading a book while her muscles stretch out!

Navasana (discussed in this month’s Asana” column) is a difficult pose for hose with weak abdominals. Figure 8 demonstrates how beginners can bring their feet onto the wall, to lessen the stress on this area and improve stability.

In seated forward bends, many students have a tendency to let their feet roll (big toes closer to the knees; little toes farther away) as shown in Figure 9. If these poses (Dandasana, Janu Sirsasana, Paschimottanasana, etc.) are done with the soles of the feet pressing firmly into a wall, as shown in Figure 10, the action of the pose improves. If it seems like a minor point to you, consider the fact that such movements of the feet are largely controlled by the muscles of the legs.

The positioning of the legs in turn is elated to the degree of flexibility in and around the hip joint. You can see how a minor imbalance in the alignment of the feet implies that many other muscles clear up to the hip joint may be working unevenly as well. By correcting the one problem, the yoga student begins to correct others as well. If you still find this an esoteric idea, try doing forward bends with the feet in position 9, then position 10, and let your own body give you feedback on the difference. The practice of yoga gives us the opportunity to learn how the human body works from the inside, rather than from studying anatomy books. Mr. Iyengar says that, “To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches.”

(The author wishes to acknowledge B. K. S. Iyengar, whose work underlies many of the ideas presented in this article. And to thank her model, Pamela Wayne).