The historic Mountain Valley Water Visitor Center is the chosen place for Karen Watson Reeves to demonstrate the Fallen Flamingo Pose. Photo by Fred Padilla.
[Contributor’s note: 2025 is the year we celebrate 12 years as The Yoga Place, and this calendar year, the setting for each month’s pose will be a business in our town that has exhibited “stay power.”]
By Karen Watson Reeves
This pose is a kicker and way more difficult than it appears when looking at photos or videos of yoga greats demonstrating it. It is a relatively new posture in my repertoire of yoga poses, and I came across it while researching something different, fun, and challenging to teach to my classes.
This one fit the bill for me. It is basically Pyramid Pose that incorporates a balancing aspect. And when I type that, it sounds simple enough: move into Pyramid with the forward bend variation and bring the back foot off the mat toward the buttock.
For that to happen, several things have to occur. First, I spent several breaths in Pyramid Pose, allowing my hamstrings to stretch, along with the hips and spine; I practiced taking deeper, slower breaths and allowed my mind to focus on breathing.
Then I took my awareness and focus to imagining the pose, visualizing my back foot coming off the mat. The fingertips had to activate into the ground, and my abdominals had to engage. It took a lot of concentration to will that foot to lift without compromising the alignment of the front leg. It was so difficult to do that, and my upper body is definitely too far forward, and my upper back is too rounded as I self-critique.
But that is one of the biggest benefits and lessons of yoga. It is a practice! If we continue to do only the things that are easy and if we wait until we have a pose “perfect” (talking to myself as I post a photo that is far from how the pose “should” look), then there is little chance of growing and expanding—a lesson for off the mat as well as during the yoga practice.
Another huge benefit of yoga is how our bodies feel as we move in and out of poses. And I definitely feel the stretching of my hamstrings and the strengthening of my core as I try to do and teach Fallen Flamingo.
Most balancing poses are considered to be challenging, and this one will continue to be so as I work on it along with my students. But we sure had fun playing around with it, and in my opinion, fun is one of the biggest benefits of yoga!
{The Mountain Valley Spring Water Visitor Center was built in 1910 and is located in the city’s Historic District at 150 Central Avenue, open seven days a week.}
Karen Watson Reeves has called Hot Springs home since 2006. Owner of The Yoga Place, at 301 Whittington Avenue, she became a registered yoga/children’s yoga teacher in 2011. When not on the mat, Karen enjoys the beautiful outdoors of the National Park, especially from her bicycle. Please find more information about her studio and her schedule of classes at www.theyogaplacehs.com.
