Utkatasana: Awaken Your Inner Fire

Have you ever seen the famous paintings of ancient Indian yogis sitting in chairs meditating? Me neither. Over the millennia, the vast majority of sadhus who committed themselves to the yogic life owned little more than the minimal clothing they wore, along with a bowl and utensils for collecting their daily alms of rice. Most likely never saw a chair, let alone sat on one.

All this is to say that the Sanskrit name for this pose, Utkatasana, has absolutely nothing to do with its most widely used English name:  Chair Pose. Utkatasana’s root word, utkata, actually means “wild,” “fierce,” “frightening,” “furious,” or “intense,”—words that, for me at least, do not conjure up the image of someone lounging in an easy chair, or even sitting in an office chair.

Utkatasana is one of yoga’s heating, strengthening, and stabilizing poses. It is fierce, furious, and intense during its practice and in its effects, generating upward-radiating waves of heat and energy in some practitioners. Utkatasana is best practiced in the morning or early afternoon, as it can be stimulating enough to interfere with sleep when practiced too late in the day.

Practicing Utkatasana strengthens your thighs, hip flexors, calves, ankles, and back muscles; stimulates your abdominal organs, heart, and diaphragm; stretches your shoulders and chest; and can help build arches in flat feet. It is one of the most productive poses for preparing your legs and teaching you how to lower your center of gravity for stability in downhill skiing. Practicing Utkatasana can also keep you well above the fray when you have no alternative but to use a porta-potty.

How to Practice Utkatasana (Chair Pose)

1. To practice Utkatasana, stand with your feet hip-width apart on a nonskid mat. Tune into the bottoms of your feet. Locate the four corners of your feet:  the inner and outer balls of your feet and the inner and outer heels. How is your weight distributed among the corners? Take a minute or so to explore the relationships among these areas. Find a way of standing so your weight feels equally balanced among the four corners.
2. Extend your arms up alongside your ears, taking care to lift your back and front rib cages. When many of us raise our arms overhead, we tend to raise our front ribs and let our back ribs collapse downward, compressing the lower back.
3. Lift your back ribs, lower your pelvic rim, and ground your heels as you raise your arms to elongate your lower back.
4. Bend your knees and lower your pelvis as if you’re about to sit down. Feed the weight of your pelvis into your legs. Now, check the four corners of your feet again. In Utkatasana, our weight tends to pull forward onto the balls of our feet. Actively root your heels to balance your weight and activate your hamstrings and gluteal muscles.
5. Without tightening your abdominal muscles, keeping them free and mobile to receive your inhalations, draw the lower abdominal muscles gently upward—millimeters, not inches. Allow your torso to slant forward so that you can keep your natural spinal curves intact.
6. Lengthen the back of your neck so that your head and neck follow the natural trajectory of the rest of your spine.
7. As you feed your pelvis into your legs and feet, allow your torso to rise from the waist up. This action explores the dynamic relationship between grounding (lower body) and rebounding (upper body). Take five to ten deep breaths.
8. Return to standing. Take a moment to feel the effects of Utkatasana. Repeat one or more times, taking time to feel what happened after each repetition.

March is named after the sizzling, crimson planet Mars. In all its ferocity, Utkatasana (Chair Pose) perfectly expresses the intensity of the month. Utkatasana stirs things up. It awakens our inner fire. Despite its commonly cited English misnomer, Utkatasana is not about sitting on our laurels. Think of it as a dynamic launching pad for the spring and summer months.