Improving Yoga Student Safety: Modified Pigeon Pose

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed

Many Yoga teachers often strive to balance offering their students a challenging and creative series of Yoga postures and breathing exercises, while still maintaining a high degree of student safety in their classes. For some Yoga teachers, this quandary may prove to be quite difficult. This balance can be especially challenging to establish if you are a new teacher. However, with the graceful and strategic use of modified Yoga poses and supportive props, you will be able to lead your students through a challenging series of asanas and pranayama exercises, without risking their safety. 

The artful use of modified Yoga poses and props, such as chairs, bolsters, blankets, and straps, can immeasurably increase the variety of Yoga postures that you can offer to your students during class. The intelligent use of props and modified postures develops with time and teaching experience. Using props and suggesting appropriate modified postures will support your ability as a teacher to lead your students through a comprehensive, challenging and exhilarating practice of Yoga postures, without sacrificing your students’ safety or well-being. 

This is particularly important when you are teaching a multi-level class with intermediate and beginning students all mixed together. In many Yoga studios, health clubs and community centers, the students who are attending Yoga classes are often at various levels of aptitude and physical fitness. In order to keep the more advanced students challenged and the beginning students “up to speed” with your class, while not risking injury, spotting students who would benefit from modifying a pose or two and using strategically placed props, is quintessential part of the art of teaching Yoga well.  

* Modified Pigeon Pose or Eka Pada Rajakapotasana

Pigeon Pose is a wonderful Yoga posture for deeply opening the hips and alleviating sciatic pain and lower back stiffness. This hip-opening posture also improves the overall alignment of the spine and helps to release feeling of anxiety, trauma and stress that is so often energetically lodged in the hip area. Pigeon Pose is quite simple to modify, if you are teaching some students who are quite tight throughout the hips, groins and knees. By placing a blanket underneath the folded leg in Pigeon Pose, many students, who would otherwise find the pose to be too uncomfortable to perform, will be able to benefit from the practice of Pigeon Pose with a minimal amount of discomfort and stress to the knee joint.  

For those Yoga students who find that entering into Pigeon Pose without the support of a folded blanket or bolster is too intense or puts too much pressure on the knee, the use of props in Modified Pigeon Pose will help these students to practice the posture in a much safer fashion. Pigeon Pose is usually practiced after a series of Sun Salutations and standing asanas and prior to backbends, inversions and seated forward folds. Before leading your students through the practice of Modified Pigeon Pose, make sure that the students who wish to practice the modified version have a folded blanket or bolster nearby to place underneath the hip of their folded leg. 

When you are ready to lead your Yoga students through the practice of Modified Pigeon Pose, have them begin to flow through the beginning postures of the Sun Salutation until them come to Downward Facing Dog. From Downward Facing Dog, guide your students to place their right lower leg parallel to the front of their Yoga mat or as close to parallel as possible. For those students who need some extra support, have them place a bolster or folded blanket underneath their right hip, so that their hip bones are parallel to the front of the room and there is minimal pressure on the knee joint. Ask your students to hold Pigeon Pose for three to five breaths, and then remove the blanket or bolster if they are using one, and slowly move back into Downward Facing Dog. Repeat Modified Pigeon Pose on the left hand side when your students are ready. 

Virginia Iversen, M.Ed, has been practicing and studying the art of Yoga for over twenty years. She lives in Woodstock, New York, where she works as a writer and an academic support specialist. She is currently accepting Yoga and health-related writing orders and may be contacted at: enchantress108@gmail.com.