For this lesson, it would be helpful to use visualisation. One image that springs to mind as a relevant analogy is that of coloring books. Remember the colouring books that you most probably had as a child. You would get pictures with sharply outlined contours and you would have to colour them in, staying within the black lines, filling the contours in as smoothly as possible.
Imagine this as you are doing the poses today. We will mainly be going through seated forward bends and focusing on the actions in our legs. Try to imagine that the energy and tension in the legs are expressed as a solid colour. Your goal is not to overstep the line to the point where you start forcing yourself to jam yourself into the pose and thus add unnecessary tension to your muscles. You should instead try to spread the energy evenly throughout your leg muscles, like you would when filling in the contours in a colouring book.
Keeping this image in mind, after completing a brief seated meditation, we will go through some warm-up poses: Adho Mukha Svanasana to the wall and Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana as well as some heating inversions. Then, we will move on to the main section of the class with the forward bends in a seated position. We will then do a few restorative poses before finishing off with our final relaxation in Savasana.
Video stills from this sequence
