Butterfly Pose Wellness For Tight Hips Opener

Butterfly Pose is a much needed pose for tight inner hips and hip opening. This article is about how to get the most out of the pose and good exercises you can do daily to help open your hips when they don’t want to or you want to keep them flexible. 🧘🏻‍♀️

Which btw, our bodies are natural wonders and so is the total eclipse that gave solar chills and happy tears this week, that I’m still reeling over and  you can too days later.

…Even if you’re not spiritual, the palpitable feeling can be deeper than even seeing the phenomenon. And if you want the lasting effects, you can make and enjoy a cake that celebrates the moon and eclipse. 🌘 Cake recipe and steps below.

But first things first: when you have tight hips, you know it immediately when you move around. And I didn’t know about this because I didn’t feel it until one day.

And like the Butterfly name implies, the pose looks like opened butterfly wings. Or if you speak in chef language like I often do, you know what butterflying means on a plate. Butterfly pose looks also like an open lotus flower. 🪷

Opening your hips this way is a metaphor for opening yourself up and while you’re sitting still in patience and peace.

In life, butterflies wait before they can flutter about. It’s one of the  fascinating creatures out there in nature I think and a symbol of transformation. They are fragile like we are. 🦋

Similarly, we start out as caterpillars in life crawling along and hopefully like most, make it to adulthood. Then we transform into our adult butterfly bodies.

As sweet reward, we get tastes of honey along our journey and feed back honey nectar to our community. We contribute to the environment we’re in where we spend time. And this is a metaphor for making our individual impact in the world that’s one of our highest callings.

Butterflies are unique in colors and design patterns like the Peacock Butterfly commonly found in Europe or Asia, or a Monarch Butterfly that I see often in North America.

They are something we can globally appreciate like the sun, the moon, and the solar eclipse.

Butterfly Pose When Hips are Tight

If your hips are tight, to open your Butterfly pose, do it gradually. Don’t force it along.

Use metaphors of appreciating time and never giving up persistence to help you on this journey.

You can use a block or a towel to raise your thigh until your hip loosens up (one side is usually tighter) and you can get to your ideal Butterfly pose.

Maybe someday your knees and top half of your leg touch the mat, or they don’t. Some people are naturally more flexible in those areas.

…But a good goal would be to not feel any tension or pain in the hip muscle, inner hip, or groin areas. Both men and women seem to have this common issue.

If you sit a lot this could be a reasonable cause. And if it shows up one day, it could be a new habit position you were sitting in that simply needs to be adjusted so you can restore.

In the meanwhile, you can complement Butterfly Pose with Triangle Pose and Pigeon Pose that are other yoga poses that will help open up in slightly different angles.

Also try the Seated Spinal Twist.

As usual in yoga, one side is usually tighter than the other for different poses, so workout a little longer for the side that needs more TLC.

Balance and alignment comes from asymmetrical efforts. So if for balance ⚖️, this means intention or laser focus on the side or area that needs attention.

Another yoga pose that can really help is a 5 star yoga pose on the mat with your legs straddled open to each side, and arms under and through your legs.

If you’re not familiar with the more common star pose, your head arms and legs make up the 5 points.

Doing this stretch faced down on the mat will also give you a good stretch through your legs and arms.

And combining physical therapy type exercise that you can do at home will help. These often use repetition vs. weights. And repeated repetitions.

One of the best exercises I found is the side hip abductor exercise that you can do on your mat. You turn to one side and bend your knees and then lift the top leg up and down for 10 repetitions or more at a time.

This helps the inner hip to open. And should feel good. It’s also a killer butt toning exercise!

A second exercise is: sit on the side of a regular height bed or a chair that allows a hip-leg to anchor straight down on the floor either straight up perpendicular or slightly shifted to the back while the other hip-leg (the tight one) is on the bed or chair.

Take the tight hip-leg (on the bed) and bend, so that you can see the bottom of your foot. You should feel a light stretch (that does not hurt) in the tight hip area that’s slightly different than on a mat.

If there’s any pain, you should stop as you may have injured the area somehow. Remember, we’re fragile like butterflies.

And if you don’t feel anything in your hips, that’s something to be grateful for.. and now you’re more aware of what to do and what people (aka older people) are talking about when they say they have tight hips… Not feeling your hips is something else to celebrate. 🎉

Now, this is the chocolate total eclipse cake (of the heart) recipe that you can make to embrace life and wonder.

I could’ve made this a vanilla cake 🌕, but chocolate is more decadent and mysterious like the moon. 🌚

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