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 to open your spirit and welcome in a new season.
Plus, good exercises you can do daily to help open your hips when they don’t want to fully (or you simply 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 healthy chocolate cake that celebrates the moon and eclipse. 🌘
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 in new seasons.
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 As a Metaphor For Opening Up
Phyiscally, Butterfly pose helps to open in tight hips. You’re a lotus flower ready to blossom and sometimes your mind-body can get stuck. 🪷
Giving it time to open up and bloom when ready is part of patience in Life.
In your Butterfly pose, if it’s not easy, do it gradually. Don’t force it along. Pain is never good in yoga. Unlike physical sports and fitness, that says, “no pain, no gain.” Yoga is completely opposite: pain means no gain.
Because you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing to your body. Pain is a warning signal from your body.
In yoga, it’s good to challenge the body with stretching further and higher, but only when it’s in tip-top shape.
And with all the muscles, tendons, joints, and crevices in our bodies, sometimes there are places that need broken mending.
So we want to add stress to those parts. We want to work on other parts while our weak spots heal. And with Butterfly pose, you know whether or not you have a weak inner hip injury.
If you’re feeling tentative, then be gentle.
One thing I like to do is raise myself off the mat.
You can use a block or a towel to raise your thigh above the mat until your hip loosens up (one side is usually tighter) and you can get to your ideal Butterfly pose.
So you can still do a modified version of the pose without stress.
And then when ready, maybe someday your knees and top half of your leg touch down on the mat, or they don’t. Either is great.
For beginners, it doesn’t matter how cool it looks. All that matters is you feel good. Maybe that’s why my Vata loves yoga for the comfort reasons. 😊
You’ll find what you’re comfortable with and then you’ll have a baseline for what your body can do in those areas, and what the limitations are.
The limitations are there to help you lean in on your unique body and SELF. Create goals that are good for your body. 🎯
In Butterfly pose, 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. 🦋 We’re also resilient.
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. 🎉