Asana: Eka Pada Rajakapotasana

“Eka pada” = one-legged. “Raja” = king. “Kapotasana” = pigeon pose.

Here is the pose:

Now, there is a lot of confusion for newer students (in my view) about what exactly pigeon pose is. Near as I can tell, this is pigeon pose:

You can see for yourself how one-legged king pigeon pose is distinguished from this one. The gal above has slightly bad form in that her back foot is bent; it should be straight, one long line starting at the hip.  There is also this one, which I learned as king cobra pose, and which came up in an image search as king pigeon:

I believe that’s Patricia Walden modeling. This might look like it’s a sort of double pigeon pose, but because you’re using your back muscles to pull much more strongly than in one-legged king pigeon, and because there’s pushing action from your hands and there’s less of a balance requirement, I prefer to think of it as king cobra (regular cobra pose is here).  There is also this variation on one-legged king pigeon that is both harder and easier, with one leg in a lunge of sorts:

This is actually one of the most open and lovely modelings of this pose I’ve ever seen. The balance in this variation is much, much easier if you bend the front knee and ankle quite a lot more, so you’re sort of squatting over that front calf. Any way you slice it, this variation takes openness in the hips and in those long, strong thigh muscles that may just be impossible, so on-the-ground might be a good deal easier. Or not; depends on your body.

There is also kapotasana, which translates to “pigeon pose”:

I learned this as “little thunderbolt”, but it turns out that little thunderbolt (or laghu vajrasana) is an ever-so-slightly different pose than this: the hands are on the thighs instead. I am not actually sure if you get into these two poses differently, but I don’t think so. You can see that this is the upside-down version of king cobra above, so I suppose it makes sense that it’s pigeon pose. I don’t know. I don’t know why any of these are called pigeon pose in the first place. The standard line is that pigeon pose has its name because the chest is all puffed out like a strutting pigeon, but I just don’t see it.

So! Now that we’ve settled that the name of this pose is thoroughly confusing, let’s talk about how to get into it and my own experiences with it.

This pose is very hard on people with tight hips. Teachers encourage you to use padding under one or both hips, padding the back-leg hip more to make sure you can keep your balance. Padding has only made this pose more awkward for me, so although my back-leg hip is still off the ground, I’ve found good balance that way.

Bend your front leg as much as you need to in order to be comfortable. The eventual goal is to have the calf parallel to the short edge of the mat, but I have found that focusing on that piece of the pose only adds to my discomfort, and stretching yourself elsewhere will lead to better results. You want to make sure that your back leg isn’t veering inward, that the hip and ankle joints are straight. Most of the time that this pose is taught, in my experience, the sitting-up is the smallest part of it, and bending all the way over your front leg and resting your hands, forearms, or forehead on the mat is the real pigeon pose. This is a great hip opener, and can be very relaxing if you already have open hips.

Plenty of people are content to stay in “plain” pigeon pose for the entire lifetime of their yoga practice, without even adding the backbend, but I am not one of them, which is why this post is about eka pada rajakapotasana instead of “plain” pigeon pose.

Bending the back knee to lift the foot and calf is a hell of a lot harder than you think it will be. It pains in the quadriceps, in the hips, and in little pinchy feelings all up the front of the thigh. This part of the pose goes in stages: first you try to reach back with your hand to grab your foot, and then you hook your wrist around, and then your elbow. Then you hook your foot with your elbow, raise the other arm up and over, and join your hands. Like this:

This is the stage I’m at. While you’re doing all these stages, of course, you’re trying to puff your chest out and lean your head back and push both hips to the floor and keep your balance. Eventually you will lift your arms up and over and grab the foot with them both. (I despair of ever doing this, but I’ll talk about that shortly). This is an extremely intense backbend – in fact every stage of this pose, other than leaning forward, is a pretty damn intense backbend – and tucking your tailbone may seem impossible but it will help the health of your lumbar spine.

Being able to put your foot on your head in this pose is a combination of back, leg, hip, and neck flexibility, not just one or the other. This is part of what’s frustrating about the pose, because just when you think you’re doing backbends that are so insanely deep that you must be able to touch your head with your foot, you realize that your quads are still too tight to bend the knee far enough, and so on.

I LOVE backbends. They are the joy of my practice. I often hear about “trigger poses” from other yogis and yoginis – the pose that inspires them to start or to keep doing yoga, like, forever. For one of my teachers it was king dancer pose, and for me it was eka pada rajakapotasana. I saw it and I instantly wanted to be able to do it. I actually asked a teacher to help me find my way into it in June of 2008, and since I started doing yoga seriously in April of 2008, I was way, way premature. She tried to tell me that she hadn’t even tried one-legged king pigeon until she’d been doing yoga for two or three years, but naturally I didn’t listen and she gave me a few tips anyway.

For the first several months of trying to do this pose, the awkwardness and the inflexibility of my body was positively painful. The pose itself did not actually cause much pain per se, but my joints and muscles felt so much tighter than they did in other poses, and I hated the feeling of not being able to get comfortable just by nature of what I was trying to do, if you know what I mean.

Yet, one of the life lessons I have not absorbed well enough in my first 27 years (and which yoga is finally banging into my stubborn skull) is that if you practice, and practice, and practice, the most difficult tasks will eventually become easier. Over the months, I watched my body transform, and to me, one-legged king pigeon was one of the most visible reminders that slowly, gently, I was making progress. Throughout my journey so far, one of the key mindsets I’ve had to let go of is the idea that my body is fighting me, that it’s resisting my attempts to bend this way and that, and realize that there is no struggle except the one in my head. My hamstrings are taking forever to lengthen because that’s the nature of gigantic muscles that have never been stretched; finding my way into pigeon is awkward as hell because it’s an awkward pose. My quadriceps are not my enemy. My rush-rush mindset is.

This pose is still challenging for me, of course, but its awkwardness, the feeling of being stiff and unoiled, has receded. I still can’t lift my arms up and over to grab my foot, even if I start by reaching back, grabbing the foot, and then trying to flip my elbow upwards. This seems to be a problem with my shoulder or upper back flexibility, because I can’t do it in other similar poses either, but I haven’t spoken to a teacher about it yet.

I’m a lot more patient about the evolution of the pose (and my practice in general) than I used to be, in part because the pose has taught me that this is, provably, a road that’s moving forward and not just a treadmill. I am open to the possibility of further advancement in the pose, but I’m not pushing it like I have for so many months. All it took to find this change in attitude was some visible progress. If only I had stuck with those piano lessons when I was ten, I might have learned this lesson a lot sooner.