Why: Yoga begins with stability and balance, and no pose teaches them better than the one-legged balancing Tree. Patience, please: Trees take hundreds of years to become strong, rooted, and stable, so it will also take us humans some time to get grounded.
How: Stand tall with your feet hip-distance apart and your arms at your sides. Shift your weight onto the left foot. Bend your right knee and, reaching down, use your right hand to place your right foot on the inside of the left thigh, just above the knee. The right knee opens out to the side. Be the tree: Imagine that your left foot has roots growing out the bottom of it that anchor you, and visualize your torso as the stable trunk. Make sure your pelvis faces forward.
Bring your hands together in front of your chest in prayer position. Fix your gaze to a spot on the wall in front of you to help your balance. Stay here for a full minute, or as long as you can. Slowly lower your arms, come back to standing. Repeat on the other side.
Do the pose on the first side again. This time, bring your arms overhead with hands separated shoulder-width apart and palms facing one another. Visualize your arms as a tree’s branches, strong and steady. Repeat the pose (with the arms overhead) on the other side.
Tips: To keep from toppling over like so many new students, instructor Seane Corn suggests two things: First, do the pose either leaning with your back against the wall or with your hand against the wall so you can steady yourself. Second, coax tight hips open by pressing the bone under your big toe on your standing foot firmly into the floor.
Insight: Tight hips are often to blame for knocking you off-kilter in this posture. Practicing helps you develop external rotation in the hips, which you’ll use over and over again, and since the pose “teaches you how to open up the hip without being weight-bearing, there is less pressure on the joints and the lower back,” Corn says. “As you get more flexibility in the hip, you can gradually begin to bring the right foot up higher on your thigh.”