Dragons make everything better. Fairy tales, New Year’s celebrations, yoga. Real dragons, of course, would be a major downer, but dragons aren’t real (are they?) They’re fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, flying magical creatures of our imagination. They might consume a fair maiden or two, but look what they give in return – great stories.

My son and I are reading Michael Hague’s Book of Dragons right now. Most of the stories are familiar – Smaug from The Hobbit, Eustace in C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawntreader, St. George and the Dragon. If you’ve never seen Michael Hague’s illustrations, look him up – the pictures alone make one of his books worth reading.

It’s a good time for dragons. The Chinese New Year, on January 22^nd, features dragon dances for good luck. And I’ll be doing my own dragon dance this Thursday.

I teach gentle yoga every Tuesday, but I also substitute in other classes. This week, I get to teach a Vinyasa Flow class, which I haven’t taught in awhile. I’m pretty excited, and I’m going with my favorite yoga sequence of all time: the dragon sequence.

You can find several variations online, but I like the one my first teacher used. That was ten years ago, and I’m likely misremembering it, so the version below is an amalgamation of her sequence and my preferences. Once you get the hang it, it’s a full-body stretch, workout, moving meditation, and the only yoga flow I know that tells a story.

Here’s how my version goes:

• The dragon sleeps (chair pose with prayer hands)
• The dragon awakes (mountain pose)
• The dragon crouches (lizard pose)
• The dragon looks out its cave (lizard pose with bent elbows, look to sides)
• The dragon stretches its wing (twist with arm up)
• The dragon breathes fire (high lunge with cactus arms and lion’s breath)
• The dragon flies (Warrior III)
• The dragon waves its tail (3-legged dog and scorpion dog)
• The dragon shows its belly (wild thing)
• The dragon flies around the world (move through goddess pose to frame opposite foot)
• The dragon sleeps (chair pose with prayer hands)

Here’s a video, totally different than what I described

You can then cry mercy or move through the whole sequence again in reverse, landing back asleep in your cave. It’s a challenging sequence, but I love imagining myself as a yoga dragon.

What are your favorite dragons tails?