Private Universe

Making your practice your own

So, while talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I commented that doing yoga teacher training had changed the way I did my home practice.

I have been doing a morning yoga practice for years, but for most of that time I did the same routine day after day, or else I consciously chose and planned a change to it here and there. These days, I am more likely to improvise my practice based on what postures feel good at the time, and what goals I'm working on.

One of the gifts of yoga is that it can change your relationship to your body. Most of the time we shut off feedback from our bodies, and ignore or power through any discomfort. In yoga you can change that adversarial "mind-over-matter" relationship and give your body a chance to speak up and ask for what it wants. If your back is twinging after a particular posture, you can alter the rest of your morning practice to take care of it, by doing some relaxing work, even if you "planned" to do more strengthening.

It is hard to establish those lines of two-way communication, but once they start to open up, you begin to get all sorts of useful information about what your body likes and dislikes: foods, exercises, positions that you sit in at the computer, all sorts of things.

One of my teaching goals is to get my students started on the project of listening to their bodies, which (sadly) you don't always get to do in a beginning yoga class. For example, I would like to offer my students a lot of choices in class, like showing them two or three variations of a posture and asking them to find the one that feels the best to them. Oftentimes when yoga teachers do this, they label the posture variations as "beginning," "intermediate," and "advanced," which I think is counterproductive. You don't want your mind making the decision, or choosing the word it thinks best applies to you. "Oh, I'm a beginner, so I'd better not even try the other versions"... or worse yet... "I'm going to show everyone how talented I am by doing all the advanced versions!" You want your body taking charge, and your body doesn't care about the labels. It might like the "beginning" version of one posture, and the "intermediate" version of another.

I am hoping to short-circuit that problem by offering (say) two versions of the posture, and having them try both, while I ask, which feels better for your body?

Gary did a Reverse Namaste easily, the first time he tried, while after ten years of regular yoga practice, I am not even close to being able to. I'm not sure that "advanced yoga student" is a meaningful phrase. Or at least, its meaning has little to do with physical strength or flexibility. A dancer or gymnast might be able to do every yoga posture in the book perfectly on day one, but if they don't have that friendly, open communication between mind and body, I'd hesitate to call them "advanced." Yoga asanas are for getting to know your body and what it wants, not for looking pretty like the Yoga Journal models.

Labels: yoga

posted by Jaime_sama @ 9:57 AM