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| Awakening and Yoga | ||||||||
a
center for Our Present moment Spiritual Foundation |
Guidelines for Beginners in Yoga Developing a Home Practice
1. Choose a specific time to practice. If possible, discipline yourself to keep this time free. Don't set the bar so high that you will give up. Be sensible. 15 minutes a day will eventually expand to 30, 60 and more. If your life situation requires a changing practice schedule, do your best to find a few free minutes. If your life situation only gives you a few openings a week, make the best of those. 2. Set aside a place to practice. Have your mat and any other props you may use handy. 3. Choose 5-6 poses to do every day. Include poses that help: forward bending (spinal flexion, hamstring stretch) torso/spinal extension (mild back bending, quad/groin stretches chest and shoulder openings twists (spinal rotation) relaxation and breathing Possibilities include: Standing poses: mountain pose (tadasana) tree pose (vrksasana) triangle pose (to right and left), standing forward bend (uttanasana), side angle pose (parsvakonasana) (to right and left) warrior pose I and II (virabhadrasana) (r&l) intense side stretch (parsvottanasana) (r&l) revolved triangle (r&l) Sitting poses: bound angle (baddha konasana) hero pose (virasana) seated twist in a chair Other poses: downward dog pose wide legs down dog lying down twist legs up the wall relaxation (savasana)
4. Find a good yoga book for help. The simplest and most practical I have found is "How to Use Yoga" by Mira Mehta. The more detailed companion, "Yoga the Iyengar Way", also by Mira Mehta is helpful. The Yoga bible is "Light on Yoga" by B.K. S. Iyengar, a must for any serious student. Other possibilities include: "Runners Yoga Book" by Jean Couch, and "30 Essential Yoga Poses" by Judith Lasater Some students find videos helpful also.
Basic Skills to Develop For a Home Practice 1. Discipline 2. Tracking Sensation and Developing a Feel For Alignment 3. Sequencing Poses and Maintaining a Balanced Practice 4. Making the Most of Your Time 5. Basic Sitting 6. Relaxation/Restorative positions 1. Discipline is required to set aside time to practice. To develop skill in any endeavor, time and effort are necessary. In the beginning, do not set the bar too high. Fifteen or twenty minutes to explore a few poses and watch the breath is a simple start. You may find yourself doing more quite effortlessly. If you can, try to practice at the same time and same place every day. If it becomes part of your daily routine, it will be much easier to keep the practice going. If you are a parent with busy children, this may not be practical, but do what you can do. Ultimately, your life IS your practice. 2. Tracking sensation is the foundation skill in yoga. It requires constantly attending to the sensory information arising from muscles, tendons, bones, joints, skin, and organs and learning, as you would learn a language, to make sense of what you are feeling. Ideally, all of our actions in a yoga pose arise out of direct perception. In the beginning we are dependant upon the teacher or instructions from a video or book to help us navigate the poses, but our own self-referencing is the clearest guide we can have. Through our own perception we begin to experience the balance, strength and ease of an aligned yoga posture. Alignment refers to the relationship of the various areas of the body to each other and gravity. Healthy alignment allows the body to distribute the gravitational stress of the posture efficiently and carefully, to strengthen the weak regions and release/stretch the tight constricted ones. As an Iyengar influenced style, we use props such as blocks, belts, chairs and bolsters to help find, explore and sustain healthy alignment in different poses. This is especially important for students with tightness in the hips, legs and shoulders, or students dealing with injuries, as poor alignment will send the stress to the most vulnerable areas of the body, the knees, the lower spine/back, and the neck. Protecting these areas is of primary importance in the practice of a yoga pose and we will discuss the specifics of how to do this in more detail later. 2. Sequencing is the linking of simple stretches and classical poses in a practice session or class to create an effect on the whole person, physically, physiologically, psychologically/emotionally and spiritually. In general there is a beginning, a middle and an end. a warm up, a dynamic phase, and a cool down. Begin by warming, loosening-stretching the larger, tighter, outermost areas and gradually work into the deeper regions, the edges of your awareness. The cooling down is used to reverse any imbalances left over from the previous poses and always ends with a deep relaxation (savasana). Beginning sequences are usually very general and involve intermingling symmetrical standing forward bends with standing poses to the right and left to open the front back and sides and may also include simple groin/hip and shoulder opening stretches, sitting poses and downward dog, one of the best all around yoga poses. These may be done vinyasa style, that is, in a linked flowing sequence, or with each pose as its own meditative enquiry. There are excellent beginning sequences given in the Mehta's book "How to Use Yoga", all of which present a balance from day to day. More experienced students may choose to dive more deeply into specific categories of poses from day to day and balance week to weekor even month to month. When I worked with Dona Holleman many years ago, I adopted her routine of two days a week of backbends, two days a week of forward bends, one day for standing poses and one day for arm balances, with head and shoulderstand and pranayama every day. The 7th day was just pranayama. My practice today is much more intuitive and primarily organized around my gut feelings in the moment, but I also weave in poses based on the monthly schedule I generally follow teaching; standing poses the first week of every month, backbends the second, forward bends the third and pot-luck the fourth which may be arm balances, inversions or pranayama. A common tendency for students is to hold or restrain the breath, especially when in a challenging or new situation such as staying in a yoga pose. This may involve anything from a total suspension of the breath to much more subtle closing off of the breathing space. As best you can in the moment, find the breath, feel the breath and keep the breath moving as flowing sensation. This may not be easy, but is the foundation to everything that arises in any yoga pose of life situation. Eventually, the flow of breath and the flow of sensation will be experienced as a single flow.
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