About Your Yoga Practice
Yoga is playful! Think about how much children learn from playing.
Remember:
- what it was like as a child to be curious?
- To be adventurous and engage the senses in discovery?
- To be aware of everything around you?
- What it was like to feel the excitement of courage and overcoming fear?
- To not hold back?
- To be happy?
Take the opportunity to cultivate qualities such as patience, steadiness, and confidence. By being open and trying new things, yoga becomes a means of transformation in your life.
Despite many people's first impressions, the goal of yoga isn't to get into a difficult pose. At its origins, yoga was a prescription for overall health. The student worked with his teacher and the teacher would lead the student with lessons appropriate for the student's development. Most people now start yoga for physical purposes — to improve overall fitness, to complement athletic pursuits, or to help with injuries and pain. Breathing work improves pulmonary function and results in increased circulation and oxygen availability to the body. Attention to exhalation engages your parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers a relaxation response and promotes detoxification. This initiates a release of tension not just in the body but also the mind. The scope of traditional yoga remains. A yoga teacher is less like a workout instructor and more of a guide who will be present with the student, observing and providing feedback to help the student and advance his/her progress.
Attention to alignment during asana practice increases body awareness and improves posture. But learning and practicing the postures is only a strategy to explore your self. (Cliché alert: yoga is a journey, not a destination.) In cultivating attentiveness you move one step at a time towards your goals be they physical (weight loss, strengthening muscle, recovery from injury, better sleep), mental (relaxation, stress reduction, improved concentration), or emotional (increasing happiness, relief from negative feelings such as anxiety.) These may only be minute baby steps, and the changes will be unnoticeable at times but the cumulative progress sets up an internal pattern along the way that can be used as a template for growth in the other areas of your life. By being present we learn to observe our emotions and fully experience them without becoming overwhelmed. When we are calm and come into the now we are able to let go of the noise of the past and unknown of the future.