Yoga Cue for Everybody

Earlier this 12 months, I wrote a submit about tips on how to simplify your yoga cues. Should you’ve ever been in a yoga class the place the cues have been coming at you quick and furiously, it’s possible you’ll know the way complicated it may be. I really like listening to lecturers clarify observe in methods I’d by no means imagined. However generally fixed cueing can depart no house for our personal exploration. Yoga cues are crucial, for college students’ security and for his or her development. But when I might solely give one yoga cue in my lessons it will be this: Loosen up into the place you’re.

A Yoga Cue for Mastery of Asana Apply

This yoga cue aligns with Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Of the 196 yoga sutras, these three are involved with asana observe (as translated by Alistair Shearer):

• 2.46: The bodily posture ought to be regular and cozy.
• 2.47: It’s mastered when all effort is relaxed and the thoughts is absorbed within the Infinite.
• 2.48: Then we’re now not upset by the play of opposites.

In Sutra 2.46, we study that asana is a observe of stability—balancing stability and ease. The third niyama, tapas (interior hearth) conjures up us to be regular in our dedication, and powerful and secure in our expression of the poses. However we stability this with a way of ease, by no means pushing ourselves to the purpose of ache or battle.

Balancing these two qualities opens the door to mastery. What Sutra 2.47 tells us is that mastery of asana has nothing to do with pushing our our bodies to the max, or practising “superior” poses. Mastery arrives once we are capable of loosen up into the place we’re. After we are capable of loosen up right into a pose simply as it’s—no matter what it could appear to be from the skin—our minds and our bodies change into one. We change into absorbed within the ever-changing sensations arising in every second of a pose.

Our capability to relaxation in every second of every pose, it doesn’t matter what sensations occur to be arising, yields probably the most life-changing advantage of asana observe. Sutra 2.48 states that when we now have mastered asana on this manner, we’re capable of navigate the ups and downs of our lives with extra grace.

Intentions for a New Yr

I’ve usually mentioned once we’re practising a seated ahead bend in my lessons, “Enlightenment doesn’t come from touching your head to your knee. Loosen up into the place you’re.” After all, that doesn’t imply immediate enlightenment will occur once we loosen up into our poses simply as they’re. However maybe, for a couple of moments, we will contact into our interior useful resource of calm and peace once we enable ourselves to easily be in our poses with out judgment or ambition. We are able to shift from the realm of doing to the realm of being.

Practising asana on this manner might help us domesticate a behavior of enjoyable into the place we’re in different areas of our lives. All of us expertise nice and ugly experiences in our lives. Peace doesn’t come from avoiding the disagreeable experiences; it comes from assembly them with each stability and readability. After we observe this yoga cue on the mat, it turns into a ability we will entry off the mat.

As we head into a brand new 12 months, might you loosen up into the place you’re proper now. Might you domesticate stability and ease and benefit from the pleasures of merely being.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third e-book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Crimson Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards.