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OPEN MIND OPEN BODY Ideas for Your Yoga Practice |
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Yoga classes provide inspiration, feedback, and community, but a home practice is the best place to explore yoga deeply. The following articles provide suggestions for building a creative and personal home yoga practice. Ideas for Your Yoga Practice New! (posted 3/3/07) Head Follows Heart. Connecting core strength to the movement of the heart helps us direct our attention and energy. The asanas (yoga poses) that can help you experience this idea are twists and backbends. New! (posted 3/3/07) Yoga Philosophy in Everyday Life: Balancing Retreat and Engagement. A transcript of a talk I gave to a women's group. What Do You Do When Difficult Emotions Come Up During Yoga Practice? This email exchange was part of my 2006 online class, the Yoga of Connection.
Let the focus of your yoga practice connect you to something bigger than endless self-improvement.
Why a self-guided yoga practice is important.
3 Parables about Building a Personal Practice These stories from the 100 Parable Sutra can help you find balance in your personal practice, and the courage to begin.
Cultivate the four phases of tranquility in each pose and movement.
This practice connects you to the direct experience of sensation, which is the first step to finding peace of mind. Notes and quotes from the January 2006 San Francisco Yoga Journal Conference panel discussion on yoga ethics in everyday life. Notes from my Guided Breath & Asana Practice at the Future of Breathing Conference These are my notes from one of the workshops I presented at Kripalu in September. It is a practice designed to cultivate a strong center and an open heart.
Cultivate Self-Acceptance in Your Yoga Practice What yoga can teach us - if we are open to the idea - is that everything we want to be, and everything we want to feel, is already a possibility within us.
Enjoy the Process, Not the Progress, of Your Yoga Practice Ambition in your yoga practice can be just one more way to postpone happiness.
"What is important is not how you do the pose, but what the pose is doing to you."
Close your eyes to open your other senses. This practice develops your ability to observe from within. Feel each pose more exquisitely, and refine your actions in each pose with your new-found sensitivity.
A Restorative Practice for an Open Mind Combine the Buddhist tradition of a dharma talk (receiving the wisdom of a teacher) with restorative yoga to help open the body and mind. The intention of this practice is to cultivate a relaxed, receptive physical and mental state to prepare you for deep listening and learning.
During times of stress, our bodies and minds can fall into a familiar pattern: The first part of the day is spent worrying, procrastinating, denying our own stress and the difficulties we face. By sunset, the challenges have only become more stressful, and we spend what should be a calming part of the day rushing, blaming, panicking, or otherwise exploding. Use this yoga practice to counterbalance the tendency to fall into this emotionally draining pattern.
3 restoratives pose to undo the effects of a long commute and a long day at a desk.
Habits and stagnation in your yoga practice can lead to overuse injuries. Learn to how to avoid, recognize, and recover from them.
Whether you have a mild injury or are recovering from an illness, write yourself an individualized yoga prescription. Use your injury or illness as the foundation for increased mindfulness and compassion in your practice. Take the everyday aches and pains as reminders to treat your body with respect, to be consistent with your practice, and to keep the creativity of your practice alive.
A series of stretches that use gravity to open the muscles more effectively than muscular effort.
Choose an area of your body that you usually don't think about, and make it the focus of your yoga practice.
Blend Asana with Meditation for a Centering Practice Students often ask me what my personal practice is like. This month, I describe a typical practice, straight from my sticky mat.
Exhaust
Yourself
The S T R E T C H E D O U T Practice If a little yoga is good, it stands to reason that a lot of yoga is even better. However, if you've ever attended an all-day yoga workshop or a yoga conference, you know that asana all day does not always feel as blissful as you anticipated. How do you get the benefit of all-day yoga without pushing beyond what your body and schedule can accommodate happily? Try stretching out your regular practice throughout the day.
Teaching yoga is the clearest mirror onto your yoga practice, for one simple reason: teachers tend to teach their most current lesson. Find a friend, family member, or co-worker, and offer to teach them a yoga pose or two. Then observe what you choose to teach and how you present it.
Holiday-Inspired Practices
National Teacher Appreciation Week (May 7-13) An exercise for reflecting on the unique yoga student-teacher relationship.
This New Year's Day, invite change into your life by cultivating awareness, focus, and patience.
Give Yourself (and Others) the Gift of Actual Yoga Practice This holiday season, hold back on the urge to splurge on yoga accessories, and invest your money in actual learning and practice experiences.
A Practice Inspired By Halloween Try on different poses to express the qualities of different characters and creatures.
Yoga Humor
This "press release" from the Center for The Advancement of Asana highlights the ways we sabotage our own enlightenment.
These short (and always wise, sometimes funny) poems were written by students in my 2005 online class, Can Yoga Really Change My Life? Consider your own yoga journey, and what you have learned.
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