Yoga Cue for Everybody

Earlier this 12 months, I wrote a put up about how one can simplify your yoga cues. Should you’ve ever been in a yoga class the place the cues had been coming at you quick and furiously, you might understand how complicated it may be. I like listening to academics clarify follow in methods I’d by no means imagined. However generally fixed cueing can depart no area for our personal exploration. Yoga cues are essential, for college students’ security and for his or her development. But when I may solely give one yoga cue in my lessons it will be this: Calm down into the place you might be.

A Yoga Cue for Mastery of Asana Observe

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

• 2.46: The bodily posture must 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 not upset by the play of opposites.

In Sutra 2.46, we study that asana is a follow of stability—balancing stability and ease. The third niyama, tapas (interior hearth) conjures up us to be regular in our dedication, and robust 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 training “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 might appear like from the surface—our minds and our bodies turn into one. We turn into absorbed within the ever-changing sensations arising in every second of a pose.

Our potential to relaxation in every second of every pose, it doesn’t matter what sensations occur to be arising, yields essentially the most life-changing good thing about asana follow. Sutra 2.48 states that when we’ve got mastered asana on this approach, we’re capable of navigate the ups and downs of our lives with extra grace.

Intentions for a New 12 months

I’ve typically stated once we’re training a seated ahead bend in my lessons, “Enlightenment doesn’t come from touching your head to your knee. Calm down into the place you might be.” In fact, that doesn’t imply instantaneous enlightenment will occur once we loosen up into our poses simply as they’re. However maybe, for just a few moments, we will contact into our interior useful resource of calm and peace once we permit 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 approach 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 follow this yoga cue on the mat, it turns into a talent we will entry off the mat.

As we head into a brand new 12 months, might you loosen up into the place you might be 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 Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe 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 Purple Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.