This entry was posted on Dec 31, 2024 by Charlotte Bell.
Earlier this 12 months, I wrote a publish about tips on how to simplify your yoga cues. When you’ve ever been in a yoga class the place the cues have been coming at you quick and furiously, chances are you’ll understand how complicated it may be. I really like listening to academics clarify follow in methods I’d by no means imagined. However typically 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 courses it might be this: Chill out into the place you’re.
A Yoga Cue for Mastery of Asana Follow
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 needs 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 not upset by the play of opposites.
In Sutra 2.46, we be taught that asana is a follow of steadiness—balancing stability and ease. The third niyama, tapas (internal hearth) conjures up us to be regular in our dedication, and powerful and secure in our expression of the poses. However we steadiness this with a way of ease, by no means pushing ourselves to the purpose of ache or wrestle.
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 working towards “superior” poses. Mastery arrives after we are capable of chill out into the place we’re. After we are capable of chill out right into a pose simply as it’s—no matter what it could seem like from the skin—our minds and our bodies grow to be one. We grow to be absorbed within the ever-changing sensations arising in every second of a pose.
Our capacity 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 mastered asana on this means, we’re capable of navigate the ups and downs of our lives with extra grace.
Intentions for a New Yr
I’ve usually stated after we’re working towards a seated ahead bend in my courses, “Enlightenment doesn’t come from touching your head to your knee. Chill out into the place you’re.” After all, that doesn’t imply instantaneous enlightenment will occur after we chill out into our poses simply as they’re. However maybe, for just a few moments, we will contact into our internal useful resource of calm and peace after we permit ourselves to easily be in our poses with out judgment or ambition. We will shift from the realm of doing to the realm of being.
Training asana on this means might help us domesticate a behavior of stress-free 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, could you chill out 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 educating in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Follow and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third ebook 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 folks sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.
