Living the Wisdom of Yoga in Modern Times

How to Breath Like A Seasoned Yogi Darth Vader Style

Even though breathing is natural, for many yoga students, breathing deeply is not easy. Breathing deeply during yoga:

• keeps the mind calm
• increases metabolism
• energizes the body
• brings nutrients to the cells
• lets you know when you are over exerting, nervous or not being mindful. When the fluidity and ease of the breath becomes jagged, it is a sign that something is not right
• helps you get in and out of poses with ease

Ways To Cultivate a Deep Ocean Like Sound and Fluidity to Your Breath aka Breathe Like Darth Vader aka Breathe Like an Ashtangi

• Practice without music-The difference between the breathing of my students who practice with and without music is like night and day. The music drowns out the breath. The students who practice with music think they are breathing fully, but when the music drops, you can hear a pin drop. The students who practice without music develop deep full breathing quickly and are more aware of their breath.

 

• Practice Breathing Without Asana(yoga poses)-Sit in a quiet place and just breath

 

•     Inhale Fully/Exhale Fully-when you inhale, sip in as much air as you can. Feel the pressure   of the air against the diaphragm and don't stop inhaling until you can't sip in any more.   Then exhale out all the air fully. Feel your longs emptying out

 

•      Move Slower-Moving slower makes you more mindful of your breath. When you move fast  your breath speeds up as well and eventually your breath gets labored and you feel like you  are hyperventilating. Also when people move fast, they sometimes forget about their breath  all together.  I constantly see students holding their breath during sun salutes which are often  the fastest portion of the yoga practice. This is when your body needs to be supported by  breath the most. Breathe slow, move slow.

 

•      Stop Moving-If your breathing gets scattered and staccato, sit down and take a few focused breaths and start your practice again.

 

•         Move with the Breath-Every pose in yoga begins with a breath. Discipline yourself to not move until a breath is completed.

 

•        Practice Elongating the Breath- Sit down and count the beats of each inhale and exhale. Seeking to make them longer and longer. 

 

•         Practice Ashtanga-Whether you practice Mysore style or Led, all the breaths in Ashtanga are  meticulously counted by yourself or the teacher. This creates a hyper awareness of the breath that gets translated into other practices.

 

•          Practice, Practice, Practice

 Video of the Day

 

Easy Yoga = Less Effective Yoga

Yoga reflects life.  Your biggest growth opportunities in life are presented when you come up against challenges.  The same is true for our practice. Yoga is designed to bring out the best in us by bringing us  face to face with ego, fears,negative emotions, destructive unhealthy habits and hidden demons that we often suppress or ignore in our everyday life. The effectiveness of yoga is lessened when it is too easy.

While easy yoga feels good and is relaxing, we don't live in a world where everything feels good and is relaxing.  You walk out of the controlled environment of your candle lit yoga  studio where the music is soft and everyone is peaceful and  sweet and back into your normal everyday life where the kids are screaming, your boss is cutting your pay, you still can't fit in your jeans  and the car won't crank, and stress immediately returns and you feel bad again.   Then you are stuck in a cycle of having to come back and get your fix.  However, if you chose a yoga practice that takes you to your edge and pushes your buttons, you learn stress releasing tools on the mat that you can integrate in your everyday life.

How Doing The Hard Stuff Translates Into Your Everyday Life

Practicing every day, even when you don't feel like it, teaches discipline. Change often takes time and sustained effort. Our yoga practices teaches us that when we commit to something, our goals are realized.  

Practicing poses and techniques you hate teaches that your are always stronger then your circumstances and that you can overcome even the hardest and most difficult challenges.  

A daily practice at the same time and the same poses allows you to see how diet, lifestyle and stress effects your body. 

Unhealthy lifestyle habits are eradicated.  It is not possible to maintain a consistent, steady and powerful practice while out of breath, overweight, lacking sleep, being dehydrated, without energy, over scheduled, over committed, with a disheveled state of mind or with a diseased body.

Yoga Helps Us Learn How To Process Emotions. When you are taking your body and mind to the edge, negative emotions such as frustration, unworthiness, anger, and impatience come to the surface. By using the breath and being with the pose, we learn how to let the emotions flow through us instead of getting stored in the body as stress and disease.

Video of the Day

 

Happy Yogi. Better Practice.

 When we start to get serious about yoga, we start to take yoga seriously. We turn it into a struggle, start setting bench marks for ourselves and get upset when we don’t reach them. Instead of playfully approaching postures, we start to criticize our execution and even start judging others. Yoga actually becomes cause of stress instead of a stress reliever. It becomes a chore. Something we have to fit into our schedule. We start to lose our joy and then our practice becomes practically nonexistent. When we see it as constructive play, it becomes fun and enriching.

The fastest way to ruin your yoga practice is to stress about it. "When am I going to be able to jump through?", "When will I be able to complete a class without going into Child's Pose?" "Why is my practice not progressing?" Stressing over yoga is counter productive! Yoga is supposed to relieve stress and bring health to the body. When you are frustrated, you just draw more of that to you anyway.

How To Keep Your Practice Happy and Stress Free:

See it as Play

Try new poses and techniques without judgement

Enjoy the journey and don't worry about the destination-it is good to work towards poses you want to achieve but focus more on the fun you have getting there.

Know when to move on-work on the pose a little bit and then keep it moving. You are not wanting to get into the pose just once. You want a firm foundation that allows you to enter the pose at will. If it takes you 10 times or 10 minutes of efforting to get into it, you are not there yet. That one time was probably just an accident. Try the pose a few times paying special attention to the foundational work and then move on. By working the pose this way, you are building it from the ground up. Your body starts to reprogram itself with this information and when you approach the pose, it becomes second nature. Then you start working on another foundational piece. When everything finally comes together, you have a strong pose that you can access at will.

Don't compare your practice to others-Just because Joe could do handstand after 6 months doesn't mean you should be able to as well.  See your own small incremental achievements and be proud.

The changes are happening but sometimes you don't see them-you will have periods where your changes are so infinitesimal that you cant see them and then one day you will be doing the pose seemingly overnight....but not really....All the preparation just came together...finally

Continue to practice and trust that help is on the way-there are times where you will run up against a brick wall with your practice and you may not be progressing. Enjoy your practice where it is today knowing that anything you want you draw to you.  Eventually, the information you need to move on will be presented to you. However, be careful of jumping around from teacher to teacher, studio to studio, watching tons of You Tube videos, reading tons of books with this hungry need to find it. Constantly looking can sometimes put us on a roller coaster of looking for the next best thing and not being content with the present moment. This can lead to frustration as well. Joyfully keep your yoga ears and eyes open but practice non attachment to results. Again, it is the journey and not the destination.

Video of the Day

 

Real Yogis Don't Do Self Promotion/YouTube? Bull Shit!

Recently someone wrote a blog putting down a very popular yogi saying that their videos are just arrogant peaces of self promotion. I don't know this yogi personally and they may be an arrogant ego driven person, however, just a little bit of research will show that yogis doing demonstrations is a part of yoga's culture. Krishnamacharya's students did it. Pattabhi Jois did them when he was a student. He had Sharath do them.  Demonstrations were just old school versions of You Tube videos. What is the problem?

What is up with all the hating on successful yogi's?  If someone masters a pose,  makes a video and they get picked up by YAMA, Oprah Winfrey and Giam, why are we going to hate on them? Should they say, "sorry, real yogi's don't make money. I prefer to grovel and be broke for the rest of my life?" 

We bash yoga in the West  so damn much(me included) but we owe the spread of things like Ashtanga to those cheeky Western students who set at the Guru's door and wouldn't take no for an answer. Many of these Guru's were broke and written off as crazy. When the Western kids got there and brought their hippie friends, these teachers  blew up  and started wearing gold chains and traveling all over the world.  Hell, they liked money too.

There is nothing wrong with money. There is nothing wrong with people knowing your name. There is nothing wrong with wearing Lululemon, tubetops, fake boobs and kissing babies if at the end of the day, the teacher's intentions are pure and people's lives are made better through yoga.

Please, lets put down the Haterade!

Video of the Day: Being a teacher takes a bit of selfishness too