Yoga 109, Shanghai - Yoga Articles

True Joy, by George Bernard Shaw

There is one True Joy in Life; that is being used for a Purpose recognized by Yourself as a worthy one.
Being a Force of Nature, not just a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the World does not devote itself to you – to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my Life belongs to the Whole Community – and it is my Privilege – My Privilege to do for it whatever I can. For the harder I work the more I live.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. Life is no brief candle to me. It is like a Brilliant Torch that I have a hold of for the moment and I will make it burn ever more brightly as I pass it on to future generations.

The 7 Chakras

Through inner attunement, the ancient yogis were able to perceive the energetic basis of all matter. The seven chakras or energy centers comprise their model of the energetic or subtle body. Each chakra is located along the spine, starting at the base and running upwards to the crown of the head. These "whirling disks of light" each radiate a specific color and spiritual quality, and are associated with corresponding psychological, physical, and emotional states necessary for the development of the whole person.

Though the chakras have not been confirmed by Western science, with the spirit of inquiry, we can explore this model through asana, meditation, and other practices --and ultimately incorporate what we find useful for our own growth and self-understanding.

1. Root or Base Chakra - Survival
The first Chakra, Muladhara (root), is located at the base of the spine. Its color is red and its issues are survival, stability, and self-sufficiency.

Imbalances
Anemia, fatigue, lower back pain, sciatica, depression. Frequent colds or cold hands and cold feet.

2. Spleen Chakra - Feelings (sensual & sexual)
The second Chakra, Svadhisthana (sweetness), is located at the lower abdomen (between belly button and pubic bone). Its color is orange and its issues are sexuality, creativity, relationships and emotions.

Imbalances
Eating disorders. Alcohol and drug abuse. Depression. Low back pain. Asthma or allergies. Candida & yeast infections. Urinary problems. Sensuality issues as well as impotency and frigidity.

3. Solar Plexus Chakra - Personal Power
The third Chakra, Manipura (lustrous gem), is located at the solar plexus (between belly button and bottom of rib cage). Its color is yellow and its issues are personal power, self esteem, willfulness and energy.

Imbalances
Digestive problems, ulcers, diabetes, hypoglycemia, constipation. Nervousness, toxicity, parasites, colitis, poor memory.

4. Heart Chakra - Love
The fourth Chakra, Anahata (not struck), is located at the heart (center of the chest). Its color is green and its issues are love, compassion, acceptance, and trust.

Imbalances
Heart and breathing disorders. Heart and breast cancer. Chest pain. High blood pressure. Passivity. Immune system problems. Muscular tension.

5. Throat Chakra - Communication
The fifth Chakra, Vissudha (purification), is located at the throat. Its color is bright blue and its issues are communication, inspiration, expression, and faith.

Imbalances
Thyroid imbalances, swollen glands. Fevers and flu. Infections. Mouth, jaw, tongue, neck and shoulders problems. Hyperactivity. Hormonal disorders such as PMS, mood swings, bloating.

6. Third-eye Chakra - Perception
The sixth Chakra, Ajna (to perceive), is located between the eyebrows, just above the bridge of the nose. Its color is indigo blue and its issues are psychic, emotional and mental intelligence, and intuition.

Imbalances
Depression, learning disabilities, co-ordination problems, sleep disorders

7. Crown Chakra - Universal Connection
The seventh Chakra, Sahasrara (thousand petaled), is located at the crown (top) of the head. Its color is white or violet and its issues are devotion, inspiration, selflessness, and spiritual understanding.

Imbalances
Headaches. Photosensitivity. Mental illness. Neuralgia.Senility. Right/left brain disorders and coordination problems. Epilepsy. Varicose veins and blood vessel problems. Skin Rashes.

Healthy and Safe Pregnancy - Prenatal Yoga, by Kelly Camden

Maybe you have seen yoga photos on magazine covers: slender, athletic-looking people twisting themselves into human pretzels while balancing in seemingly impossible positions. It leaves you wondering, if that is yoga, how could a pregnant woman possibly do it? The answer is prenatal yoga.

During yoga classes that are designed specifically for pregnancy, the focus of the postures is to support the mother's changing body. Prenatal yoga teachers employ many props, such as blankets, bolsters, chairs and blocks, to help pregnant mothers perform a variety poses.

Why Yoga?
Yoga rewards its practitioners with wonderful health benefits.

By maintaining the integrity of the spine, movement and breathing become easier. For example, exercises that are "shoulder stretches and chest opening poses will help correct faulty posture by strengthening the muscles which pull the shoulder blades down and together, and stretching the muscles of the rib cage. As the chest expands, the lungs gain freedom and breathing deepens," according to Sandra Jordan, author of Yoga for Pregnancy (St. Martin's Press, 1987).

The strength building postures of yoga also increase endurance, giving mothers a boost during labor. Having endurance allows women to be active during labor so that they may walk, squat and change positions freely and further into the birthing process.
The Mind
Because asana practice requires concentration of the mind on the body, yoga promotes turning off the rationalizing, judging mind and encourages listening instead to body wisdom; messages that the body sends, such as tension, fear, thirst, relaxation or euphoria. This aspect of practice is particularly useful during pregnancy, as we create the mindset that the body knows just what it needs to birth a baby.

The Breath
Yoga uses the breath as a tool. While we are observing how we breathe, we bring our attention into the body. The breath provides feedback, alerting us if we have gone beyond our comfort zone in a yoga pose, as well as when we are uncomfortable with something in our lives.

This awareness of breath and body, and how they correlate, is key for laboring and giving birth. During asana practice and in birth, moving in sync with the breath encourages the body to soften, releasing areas of tension. Prenatal yoga classes tend to allow extra time for practicing these breathing techniques, which are useful during childbearing as well as mothering.

As we become aware of our breathing patterns, we may familiarize ourselves with a variety of ways to practice breathing. Deep and steady breathing is the path to mental clarity and relaxation. Through this breath work, yoga practitioners gain resilience in stressful situations.

Whether a woman has a long labor or a short labor, she will reach the point where her body is working hard, as if she is exercising. It is at that point that the breathing exercises done in yoga class really help the birthing mother to remain calm and focused.

The Spirit
A nurturing aspect of prenatal yoga is simply being able to spend time with other expectant mothers. Because the classes are mixed, there is an opportunity to meet women who are at various stages in their pregnancy. Some women later join mother and baby yoga classes together, form playgroups or just keep in touch.

Attending yoga class feeds the spirit, as we take time away from work and other responsibilities to care for ourselves. By combining physical exercises with breathing exercises, we begin to quiet the mind. In prenatal yoga, women have the opportunity to practice in an environment that supports their lifelong journey of motherhood.

Yoga Cautions

As always, safety is first and foremost. Here are some tips:

Women who want to begin yoga during pregnancy should check with their care provider first

Do not do any poses that constrict the abdomen and on no account become fatigued or breathless, according to Silva Mehta and Mira Shyam, authors of Yoga the Iyengar Way (Knopf, 1999)

Stay within your comfort zone. "There should be no discomfort or strain," Mehta says. Yoga is meant to help you feel wonderful. If you experience any discomfort, come out of the pose and speak with the instructor about adjustments

If you have any injuries, or simply aches and pains, sharing that information with your instructor will help them to show you to practice yoga safely

Many yoga poses can be adjusted for pregnancy, but some, such as the stronger "inversions," are not recommended for beginners. These include headstands or handstands. Downward facing dog is a gentle inversion that may be done well into pregnancy.

By Kelly Camden, Certified Doula

The Wind Through the Instrument, by Erich Schiffmann

Think of your body as a musical instrument, a wind instrument. Your breath, accordingly, is the wind through the instrument. As such, it is the single most important aspect of yoga technique. Traditionally considered the primary carrier of prana - life force - your breathing originates deep inside you, radiates outward and then inward, providing a gentle and steady rhythm for movement, stretch and release. Sometimes you will breathe softly, other times with vigor, but the breathing itself will always be a central and governing focus. Proper breathing brings the poses to life, inspires every subtle shift and movement in every yoga posture, and can help center your awareness in your conscious experience of the now.

Ujjayi Breathing
The main type of breathing we do in yoga is called ujjayi (ooh-JAI-yee). Ujjayi breathing, known as the "victory breath," is characterized by an audibly hollow, deep, soft sound coming from your throat.

The main idea is to coordinate your movements with your breathing. This brings a graceful and sensuous quality to your practice and turns each yoga session into a fluid and creative meditation. As you become skillful at this, the breath and movement will no longer feel distinct. You will experience them as one action, inseparably entwined. You will instinctively breathe as you move or stretch, and move or stretch as you breathe.

Certain movements are always done on inhale, others on exhale. The type of breath (inhale or exhale) depends on what works most naturally on your body. Each specific movement should start with the initiation of the appropriate breath. Opening movements such as backbends and lifting arms are done on inhale. Folding or closing movements such as forward bends and lowering arms are done on exhale. For example, you raise your arms overhead on inhale, and lower them on exhale. The movement, though, is initiated or inspired by the breath and is surrounded by breath.

This pattern makes sense, for it's what happens naturally. When you expand or open there's more room, so that air naturally enters; and when you fold or close, air is squeezed out. If you run short of breath before a particular movement is completed, stop moving, finish the breathing cycle you are now on (exhale if you have just inhaled, inhale if you have just exhaled), and continue moving with the next appropriate phase of breath. In this way an inhaling movement such as arm raising is always done on inhale, even if it requires some exhales in between. Always move with the breath, and only move when you are breathing. One inhale plus one exhale equals a single breath.

Push and Yield
Every yoga posture involves a "push" and a "yield." Pushing is an active force that moves the body further and deeper into the posture, gently exploring areas of tightness. Yielding is a passive force with which you wait and listen to the moment-to-moment feedback from your body; it's a letting go of resistance that allows the active force to be successful without being aggressive. The pushing and yielding elements occur simultaneously, as in a dance. Done properly, therefore, yoga is a matter of pushing and yielding, of "doing" and "not-doing," at the same time.

The breath plays a key role in this simultaneous push-yield activity because of its ability to function both automatically and under conscious control. It's the perfect bridge between push and yield, control and surrender, doing and not-doing, and it represents a unique link between these two forces. Skill in yoga involves orchestrating these two forces with the breath. This means that sometimes you will push with the breath into your tight areas, or challenge your endurance, or deliberately increase your sense of "fire" and energy by consciously breathing with more vigor and intensity. At other times you will ride the breath and stay soft, mellow, and be in a pose with minimal effort. With your breathing you can creatively orchestrate the tone of your practice.

Guided from Within
Normally we think of the conscious mind as the controller of movement. But consider what it would be like steering a car, typing, running, walking, hitting a tennis ball, dribbling a basketball, anything, if you had to think consciously about what you were doing. Actually, as a beginner in yoga or anything else, you must begin by thinking, in fact, learning an activity even involves a different part of the brain than is used to perform it once you know it. This part of the brain works more slowly and uses more energy than the other, so during this initial learning phase you'll need to move gently slowly - with heightened awareness. You'll need to think carefully about the pose, the breath, the lines of energy, and you will need to learn all the fundamentals of technique. Only when you have graduated from that halting stage, however, will you attain grace and efficiency. This is because the conscious mind is too slow. There is always a space or gap between what the mind says it wants to be doing and what the body actually does. In this gap between intention and execution, between the "ought" and the "is," there is always a loss of energy.

In yoga this separation comes to an end when you allow the breath to replace the thinking mind as the guiding impulse behind movement and stretch. This involves merging so thoroughly with the breath that you are not thinking about anything else. This moment, this breath, this now, is all-important. You immerse yourself so totally that the usual separation between you and the pose dissolves.

This makes it easier to listen to your body. Instead of pushing your body around with only your muscles or your mind, you learn to be guided from within - only moving when your body says it's ready. You learn to push when that is appropriate, and you learn to wait, hold hack, or retreat when that is appropriate. Appropriateness is something you cannot anticipate in advance. Knowing when to push or when to yield is fundamentally only knowable in the living instant of each new moment. Being sensitive in this way is the result of having merged and "become one" with the pose.

As you merge the pose with the breathing you will feel the breath gently nudging, coaxing, opening, stretching, and relaxing your muscles and various tight areas. These areas are contracted energy, contracted parts of you. Releasing them, therefore, will not only give you more energy, but it will make you more comfortable in your body as well.

Merging the pose with the breath will also increase your sensitivity. You'll feel what's happening with more clarity. You'll notice how holding the breath dulls your feeling-sensitivity, and how letting the breath flow freely and deeply increases it. You'll notice how your breathing actually fans the feeling, increasing and clarifying it, heightening your ability to sense yourself. Learning to feel, and feel deeply, is one of the more important learnings in yoga. Proper breathing will directly enhance your feeling-sensitivity.

The idea is to increase your sensitivity to the inner feeling of your body and let it guide you into the appropriate action for that particular moment. That's the secret - the primary thing to learn. The trick is gently to concentrate your attention on the steady flow of breath and ride it into the feeling-tone of the pose. The feeling-tone of the pose will then talk to you. It will instruct you about what to do, what subtle adjustments to make, whether or not to press deeper into the stretch, whether to breathe with more vigor or more gentleness, and how long to stay in the pose.

In this way you exercise your sensitivity and develop self-trust. Your yoga will become increasingly internal. It will become your own. You will no longer feel as though you are doing someone else's yoga. You will have learned how to learn from yourself, and you'll find this most important trait carrying over into all aspects of your lift. You will then understand that you have truly learned how to do yoga only when you've become your own best teacher which means being guided from within.

However, you will only hear the inner feeling talking to you if you are listening. If your mind is elsewhere while your body is doing the post, you are not actually doing yoga. You are not "in union" with what's happening. You're close, of course. There is a semblance of yoga occurring, and doing it at all is better than not doing it, but the practice here is that of merging and becoming one with what you're doing. You're practicing yoga, yoking or "joining with. " You're learning to merge, to yoke your conscious awareness with your now-experience - and you're practicing in this relatively simple and specific context where there are fewer variables to contend with. You're training yourself to keep your attention immersed in what's happening. Specifically, you're learning to stay with the flow of breath in order to stay with the feeling of the pose. The inner feeling will then guide you and tell you what to do. You will have learned how to do yoga when you've become willing to be guided from within.

In the broader context of what it means to live a yogic life, the idea is to continue this awareness all day long - not just in the poses. The poses, besides being good for you for so many reasons, are simply a spiritual context in which to practice being guided from within. During the day, practice this same kind of listening for inner guidance by paying attention to how you feel and then allow yourself to do and be as you are prompted. There's more to say about this later. For now, suffice it to say that asana and meditation practice make it easier to hear and follow your inner voice during the rest of your life, to let "Thy Will be done" be your basic instinct. They strengthen your ability to meditate constantly, always to be listening inwardly for guidance from Infinite Mind, and they develop the confidence required to trust yourself and go with the flow. When you are willing to be guided by the inner feeling, you will have learned the secret.

Balance
The proper use of breath also brings a balance in the way your body opens to the stretch. When the force normally used to push the body into greater opening is balanced by the relaxation that comes from proper breathing, a new kind of energized relaxation emerges. We normally think of relaxation as a letting-go that is flaccid, a diminution or lessening of energy. Proper breathing however, adds a vital and dynamic aspect to relaxation.

In order for yoga to feel right, a proper balance is necessary between push and yield. Too much push has a driven quality that betrays a harshness and severity toward oneself that is probably displayed in other areas of life as well. Your practice will be permeated with an emphasis on energy that is untamed, scattered, and often violent in nature. Injury, as well as an agitated, off-center state of mind is likely to result.

The other extreme occurs when "fire" is lacking, when there is no exploratory thrust, when it is predominantly yield. Yoga performed in this manner is dull and lethargic, all effort, energy, and intensity being avoided. There is a relaxed and sometimes sensuous quality to this, but yoga done in too yielding a fashion never develops the openings or strength that provide the energized relaxation that is so appealing and revitalizing.

Depending on your personality, you may find yourself tending toward one or the other of these extremes. If so, understand that there is an appropriate balance of these forces. If you tend toward being aggressive and overly goal-oriented, try allowing more surrender and yield into your practice. This will not slow down or interfere with your progress. In fact, learning to yield, be patient, and deliberately enter more slowly into the poses will actually increase the depth of your poses. It will help you achieve more easily what you are now attempting through excessive force. Your practice will mature in ways you had not anticipated, revealing an unexpected richness and depth.

If your tendency is to yield and not be assertive, try being more adventuresome, energetic, and exploratory. This can work to your advantage and be very pleasing, without being difficult or stressful. The analogy of an early morning yawn and stretch again comes to mind. If you were to wake up and simply hold your arms out limply to your sides, it just wouldn't feel as satisfying as it does to stretch with enthusiasm It feels better to invest a little energy - to stretch with some intensity. It's not difficult to do this. It's exhilarating, invigorating.

An effective way of bringing a balance here, regardless of which extreme you tend toward, involves using your breathing and the line of energy technique (which I will describe later) to generate energy, but at relatively easy places in the pose. This will satisfy the hunger to push for those who like to push, and respect the tendency to yield for others. It will also teach those who like to push how to yield, and those who like to yield how to push. Done this way, your strength, endurance, and flexibility will all increase at a pace your body can assimilate and retain. You will become stronger, lighter, more relaxed, sensuous, and comfortable in your body than you will by just pushing or by just yielding.

Yoga that has a proper balance between the active and passive feels wonderful. It is not overly aggressive or torpid, but a harmonious and complimentary blend of push and yield. It is at once both vigorous and quiet, like a perfectly centered top spinning so fast it appears motionless.

Be sure you understand, however, it involves push and yield - both. Sometimes it is appropriate to push and at those times it feels best to generate energy and push; other times it will be more appropriate to yield and it will feel better to surrender, let go, and be passive. And yet, even in a given moment when you are primarily pushing, there is much more than this going on. You are also waiting for your body to let you in. You are not only pushing. And if, at a given particular moment you are primarily yielding you are also, simultaneously exercising control to some degree in order mentally to direct the energy flow and continue staying in the pose. You are not just yielding. It is always push and yield.

The important idea to keep in mind is to be guided always by the inner feeling. This is one of the primary teachings of yoga. Here in the physical practice, you listen to your body You start easy. You do the groundwork. You listen inwardly to the subtle impulses to action that arise while you are in a posture. You then follow the impulses of the moment - stretching here, stretching there, breathing deeper or softer, making subtle internal adjustments, increasing or decreasing the intensity of the pose, whatever meets the need. The need is to do whatever is necessary to make this moment feel perfect, to do what feels best. You learn to do this. But you also allow yourself to do this. Your feelings, by the way, are a trustworthy guide to action because only what is best can feel best. You can therefore trust yourself to trust yourself. You have your own best interests at heart.

Therefore, by listening to the impulses of the moment and following your own inner guidance in the postures, you are actually exercising your sensitivity and developing self-trust. Self-trust, remember is more than merely trusting yourself. It's that quality of being that arises where you realize you did not create yourself, that you are all expression of the creative God Force, and that there is an underlying spiritual orderliness to all things you are a part of. In trusting yourself, therefore, you are trusting that deeper essence that is the source of you. Trusting yourself then becomes the most intimate way of trusting the universe and the most obvious demonstration of that greater trust.

Proper use of the breath will enhance your ability to feel, to listen inwardly, to be guided from within, and thereby to learn from yourself. It will also task you to sustain a sharp, focused attention for longer periods of time. In combination, these strengthen your mental stamina and help you be wholehearted.

The ujjayi breathing technique in particular is a very effective centering device. As you hold your attention on the sound of the breath, the quality of your participation will improve dramatically. This new quality of undivided attention and full participation will facilitate your personal experience of yoga. A sense of oneness will then guide you and tell you what to do, and you will notice yourself becoming more creative and intuitive, not only in your yoga but in your life.

Interest, Attention, and Enjoyment
It is difficult to pay attention to something if you are not interested in that thing. But it is also difficult to be interested if you are not paying attention. For example, you may be watching the best film in the world. But if you are thinking of something else and are not paying attention, you will miss the subtle nuances that make the film so good, and you won't appreciate or enjoy it as much as you might. Interest, attention, and enjoyment are obviously interrelated. Of course, if you are not interested in doing yoga at the moment, you should really be doing something else. Or you may he interested but unable to maintain a focused attention for an extended period of time. Ujjayi breathing can create that focus.

Each breath you take can remind you to be here now, to treat this moment as important, and repeatedly to affirm the fact that right now you are exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to be doing. You will probably be amazed at how much energy is suddenly at your disposal the moment you realize this. When you are no longer wishing you were somewhere else, doing something different, you will discover that energy is the given and that energy is abundant. What would you expect but the fullest enthusiasm and response when your body, mind, heart, attention, and interest are all in one place? When your attention is no longer splintered and dissipated through conflict, indecisiveness, or half-heartedness, you will experience an increase in energy and feel more alive.

This is especially interesting because, unless you are an absolute beginner, you'll find your mind tiring long before your body. When your mind begins to tire, only then does your body start getting tired. As your interest begins to flicker and wane, you become less attentive. You start thinking of other things, wishing you were elsewhere. Your energy goes elsewhere. You treat your body and your yoga with less care, less respect; and automatically but not surprisingly, your body - following the dictates of your mind - loses its energy and also gets tired. But as you stay clear within yourself that this is what you want to be doing right now, you will be able to sustain interest and attention for longer periods of time. As your capacity for attention increases, so does your energy, your actual physical energy.

Your mental attitude, therefore, is the real source of energy and enthusiasm, and you will learn this very quickly in yoga. Interest is the key. Be interested in the quality of your participation, in discovering where your interest actually lies. Notice what attracts your attention and what motivates you. And attend to the change of tide - when do you start being less interested, and why? What brings it to life again? Notice how your interest fluctuates, how at some moments you are more interested than at other moments. This is not only the heart of yoga, it is the heart of life.

And understand, if the quality of your participation is half-hearted, fragmented, and conflicted, then that will be your experience, and it will not be as satisfying or fulfilling as it might. It's not that you should be wholehearted and fully attentive. It's that more and more you will want to be that way simply because being wholehearted and attentive to your present moment of conscious experience is where the greatest enjoyment lies. In this way it is possible to make every specific moment of your yoga practice enjoyable and meaningful.

It's worth the small effort required to discipline yourself mentally to be attentive and present with whatever is happening each new moment. The way to stay most interested is by keeping your attention on what's actually happening. Train yourself to stay in the now. Specifically, stay with the breath and stay with the feeling of the post. You will only hear the pose talking to you if you are listening and paying attention. Sometimes you will practice with vigor, sometimes you will practice with softness, and most of the time it will be somewhere in between. Yoga is not mechanical. The key is interest, and the trick is to be attentive in the moment to that which elicits your fullest enthusiasm and response.

The quality of your yoga, and of your life, depends solely on how interested you are in the doing of it. Interest unleashes the energy of passion, and passion expresses itself as quality. Therefore, especially toward the end of a session when both your body and your attention are beginning to tire, deliberately continue breathing with the ujjayi breath. It is not hard to do this, and to do so strengthens your capacity for attention. Strengthening your capacity for attention is the real key to yoga, and your breathing is the key to this capacity. This is more important than bring able to touch your toes, or stand on your head, or turn yourself inside out.

Yoga's Naked Commercialism, by Stewart Lawrence

Yoga teacher Kathryn Budig in the controversial ToeSox ad
Photograph: Jasper Johal

The nude trend is stirring debate about how far yoga, now a multi-billion-dollar industry, has traveled from its spiritual roots

American yoga practitioners are abuzz with a new controversy rocking their once boutique but now rapidly commercialising industry: magazine advertising and public yoga classes featuring unabashed nudity. The controversy pits seasoned yoga teachers and other spiritual purists, who abhor the growing trend, against a new generation of aggressive yoga "entrepreneurs", anxious to promote the ancient Hindu practice as America's premier "wellness" lifestyle – even if it means exploiting, as critics maintain, the female "beauty myth" and embracing a "sex-sells" marketing strategy.

So far, the two sides have largely confined their debate to articles and blog postings in popular online yoga magazines, including the industry's trade publication, Yoga Journal, where nude and semi-nude ads featuring a prominent Los Angeles yoga teacher, Kathryn Budig, first started appearing last summer. Budig posed provocatively in ads for the clothing manufacturer ToeSox, which prompted one of the magazine's original co-founders, Judith Hanson Lasater, to protest publicly, first in a letter to the editor, and more recently, in interviews.

For yoga purists, it's bad enough that yoga is no longer the quiet, esoteric practice of yore. Thanks to heavy marketing, and word-of-mouth advertising, it's now a bustling business worth $6bn a year and featuring a gallery of self-promoting yoga "celebrities" like Budig, and an endless array of high-priced yoga accessories, including sticky mats, CD-roms, home videos and pricey yoga retreats and vacations in exotic Third World getaways.

Until now, many have tolerated, and even celebrated, yoga's commercialisation as a way of promoting its popularity, even if it means "dumbing down" the practice or heavily tailoring it to the traditional fitness market to further expand its appeal. According to Yoga Journal, some 18 million Americans – about 1 in 10 adults – were practicing some form of yoga in 2006, though the numbers seem to have fallen off in recent years, even as the revenues generated by the industry continue to grow.

But something seems to have cracked inside the souls of long-time yoga enthusiasts when Budig agreed to be photographed wearing only her ToeSox. In one of the photographs in the series of ads, she's in a difficult Ashtanga yoga pose, known as "firefly", and her expression is serious, but the effect is oddly disconcerting. Is it "art", as some of its ardent proponents, including Budig and ToeSox executives maintain, or is it merely the latest twist in a long history of sexual and commercial exploitation?

The debate over nude advertising and health & fitness is hardly a new one. Four decades ago, Sports Illustrated caused an enormous stir when its cover featured a topless woman jogging on the beach. Critics, including me – yes, at the tender age of 10, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published – suggested, naively perhaps, that topless women simply don't belong on the cover of a serious sports magazine. Others saw it as a celebration of the human body, and of the joyful exuberance that one experiences through jogging and other forms of exercise.

Clearly, our mores have changed – or have they? In 1999, women's soccer player Brandi Chastain caused an enormous controversy when she spontaneously stripped off her jersey after kicking the goal that ensured her team's victory. And Chastain didn't expose her body – just her sports bra.

Male soccer players often doff their shirts, but, of course, men exposing their chests in public is commonplace. Amazingly, people to this day debate whether Chastain crossed an imaginary line of female "propriety".

But is yoga somehow different? Perhaps. For one thing, it's not meant to be a sports activity, and the persons exposing themselves, while celebrities of sorts, claim to be spiritual models, and some, like Budig, have direct contact with us, their students. According to Lasater:

"[A]ll this sexualisation of yoga through props and advertising [affects] the environment of yoga classes in ways that do not honour the boundary between teacher and student. I want to help create a safe space for yoga to be taught. In the US, we pay people the most money who can distract us the best: actors, personalities and sports figures. Entertainment is all about distraction. The use of naked bodies to sell yoga products is about using distraction to sell introspection."

Others are equally worried that selling yoga with fit, trim bodies – almost all of them young and white – imposes the same harsh psychological burden on women that traditional fashion and beauty advertising does. Even more, perhaps, because women with serious psychological or physical health issues – such as obesity, as well as anorexia and bulimia – are drawn to yoga to affirm themselves, regardless of their "looks" or how they might feel about their bodies.

Budig, however, disagrees, and so do many yogis, especially – surprisingly, perhaps – many women. They see her as a courageous role model for self-expression, who is simply saying, I love my body, and what I can do it with it, and you should, too. But it is also clear that Budig is using the controversy to promote her own yoga business, and to enhance her own celebrity. Equally, ToeSox appears to be exploiting her yoga connection – and body – to appeal to a key consumer niche for its product.

The appearance of Budig's ads – and others similarly controversial, including one titled "Say No to Cameltoe", parallels the sudden emergence and rapid proliferation of "Naked Yoga", yoga classes conducted entirely in the nude. Its founder, Aaron Star, says many people, especially in cities like New York and Los Angeles, don't have ways to express closeness and intimacy without having sex, and that his practice affords that. But Star's also heavily promoting Naked Yoga videos that feature full nudity and bear a strong resemblance to soft-core pornography. He's even provocatively entitled one of his new videos apparently designed for the yoga beginner, "Hot Nude Yoga Virgin".

But if so, why stop at nudity? It's conceivable that someone might try to create a business that exploits yoga's Tantric roots even further, promote studios where students can engage in erotic exchanges with their teachers? Actually, that already happens, but so far, no one's figured out how to make a buck off of it, without actually breaking the law on solicitation.

Does all this fuss over yoga and sex reflect the enduring strength of American puritanism and prudishness? Are critics merely jealous killjoys? Supporters of Budig and the new nudity trend in yoga certainly think so. But it's also true that yoga is one of the few industries of its size that exists with virtually no regulation – either from public authorities, or from within. Last summer, about the same time the nude trend emerged, New York and Virginia tried to impose state guidelines on yoga "teacher training" programmes – the programmes that are used to teach advanced students to become teachers themselves. But heavy lobbying by yoga associations in both states beat back those efforts, claiming yoga was a "spiritual" enterprise, much like a church, and should be "exempt" from all government interference.

A spiritual enterprise with revenues of $6bn a year? That's some pose.

Guardian, UK, October 2010

Parvritta Janu Sirsasana, by Rod Stryker

Revolved head-to-knee pose generates an experience of freedom and ease, awakening a sense of the boundlessness of our true nature.

“How will I ever master that pose?” Anyone who has practiced yoga has asked themselves a similar question one time or another. I recall two occasions, both of which occurred in my 20s when I was at the height of my flexibility. The first was at a performance of Cirque du Soleil. The second was watching a contortionist on the boardwalk in Venice, California. Despite the number of advanced postures I could do, I felt a kind of hopelessness about the future of my asana practice on both occasions. If you’ve seen someone do something with their body that seemed utterly out of reach, you may have had similar doubts about your ability to attain mastery. These doubts compel us to examine the relationship between mastery of asana and extreme flexibility and/or strength. Before we assume we’ll never attain mastery in asana, let’s look at what it really means.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is the most illuminating text on the science of yoga. Revered through the ages, its sublime and comprehensive teachings are contained in 196 aphorisms. Asana is only mentioned in four, a fact which sheds light on the place of the poses in the larger context of yoga.

Asana is first mentioned early in the second chapter as one of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga. The last mentions are in sutras 2.46–48, where we find the teaching on its practice. Sutra 2.46 offers a basic definition and practice guidelines: “Asana is a steady or motionless (sthira) posture accompanied with a sense of ease or comfort (sukha).” But it is the last two sutras that address our question about mastery. Here Patanjali is crystal clear: while doing your asana (with sukha and sthira), “loosen effort while meditating on the Infinite (ananta).”

That’s it. There is no mention of becoming a master once you can, say, put your leg behind your head. Mastery doesn’t depend on feats of flexibility or strength but is sourced through communion with the Infinite.

Awareness of the Infinite is unquestionably a state of mind, yet certain postures more readily open the door. Some of the most direct are lateral poses—parivritta janu shirshasana chief among them. This powerful, radiant pose delivers an immediate experience of the boundless.

What does it mean to be boundless physically? The answer may surprise you: bodiless. That’s right—the culmination of asana is to no longer identify with your body. This idea is not as lofty as it may sound. In fact, it’s something we all aspire to. It’s called being healthy. Nothing reminds us more of having a body than physical suffering—the tiniest splinter brings us right back to our mortal coil. On the other hand, when nothing ails us we live joyously and spontaneously, even spaciously, unaware of the container called “my body.”

Therein lies one of the great paradoxes of yoga practice. The ultimate achievement in asana is to experience the Infinite—“no body.” Yet the very process of working on the body day after day to build physical precision and control often makes us more absorbed in it. That is the risk of seeing asana as a predominantly physical practice. The more we do it, the more absorbed we become in the very thing we are meant to move beyond.

So how does one get beyond the body? The answer, at least through asana, lies in the postures that move energy up—namely, backbends and laterals. Lateral postures are particularly effective. While elongating the spine, they create space in the intercostal, quadratus, adductor, shoulder, and abdominal muscles, as well as in the pelvis, lungs, and heart. They also stretch the kidneys, which, according to the Taoist tradition, frees stagnant energies that settle there as a direct result of unresolved fear. Finally, at the pranic level, laterals increase both prana and vyana, which activate the qualities of lightness and ascension.

The five poses here are sequenced to provide maximum preparation for parivritta janu shirshasana, the apex pose of the sequence. A complete lateral practice should also include sun salutations, additional standing, sitting, and lying postures that have a backbend emphasis, as well as the appropriate counter poses.

The key to effective and safe lateral stretching is stabilizing the hips and then, while rotating the torso, maintaining length in the spine. Avoid overarching the lower back, collapsing the chest, or insufficient rotation. Proper alignment and maintaining a balance among stability, rotation, and elongation allow us to create a deep and dynamic lateral stretch. If necessary, go halfway in any or all of the postures in order to maintain that specific intention and to get the most benefit.

What is the result of doing asana masterfully? Patanjali mentions nothing about physical accomplishment. According to yoga’s greatest sage, the culmination of asana is that duality (good/bad, happiness/ disappointment, success/failure) no longer affects us. Asana done in the right spirit leads to being less and less at the mercy of the ups and downs of everyday life. Thus, the ultimate achievement in asana is boundless freedom—a state of being so present and at ease with who we are that we are able to masterfully shape destiny itself.

Triangle Pose Variation (trikonasana) prepares us for the deeper laterals. Grounds the legs to help anchor the hips. Emphasizes the extension of the waist and the spine—not the shoulder. The back body is on the same plane as the backs of the legs; the shoulders stack. Draw the top arm into the shoulder and activate the inner body to reach toward the top of the head.

Hint: Inhale, the spine lengthens. Exhale, move the navel toward the spine while rotating the chest toward the sky.

Standing Hand-to-Toe Pose (utthita hasta padangushthasana) is an adductor stretch that activates the secondary action of the laterals. Press into both heels. Both sides of the waist lift. While pressing the inner thigh of the lifted leg forward, rotate the torso in the opposite direction.

Hint: Inhale, expand the back body. Exhale, stabilize the standing leg and the sacrum.

Vasisthasana is a classic lateral arm balance. Shins in, shoulders stack. Lift and press the inner thighs back while hugging the sacrum into the body.

Hint: Inhale, broaden the collarbones while drawing the waist and the ribs away from the hips. Exhale, the navel rotates toward the sky.

Latch Pose (parighasana) is deepened by emphasizing its asymmetrical component. To do this, expand the upper-side body (i.e., arch the upper-side waist, the intercostals, and the lung toward the sky).

Hint: Inhale, lengthen the side, the back, and the front bodies. Exhale, draw the tailbone into the body, applying enough rotation so that the shoulders are stacked.

Head-to-Knee Pose (janu shirshasana) stretches the back for the sitting twist: parivritta janu shirshasana. Press the inner thigh toward the floor and the extended heel forward. Externally rotate the inner thigh of the bent knee—gradually working that knee away from the straight leg. Elongate both sides of the waist.

Hint: Inhale, lengthen the sides and lift the collarbones. Exhale, flatten the lower back.

I do Yoga backwards, by Matthew Sanford

I came to yoga because I got tired of overcoming my body. That’s basically what I was told to do: get my upper body strong and drag my lower body through life. After 12 years of treating my paralyzed body as an object to overcome, I just lost so much of the joy of living. I needed to experience something different. I needed to feel my body more. I’ve never lived in the same town as my teacher, so the primary vehicle of my yoga experience has always been my own practice. That’s what a lot of students are missing when they just go to class. You can’t make things your own in a class and experiment with them and play with them.

I can’t lift my legs. I can’t flex the muscles. But I feel a hum, a tingling, a buzz. My yoga practice is trying to understand the asanas. The instructions in an asana are intended to amplify your connection to that hum, and I don’t mean this in a touchy-feely New Age way. I literally mean there’s a hum. Because of my paralysis, I understand and appreciate that the sound Om is actually calibrated to that buzz, to that hum. So my yoga practice is trying to watch how alignment and precision amplify that hum through both my paralyzed and unparalyzed body.

I study Iyengar yoga. I’ve been practicing for nearly 17 years. I’m not so worried any more about what complicated poses I can do. I’m much more interested in refining the base of a pose. If you can continually deepen or refine the quality of your base in any simple pose, then the rest just comes.

Because I don’t walk, my practice almost always begins with some time to really feel the floor, the earth. So I’ll sit in dandasana (staff pose) and just really feel. I’ll then stretch my heel by pulling one foot back, because that’s what you get from walking. I warm up by doing what most yoga practitioners get by standing.

I do full poses, but I also do parts of poses. I break them apart. For example, it’s too much work and takes too many people to help me get into headstand, shirshasana. So I have to start thinking about what’s going on in shirshasana that’s important for the spine and the mind-body relationship. I’m relatively confident now that the feeling in the spine in shirshasana is similar to the feeling in the spine in lotus, padmasana. Of course, pressure on the top of your head does something to your spine in space, so I might put a book on my head. I might do chaturanga dandasana (four-limbed staff pose) with my head slightly touching the wall. You have to learn to extend through your whole body. That extension has some similarities to what I imagine is going on when you’re lifting up into shirshasana. Like a quilt, I’m piecing together parts of poses. That being said, dang, I wish I could do shirshasana. I have shirshasana envy.

In general, when I teach yoga and adapt yoga and practice yoga, I have to go from the experience of the pose to the action, as opposed to going from the action—doing trikonasana (triangle pose) 3,000 times—to the experience. I do yoga backwards. I have to intuit the feeling, the sense of direction.

I have to have faith in the building blocks. But isn’t that true for you, too? That’s really yogic realization, when you don’t get lost in the drama of the full pose, when you keep it simple. And then the other stuff just happens.

Matthew Sanford is a yoga teacher, author, and public speaker.

Upward Facing Bow, by Rod Stryker

Urdhva dhanurasana (upward-facing bow) is an expression of the joy and fearlessness that is the hallmark of a successful yoga practice. This pose opens the body and awakens the mind.

The ancient masters saw the body as a bridge to the infinite. Their exploration of how it can be used to access Spirit’s sublime beauty and power is what we know today as hatha yoga. The approach of these masters was based on two key insights: all the forces of nature are contained in our physical form, and fulfillment—both material and spiritual—follows effortlessly as we develop mastery over these forces within
the body.

We often judge our practice by what our body can or can’t do: the number of sun salutations, how deep we are in a pose, how long we can hold it, even which cross-legged seat we use for meditation. None of these are true barometers of practice. While the body is indeed where the journey of yoga begins for many of us, perfection of the body is not the goal. In yoga your body is a means, not the end.

I am often asked how to measure the quality of a yoga practice. “How do I know that the practice I am doing is the best one for me?” The answer: by its effect. The quality of your practice is ultimately measured by its effect on the quality of your life. In other words, mastery in yoga is mastery of life.

Urdhva dhanurasana, like all poses, benefits our body, mind, energetic systems, and emotions in unique ways. By encapsulating the essence of backbending, the pose propels us toward the ultimate embodiment of yoga: fearlessness and joy.

Sukha, the Sanskrit term for ease, happiness, or pleasure, literally means “good space.” The masters tell us we suffer (duhkha) because “stuff” overshadows the inherent goodness of our inner space. It settles between cells, organs, vertebrae, along medians, and in our fields of perception. The glory of backbends is their ability to disperse this “stuff,” thus revealing our natural state of ease.

Urdhva dhanurasana increases the vital force around the heart (pran), as well as the distributive force (vyana) throughout the body, thus increasing the breadth of courage and awareness. The pose stimulates both mind and body—the net result is exultation, awakening radiance, delight, and compassion.

This pose is the culmination of backbends, and so is beyond the reach of many students. Those who can do it often experience pain or harm their lower back or shoulders. Thus, the challenge is to move toward accomplishing the pose safely and effectively.

The principles of sequencing (vinyasa krama) require us to systematically prepare the body for the most challenging pose in a practice (the apex). Poses that prepare us for the apex have a similar physical, mental, and energetic action, but are simpler and more accessible. Methodical sequencing has four steps: First, identify the apex. Then analyze the focal points—the areas of the body most involved—in terms of flexibility, stability, and correct actions. Next, choose the appropriate preparatory poses, and, finally, place them in order.

The focal points for urdhva dhanurasana include flexibility along the front body, specifically in the quadriceps, hip flexors, intercostal muscles, shoulders, wrists; and strength and stability in the sacrum, arms, shoulders, wrists. Correct actions include internal rotation of thighs, upper arms, and the engagement of the hamstrings.

The postures pictured here address many of these focal points. I consistently use them (or variations) to prepare students for deep backbends. They should be part of a complete practice that includes sun salutations, standing postures, arm strengthening, and counterposes.

Asana practice enhances physical well-being, but its greatest effect is on the mind and pranic (energy) body. Upward-facing bow and the postures that build toward it inspire us to reach for greatness and increase our capacity and passion for life.

Chair Pose (utkatasana) is an excellent preparation for backbending. It strengthens the lower back, opens the chest and shoulders, and establishes the correct action to stabilize the sacrum: tailbone draws into the body (pelvic tilt), while upper arms externally rotate and draw down into the shoulder sockets.

Hint: On inhale, lift chest and collarbones. On exhale, tailbone tilts toward the heels.

Side-Angle Pose (parshvakonasana) is a dynamic stretch for the intercostals and shoulders.

Hint: Stretch the back body and front body equally. Back leg muscles engage, draw tailbone into the body.

Warrior I Variation (virabhadrasana I) builds on the pelvic tilt of chair pose by deepening the opening of the chest. It dynamically stretches the hip flexors and quadriceps.

Hint: Inhale, lift collarbones. Exhale, expand and flatten lumbar spine, tailbone toward the front heel. Powerfully, internally rotate the back thigh.

Cobra Variation (bhujangasana) deepens the lumbar curve, engages lower abdominal lift, promotes expansion of intercostals and lengthening of the upper spine.

Hint: Keep the legs active: shins in, inner thighs engaged, and spiral toward the ceiling. Arm draws down into the shoulder socket. Exhale, navel toward spine.

Bow (dhanurasana) enlivens the action of the legs, chest, and pelvis. Its similarity to urdhva dhanurasana (in action and shape) make it an ideal preparation because its action and even its shape are practically identical to the apex pose, but it is more accessible.

Hint: Draw the tailbone through the thighs toward the floor.

One-Legged Camel (ekapada ushtrasana) deepens the action of warrior I, in particular deepening the release for front thighs and pelvis.

Hint: Engage the inner thigh by lifting and contracting the muscle toward the femur. Maintain the internal rotation on the back leg. Lift lower abdomen and collarbones. The front knee is over the heel.

Playing the Edge, by Erich Schiffman
Excerpt from Moving into Stillness

A large part of the art and skill in yoga lies in sensing just how far to move into a stretch. If you don't go far enough, there is no challenge to the muscles, no intensity, no stretch, and little possibility for opening. Going too far, however, is an obvious violation of the body, increasing the possibility of both physical pain and injury. Somewhere between these two points is a degree of stretch that is in balance: intensity without pain, use without abuse, strenuousness without strain. You can experience this balance in every posture you do.

This place in the stretch is called your "edge." The body's edge in yoga is the place just before pain, but not pain itself. Pain tells you where the limits of your physical conditioning lie. Edges are marked by pain and define your limits. How far you can fold forward, for example, is limited by your flexibility edge; to go any further hurts and is actually counterproductive. The length of your stay in a pose is determined by your endurance edge. Your interest in a pose is a function of your attention edge.

In daily life, we tend to remain within a familiar but limited comfort zone by staying away from both our physical and mental edges. This would be fine except that as aging occurs these limits close in considerably. Our bodies tighten, our range of movement decreases, and our strength and stamina diminish. By consciously bringing the body to its various limits or edges and holding it there, gently nudging it toward more openness with awareness, the long, slow process of closing in begins to reverse itself. The range expands as the edges change.

Sensing where your edges are and learning to hold the body there with awareness, moving with its often subtle shifts, can be called "playing the edge." This is a large part of what you'll be doing in your practice. Your skill in yoga has little to do with your degree of flexibility or where your edges happen to be. Rather, it is a function of how sensitively you play your edges, no matter where they are.

This is a very freeing idea. Normally, we have an idea of how the posture "should" be. We have ideas about how deep we should be able to go into a pose, what we should look like while we are there, and how long we should be able to stay. We are often more aware of where we aren't than of where we are.

This idea of the "completed" or "ideal" posture as a specific destination somewhere in the future is often a lurking presence in the back of our minds as we do the poses. Because of this, there will necessarily be a gap between where you are in the posture and where you think you should be. This gap, more often than not, contains a subtle frustration, a conflict, a feeling that where you are is insufficient - or worse, who you are is insufficient - and that if you were truly doing yoga properly and were a "good" or "evolved" person, you would be somewhere other than where you are. If this is the case, your practice will be permeated with the effort of going somewhere else. It will be future-oriented, the present moment being significant only as a stepping stone to the future. And you will miss being present.

Envisioning the postures in advance can yield dramatic results, however. And watching someone else do an advanced and difficult posture that you would like to achieve can be especially helpful, both because you see it is possible and can be performed with ease, and because your nervous system - simply by watching - receives a tremendous amount of nonverbal information about how to perform the pose correctly. Having that information in your nervous system and the back of your mind as you practice can make that pose easier for you, as long as you use it as a general guideline that you understand will be expressed differently in your body. The way to realize these changes is by focusing your attention on the process of what you are doing. This involves flirting with the tight spots, your edges, with sensitivity and attention.

The main thing to understand is that there is no such thing as a "completed" or "ideal" posture. Each posture is an ever-evolving, constantly moving energy phenomenon that is different from day to day, moment to moment, and person to person. The process of sensitively flirting with your edges and achieving perfect energy flow is not merely the means to achieve the pose - it is the pose.

This is what the physical aspect of yoga is fundamentally all about. Your body is limited in movement not only through its genetic makeup, but through the conditionings that have accrued over the years. As you age, this becomes more and more apparent. Yoga is a way of exploring these limits. It's not a matter of "How can I attain this or that final posture?" It's a matter of gently pressing into the various edges you encounter within the template structure of each particular posture. And your edges and limits will change as a by-product of this exploration; you will change.

Intensity and Pain
You should never be in pain as you practice yoga. Your practice should not be a painful ordeal, but rather an expression of joy. Pain is most easily defined as any sensation you do not like, and it always invokes a natural withdrawal mechanism. When you put your hand on a hot stove, for example, instantly you take it off. Before you're even aware that your hand is on the stove, it's off. This is built-in self-protective device.

The same withdrawal mechanism is activated whenever a yoga stretch begins to hurt. Muscles clamp down and contract in order to protect themselves from overstretching. They are suddenly less willing, fearful, and they resist the stretch - naturally. And they do this, to whatever small or large degree, before you are even aware it's happening. This is blatantly at odds with your initial intention to stretch, open, and expand your physical boundaries. Therefore, by pushing into pain you are actually working against yourself. One foot is on the accelerator, and one foot is on the brake.

Pushing and working hard are frequently appropriate and can be thoroughly enjoyable at the right moments, but they should never result in pain. You may want to approach pain and get near it, but not actually be in it. You want to be in the place where it "hurts good," where you know you are dealing with what needs to be dealt with - the contracted parts of your energy field - but where it not so intense that you resist, tighten up to protect yourself, or prevent yourself from going too far.

The ideal state for practice is to be as willing and relaxed as possible, as non-resisting as possible, so that one part of you is not in opposition to another. You can then comfortably press your edges open. The practice becomes one of be relaxed and willing at your deeper edges; and this isn't necessarily easy. It's difficult to stay relaxed in the midst of a high-intensity stretch.

You want to stay within your comfort zone where you are safe and, at the same time, press into the various tight areas. By pressing, stretching and breathing into your tight areas, you can ease them open, thereby expanding the boundaries of your comfort zone. It's like being inside a bubble and gently pressing outward from inside to expand its shape, so that you experience more space and comfort within the bubble.

Pain lurks just beyond your deepest edges as a reminder that you have gone too far. It's important for anyone who spends time nudging edges open with yoga to have a healthy understanding of pain - and to have a feeling for the distinction between pain and intensity.

The word pain actually stands for a variety of different possible sensations ranging anywhere from sharp and intense to subtle and dull. Physical pain may arise from a variety of causes, a pulled muscle, for example, or from a stretch that is too intense. Psychological pain often involves the feeling that you are in a place you don't like, doing something you would rather not he doing.

Herein lies one of the reasons for the frequent confusion between intensity and pain. A powerful stretch, whether or not you have gone too far, will generate an intense sensation. Someone who is not used to intensity or is excessively worried about getting hurt may be afraid of the intense sensation and resist it. Resisted intensity becomes pain. Therefore, even relatively mild levels of intensity can be experienced as pain if you go beyond your psychological edge.

If fear prevents you from going deeper or staying longer in a posture, it is wise to avoid overriding the fear by being brave or courageous, since this makes injury more likely. Instead of pushing past psychological limits, open more slowly by finding a less intense level of stretch just before fear enters. Hold the position there as you deepen the breath, relax, and acclimatize to the stretch. By playing the edge of fear like this, you never have to experience psychological discomfort.

This can have a very profound influence on all aspects of your life. One of the things you learn in yoga is to enjoy working with intensity. Intensity is simply more "energy" at any given moment, more feeling. Happiness and sadness, for example, can both be experienced with more or less intensity. If you are unable or unwilling to deal with an increase in intensity, however, not only in your yoga but in your daily life as well, your range of life experience will necessarily remain limited and narrow. Yoga can teach you to enjoy and learn from a broader range of experience. It will encourage you to seek out and process more intensity. The more you do this within the safe arena of yoga practice, the more it will influence all of your life. This is not as intense as it may sound. More intensity isn't even noticeable as you become strong and open.

This has two distinct advantages. First, you will be able to allow more pleasure into your life. More good will come to you because you are open and receptive, no longer pushing it away. You will experience more joy and find yourself able to handle the heightened intensity of happiness. Haven't you noticed that even in the midst of joy, something you thought you wanted, there is often a part of you that wants to turn it off? Or at least turn it down a bit? It's difficult to handle intensity of any kind, even if you like it. Yoga can change this for you forever. As you are able to generate more energy and process more intensity in the poses with enjoyment and full willingness, you will correspondingly be able to receive and process more goodness in your life.

Secondly, yoga teaches you to experience the so-called "negative" emotions and intensities without being overly disturbed by them, without having to run away from them. They will feel less intense than they previously would have. You will then be able to learn from the "bad" and painful experiences in life without being bowled over by them. And therefore, because your full range of life experience is being broadened and enlarged in all directions, you are now able to learn from both the "good" and "bad," making your life that much richer.

It is important to learn how to generate voluntary intensity deliberately and willingly, by deepening the breath, increasing the current, strengthening your lines, and flirting with the various edges that arise in each pose. This is best learned in postures that are easy for you. In these postures any intensity you experience is largely self-generated. Learn to create voluntary intensity in these easy poses and in the early stages of any pose you do, and then delicately press into your tight areas in order to nudge them gently to greater openness. This will prepare you for the intensely pleasurable sensations that come with the territory of advanced yoga. Intensity is pleasurable when you are prepared for it, when you are able to let go into it; it becomes unpleasant when you resist it or generate too much. Skill in yoga involves creating the perfect amount of intensity - not too much, not too little.

Minimum and Maximum Edges
Every pose has a "minimum edge" and a "maximum edge," as well as a series of intermediary edges between these. Most of us are aware of the maximum edge; it is the easiest to detect. This is the point where the stretch begins to hurt. it is the furthest point of tightness beyond which you should not go. If you were to force yourself beyond this point, you would definitely be in pain and might easily hurt yourself or pull a muscle.

The minimum edge is where you sense the very first sensation of stretch, the very first hint of resistance coming from your muscles. For example, bending over and touching your toes may tax you to the maximum, but about halfway down (or less) you can sense the first edge. This is where you initially become aware of a stretch.

It is important to be aware of your very first edge, your minimum edge. Taking your time to open that edge is like preparing to go through a series of gates. You must go through the first gate before you can go through the second, and the second before the third. The real key to depth in postures is going slowly, making sure you have thoroughly opened your early edges.

As you come into a pose, look for your very first edge. Do not rush past it. When you feel that edge, stop. Stop moving, deepen the breath, clarify your energy lines, and wait for it to open. You will know the first edge has opened when the sensations of stretch begin to diminish. At that point you will naturally want to go deeper into the posture. Rather than having to push your way in, you will feel drawn into the pose. As you are drawn deeper, a new edge will soon appear, and the sensations of stretch will come back. Wait for the sensations at this new edge to diminish before going deeper.

Do this over and over. Wait for the sensations of stretch to diminish somewhat and then go deeper. It will feel as though you are sneaking into the pose, not barging your way in. Proceed slowly, edge by edge and gate by gate. Apply pressure and wait for the musculature to open. Then you can move deeper into the pose, apply more pressure, all the while orchestrating the tone of the pose with the breath and current, again waiting for the musculature to open and the sensations of stretch to diminish. Continue working like this until the musculature will no longer release. Then stay where you are and be motionless. Retain the sense of energy and stretch, and release every hint of strain. Be as relaxed as you can be; do and don't-do. When you sense that it is nearly time to come out of the pose, delicately accelerate your energy for a moment. Finally, release the stretch altogether and come out of the pose.

While you are at each new subsequent edge, deepen the breath, define and clarify your lines, and pay close attention to the actual feeling of the stretch. Keep tabs on whether you are enjoying yourself or not. If not, why not? Find a way of doing the pose that is enjoyable. And then be interested: Are the sensations of stretch increasing? If so, it's a sign that you are too deep in the posture and should back off a bit. Are the sensations staying the same? If so, stay where you are, deepen the breath, and wait for the sensations of stretch to diminish. And when the sensations of stretch have diminished somewhat and you are able to relax with intensity, you will instinctively know it is time to go deeper.

Proceed step by step, edge by edge, paying close attention to what you are doing, being sensitive to the changing sensations of stretch. Remember, yoga is essentially an awareness process wherein you attend to these subtle shifts in sensation and feeling. The attention you give to these changing sensations of stretch is what exercises and develops your sensitivity. You will become sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations.

When the sensations of intensity no longer diminish at the new edge, it means your muscles are not yet ready for a stronger or deeper stretch. You can flirt with these tight areas by pressing into them gently, by changing the strength and character of your breathing, by increasing and decreasing the current in your lines, by staying in the posture longer, or by doing several repetitions of the pose - but do not force your way through them. Respect your tight edges. Work with them sensitively. Lure them to greater openness.

The more you do this, the better you'll get at it. Instead of telling your body when to move or what to do, you're learning to wait until it's ready. You wait for the inner feeling to tell you when to move. You listen for the inner cue to action, and this becomes easier and easier to detect. When you feel the energy flowing freely and the sensations of intensity beginning to wane, that's the sign. If you go too fast, however, the sensations will increase instead of diminish. There will be pain - a roadblock to the free flow of energy. This is feedback that you have gone too deep, too fast, too soon. Be interested in the feedback you're receiving from your body while you are in the pose.

Let's take an imaginary pose and rate it from one to ten. "One" is the beginning of the pose. "Ten" is as far as you can go before reaching pain. There is no pain in the one-to-ten range, though the sensations of stretch will become increasingly intense as you approach ten. Anything beyond ten we will not consider.

As you proceed from one to ten, the intensity will gradually increase. At one you will not feel much, but somewhere around two or three you will feel your first edge. Most of the time we rush past these early edges, looking for the real stretch deeper in the pose. It's important, however, to find your first edge and acclimatize yourself there before deepening. It is the opening of this early edge that allows the later, deeper openings to occur. If your early edges are not fully open, your body will not be ready for the intensity of the deeper extensions. Somewhere around Eight or nine and inching into ten is what 1 would call your maximum edge, the deepest extension or degree of intensity you are now capable of sustaining without pain or discomfort. Remember, never push yourself into pain.

If your limits in a posture are marked by pain, and if the intensity of the stretch continues to increase as you come closer and closer to your maximum edge, how do you tell the difference between pain and intensity? Easy! The answer is obvious. If you do not like the sensation and you do not want to be there, it's pain. It's totally up to you. This is your yoga. You are not here to punish yourself or do something you don't want to do. You are learning to generate an intensity that is attractive, pleasurable, that you like and want. It's something you are actually looking for. At your maximum edge, just before pain but not in pain-is an intensity that is extremely pleasurable. Therefore, go slowly. Take your time. Don't miss that perfect point. Increase the intensity of the pose gradually and deepen the pose with care. This will teach you to enjoy and assimilate greater amounts of energy and intensity.

The feeling-tone of a perfectly orchestrated strong stretch at a deep edge has a seductive quality to it. It's intense, pleasurable, exhilarating, and invigorating. Your body will like it. This should not be surprising, however, because by stretching your body to full openness, you are freeing yourself from the constraints of] tightness, contraction, and pain. You are increasing your internal energy flow, flushing new life through your system, opening and nourishing yourself at very deep levels; and all of this is good for you and therefore feels good. But if you unawarely press too deeply, too quickly, into a posture, then the pleasurable and attractive sensations of intensity will become painful and unattractive. If you' happen to go too far into a stretch - "too far" meaning you do not like it - then ease out of the pose until you do. Center yourself in your breathing, regain composure , and then slowly go in again, being more careful this time.

Be clear about this: If you start not liking the stretch for any reason, there move out of the pose until you find a place you do like. Reasons for not liking where you are can be physical or psychological. You may be stretching the muscle too much, or you may not be in the mood. Either reason is valid. Never be in ~ place you don't want to be. If volt do not like it, change it. Adjust Find the degree of stretch you can totally immerse yourself in.

Sometimes you will want to flirt more seriously with your various resistances and with the common reluctance to stay with an intense, and perhaps uncomfortable, sensation for an extended period of time. Hut doing this when you want to do this is different from doing it when you do not Wr7Ilt to. If you avoid Feedback and spend a lot of time being uncomfortable or in pain, you are not going to enjoy doing yoga. You will not look forward to your practice. You will not be working with the principles of opening. And by encountering unnecessary tension and resistance, you will not be doing your body any good, either.

Edges, Breathing, and Wholeness
Since your movements and stretches will be coordinated with your breathing ("Move when you breathe, and breathe when you move") the most subtle and sensitive way to play your edges and fine-tune the feel of your stretches is with your breathing. Without the sensitive use of your breathing, your stretches cannot be precise. The muscles and lines are not sensitive enough in themselves, nor sufficiently delicate, to fine-tune a stretch accurately.

The overall feeling in your muscles and body is the sound of yoga. The sound is a feeling, a tone, a feeling-tone; it's very much like singing a note. And if a particular line of energy is not tuned just right, it will either feel "flat" or "sharp." Continual readjustment is necessary to stay perfectly tuned. I usually create a line of energy that is slightly flat, just below perfect tension and with low current. I then deepen the breath as I increase the current to fine-tune the line. This enables me to press delicately into an edge from the inside out without invoking the stretch-reflex withdrawal mechanism; and if I happen to go too far, I soften my breathing, back off the edge somewhat, decrease the current in my lines, then try again. In this way it is possible to create a strong current of energy in any given line, or flirt with a maximum edge, or perform a difficult and advanced posture without forcibly pushing beyond physical and psychological edges. The moment you do that, remember, your intention will fragment, and your attention will wander. You will begin to resist what you are doing, part of you wanting to continue and part of you wanting to stop.

The hallmark of practicing yoga properly, however, is wholeness, wholeheartedness, not being in conflict. The idea is to generate wholeheartedly the optimum intensity of energy by consciously creating an increase or decrease in current. You then use this energy to extend your boundaries and limits, to expand your comfort zone, basically - both physically and psychologically speaking. Yoga is not about "pushing through the pain," "overcoming the pain," "no pain, no gain," or about being excessively willful. If you are having to be brave and courageous in order stoically to withstand excessive intensity, you are pushing too hard. You are forcing the issue, fighting. Never fight yourself. Yoga is not about fighting. There is no advantage to this and there are many disadvantages. Ease up when necessary. Intensify when appropriate. Practice skillfully.

The optimum degree of intensity is the amount that elicits your fullest attention; sometimes this will be a lot, and sometimes this will be a little. The correct amount is the amount that helps you be one-pointed and whole. It is the amount that feels perfect to you now. Too much is a strain, and too little is not sufficiently interesting. Your mind will wander in either case. Getting "better" at yoga means getting better at generating the perfect degree of current, intensity, breath, and feeling so that, in that moment, you are consciously one with what you're doing - whole, not conflicted, and exactly where you want to be.

Therefore, learn to be more interested in the feeling-tone of your body than in how deep you are in the posture. Learn to create an energy flow that is attractive to you. Do this by pressing into your edges with the perfect degree of current and the perfect pitch of breath. Realize this is not a function of how flexible you are. A stiff body can do this just as beautifully as a flexible one. The beautiful inner music - the inner feeling - is the yoga, not the achievement of elaborate postures. And be assured, your body will grow more beautiful and become strong and flexible by being played beautifully.

This is where the concept of push and yield most meaningfully displays itself. The art of yoga lies in how well you play your edges, how delicately you flirt with your limitations, how well you lure yourself deeper into the postures, how sensitively you balance the desire to achieve results with the relaxation of non-desire and surrender, and how thoroughly you immerse yourself in the process and enjoy what you are doing. And again, the primary tool you use is your breathing. Your breathing orchestrates the feeling-tone of the poses as it brings them to life.

Keep in mind that the various poses are like maps into your body. Having a map, however, does not infer a specific goal or a predetermined destination of where you should be in the pose. The idea is to use the map to explore - to look deliberately for tight, blocked areas within yourself - open them, and thereby create lines of clean energy flow. This requires that you be delicate, deliberate, and exact, not in the sense of "blueprint," but in the sense of being increasingly inwardly sensitive for the specific alignment and intensity of stretch that feels most right. This entails pressing for greater depth in the poses, greater openness, yet also remaining passive and yielding. You knock on the door, breathe, wait, then go deeper when the musculature lets you in.

Use your breathing and energy lines to nudge into your edges, being watchful and patient. Do not barge in, but also don't just remain passive. Apply pressure in specific areas, increase the intensity gradually, breathe, and wait for them to release. Lovingly persuade the tight areas to open, breath by breath by breath. Communicate nonverbally to the various tight areas that it is in their best interest to relax and open. Do this by finding easy places in the poses where you can establish an energy flow, then bring this flow into the contracted area.

Again, never push yourself into positions that cause you to resist the stretch physically or emotionally. Always start from comfort and safety, and only increase the stretch after you're comfortable where you already are. Then feel free to go after your deeper extensions and stronger stretches, Use as much ambition and desire as you want. Push as much as you want. Let go as much as you can. But learn to do all of this with sensitivity. Deepen the breath and increase the force in your lines at relatively easy stages, then wait and be patient. Your body will open and let you in when it's ready. By staying at easy stages of the pose longer, you will increase your strength and endurance. You will need these in order to hold the increased flexibility that will accrue through time and practice.

Skill in yoga is a matter of harmonizing your breathing with your energy lines as you flirt with your edges. It's a matter of getting all three just right, of changing them when necessary, and of adjusting and readjusting in order to create the feeling-tone that is the most attractive to you in that moment. It's a matter of adjusting the tension and stretch of your muscles, and the pitch of your breathing, to produce the perfect feeling-tone. You can make it exquisite. The more perfect it is, the more one-pointed and focused your mind will be.

Stealing the Adjustments
Excerpt from an interview with Prashant Iyengar

You said, "You have to steal the adjustments." Can you explain this vice or virtue?
Yes. There are several things. "Stealing the adjustments" because you have heard from Guruji, "to move a part, you have to move the whole. To move a part, you have to hold the whole" and you will do that only when you are stealing. If you do something very conspicuously, open the sternum and you open the sternum, then you have disturbed so many parts! Do you understand the difference between opening the sternum in Tadasana and opening the sternum in Ujjayi Pranayama? You can afford to give a jerk in Tadasana to open your sternum; you can't afford to give a jerk in Ujjayi Pranayama sitting. Why do you do that? How do you do the sternum lift in your sitting pranayama? You do delicately, you steal. The adjustment is stolen. You steal the adjustment in such a way that other parts will not even know. Not only are they not disturbed, they should not even know that the sternum is lifted. What is that? When you're trying to do something which should not be noticed by others, it's a stealing. And that is to be developed in your practice. When you are doing asana, adjustment is not a jerk, it's process, because so many things are involved. Our body is like a bootlace system.

You know what a "bootlace system" is? Bootlace means the lace of the shoes. If you move the lace in one hole, you are moving in all the holes. You can't move the lace only in one hole. If you move the lace slightly, even in one hole, you are equally moving it in all the holes. So, in the body, if you do something somewhere, you are creating movement everywhere. The body is a bootlace system. If you work on the respiratory system other systems are influenced; if you work on the digestive system, others systems are influenced. In asana, you can't just say, "I'm working on the respiratory system, only on the skeletal, the muscular system." You can't do that. You are working on all the systems.

When you are making an adjustment, you should know that. In some aspect, you are not supposed to disturb other parts and also move all the parts. You must be circumspect. Adjustment should not be a "Big Bang." Adjustment is a process and therefore you should be stealing, like a thief. You know what is stealing is? The thief is circumspect. I said in class that if you have ten thousand rupees in your right pocket, you are watchful about it all the time; your mind is there all the time. But still you are pick-pocketed. And the thief, when he pickpockets, is concerned about the people around. He takes care that nobody notices him, nobody knows that he is stealing and that's how he steals. That is how you should make adjustments. It is stealing adjustments.

Savasana: Corpse Pose, by Michael Stone

At the end of our asana practice we lie down, feet fallen outward, breath long, hands facing the sky, for savasana, corpse pose. By all accounts, corpse pose is considered the most difficult posture, as we posture the mind and body to imitate a corpse. “Most difficult for students,” says Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, “not waking, not sleeping.”

When we are new to practice, the experience of savasana is simply a rest after the arduous practice of bending, stretching, and twisting the body into various shapes. At first, savasana becomes just another form, but a form seemingly void of technique, concept and application.

In savasana, we let go of any particular breathing technique and simply allow the breath to move through its inherent inhaling and exhaling pattern. As the breath finds its way through the open channels of the body, the mind does so as well, by weaving itself into the strands of thought and sensation that flow through the body. When the breath is free, the mind is free. When the breath is allowed to move naturally, the mind settles into itself. When the mind relaxes, the tongue and palette become spacious, the roof of the mouth lifts and hollows and the central core of the body opens.

While a busy mind is a consequence of over-pushing in yoga postures, then it’s opposite is deep sleep during corpse pose. However, corpse pose exists in the middle space between sleep and effort. While sleeping seems to be the most common experience of corpse pose (often dreaming is easier than surrendering to the pose), sleeping keeps us from the depth and subtlety of savasana. It’s not that there is anything “bad” about sleeping or daydreaming, it’s just that those states are considered unconscious, and the mind maintains its state of conditioned existence while in the state of sleep or reverie. From Patanjali’s perspective of looking at hindrances, we could say that we actively engage the imagination in order to avoid the void of corpse pose. This “void” is the inherent emptiness of the present moment.

What are we avoiding when we sleep through corpse pose? When the breath slows down and the mind begins to mingle with the threads of breath and sensation that appear when we calm down, we connect with deep feeling in the core of the body. Usually, the mind tries all sorts of tricks to avoid coming into contact with the feelings and sensations in the core of the body. Again, from Patanjali’s notion of avoidance strategies, we can say that our sense of ourselves depends on relegating unwanted experiences to the corners of the psyche and body where the radar that is perception will not pick them up. And if something is picked up – an uncomfortable thought, a disturbing sensation, a memory – we call up our repertoire of avoidance strategies and we take flight. Sleeping and daydreaming are such flights.

Most of the time, we live in loops of distraction. Patanjali calls this avidya, or ignorance. Ignorance is related to the act of avoidance. In Savasana, however, we need not avoid. We simply notice, with evenly hovering attention, whatever shows up, and then allow it to pass on, to die, so that we can arrive in the present moment. Savasana offers the possibility of “a small death, every moment, every day,” says Pattabhi Jois. Much of what we notice in yoga practice is our patterns of attachment and repulsion. Swallowing or spitting out, digesting and evacuating, accepting and rejecting: all of these discriminative acts become ways of sorting out what we can tolerate and what we refuse. Yet part of the process of allowing our preconceptions and our reactions to our anxieties to pass away is to allow for our categories of the unacceptable to fall away. When the discomforting thoughts arise, when the sensations that pull us out of Savasana distract us, we tether ourselves to the present moment by not swallowing or spitting out the contents that emerge from the depths of our body and mind. Instead we lie down with all of our repulsions and all of our attachments, both of which are sacred, both of which teach us about our strategies of attraction and avoidance and where we are in relation to the present moment. Observing these patterns allows us to suspend those very strategies and surrender to the feelings that we have been avoiding. This surrender gives way to spaciousness in the mind and body. When one practices this way there is space enough for everything.

When effort ceases we are able, if only briefly, to die into corpse pose. The void is left when the self is absent. When there are no views, no conceptions, no thoughts, no ideas, the world is seen in its actuality, with no filters, modifications, interpretations, goals, and qualifications. In other words, as we allow our conception of the world to pass on, we experience the world as it is in itself. In this space, corpse pose has no beginning or end and our awareness of time dissolves. There is nothing to be done. Thinking comes to a standstill and an intuitive dialectical knowing, rather than a logical or rational understanding, occurs. The gravity of savasana is surrendered to.

Savasana is the art of practicing our death, little by little, every day. “If student does not get up from savasana,” says Pattabhi Jois, “or lifting student up (and he/she) is like a stiff board, savasana is correct.” The aim of yoga practice in daily life is to live vividly from moment to moment without being stuck in thinking or the idea of not-thinking. Wood floor, open window, blanket, cushion, t-shirt, wool socks – there is something profound just here. We are not trying to create an experience; we are making room for experience to happen. Experience, like the present moment, is always waiting for a place to happen. The architecture of savasana requires us to continually let the ground we are lying down on, literally the ground of our thoughts and our bodies, to fall away, until the constructs that frame our experience pass on. This is an act of both dying and being born. Our imagination makes us very busy exploring the world of choices. In the end, there will be no choice, just death. So in the center of your bumbling human life, where you are always looking around for something better, notice how the present moment is just a small death away.

Study of the Self, by David Life & Sharon Gannon

The study of the self involves determining where need ends and greed begins. We can make that determination only by experimenting withour body and mind until we figure out how to remove the clutter and confusion.

Perhaps you have met people who obsessively accumulate anything from newspapers to old clothes. We wonder how they could possibly live with no space in their home. Yet we all have the same clutter in our head. From the moment we arrived in our body we have been accumulating habits, attitudes, prejudices, likes and dislikes, affectations and characteristics.
People who accumulate things in their house get used to the clutter. It seems normal to them to have nowhere left to sit, sleep, eat or live. we all get used to the clutter inside us too... We live in fear of losing any small scrap of it.

Without space, creation cannot take place. When you purchase a house, you purchase space , the more space, the more valuable the house. You cannot think anything if you have no space in your mind. You cannot welcome any guest in your house if you have no space within.

Patanjali called this clutter mind fluctuations. This means that the mind, misguided by the senses, assumes that all that is seen is real, and all that is unseen is unreal. This is ignorance, (ignorance of the self).

Purifying the self in Yoga is a process of purifying the body (of toxins) and the mind (of ignorance/delusions).

Standing Postures

Standing postures are essential in providing a grounded yoga practice.They develop strength, flexibility, stamina and stability. They improve co-ordination, posture and confidence. Standing postures also build the foundation of correct alignment for most other postures.

To help achieve optimal alignment in standing postures, the wall , blocks and straps can be used.

Tips

Build your standing postures from the ground up
Try lift the weight of your body up from your feet using your bandhas
Find lightness in the postures by engaging abdominal strength and using your breath
Holding your breath makes every posture harder, your body feels heavy.

"An attitude of sincerity and humility is the first pre-requisite on the spiritual path. We've got to know what we don't know. We've got to know that there is nothing to know, that there is only being. The best attitude is to be very gratefule and thankful and constantly generous."

- Bhagavan Das

Balancing Postures

Balancing in Yoga may involve balancing on your hands, feet, shoulders, knees, hips, head, toes or sacrum. These postures develop the motor area of the brain that controls the muscles used for co-ordination, balance and posture.

All balance postures require that the student concentrate on one point of focus, thereby quietening the mind and stilling the body.

Benefits of Balance Postures
Balance postures can and should be practiced frequently. They assist in:

relieving stress and anxiety
improving concentration
increasing courage and determination
act as an excellent tool to focus and still the mind
strengthen the entire body

Standing balance postures together with other standing postures are emphasized for beginners to Yoga to help create a solid foundation from which to develop a practice.

Most standing balance postures are considered to be heating for the body and are best practiced at the beginning and of a practice.

The Essential Skills of Yoga, by Witold Fitz-Simon

The Essential Skills of Yoga is aimed at both the beginning and advanced practitioner looking at fundamental techniques of the physical and spiritual practice of the mind/body path of yoga.

How do we relate the spiritual practice of yoga to the physical practice? If yoga is a spiritual endeavor, how does care for the body fit into the path?

Hatha yoga, or the “forceful yoga”, was originally devised as a technique to use the body as a vehicle to achieve spiritual realization and liberation. According to the sages of this tradition that began in 15th century India, by using certain physical postures coupled with breathing practices and cleansing techniques, the body can be purified to the extent that it literally transmutes into an immortal diamond-like substance that becomes the perfect vehicle for the spiritual transformation that will allow the practitioner to transcend the continual cycle of life, death and rebirth. Such goals seem beyond the reach of us normal human beings with everyday lives of work, recreation and relationships, but within the lofty aspirations of these ancient masters lie certain basic principles that can apply to and benefit all of us.

On the most fundamental level, then, yogic practice is about creating optimal health, a goal that has been developed and refined in the last century by the work of pioneers such as B. K. S. Iyengar, T. K. V. Desikachar and their guru, Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, to become an end in itself. Without that optimal health, the individual is unable to function properly even in their mundane life, let alone undertake loftier pursuits of self-betterment and spiritual inquiry. The immortal diamond body may be an ideal of perfection unattainable to us today, but modern yoga presents us with a new ideal, one of the balanced body and mind that is well-nourished, supple and adaptable to the demands placed on it by modern life.

The yogic view of optimal health

Freedom from physical ailments: aches and pains, illness.
Vitality of body: enough strength to fulfill one’s daily needs for basic survival and to have enough energy left over for spiritual practice.
Suppleness of body: enough flexibility and resilience to carry out one’s daily tasks without injury; enough freedom and poise in the body to undertake deeper spiritual inquiry.
Equanimity and resilience of mind: a mind untroubled by aches, pains and illness that is calm enough to undertake self-reflection and focused enough to sustain an introspective mindset for extended periods of time.

Elements of a balanced body

Bilateral symmetry: differences between the left and right sides of the body are minimized, creating symmetry and freedom of poise and movement.
Balance between the front and back body: weight becomes distributed evenly through the shoulders, hips and feet, with the chest and abdomen, the upper and lower back broad and free, minimizing postural imbalances that put pressure on the spine and creating space and freedom for the internal organs.
Elongation of the spine: the natural curves of the spine become decompressed and balanced relative to each other, creating freedom for the nerves that flow from the spaces between the vertebrae out into every part of the body.
Freedom of the neck and shoulders: pain and tension are released and the head is free to balance properly on the neck, allowing for clearer sensory perception, coordination and control of movement.
Calm and efficiency of poise: the “fight-or-flight” mechanisms of the nervous system are calmed and countered, reducing stress which in turn allows the body to heal itself.
Freedom of the breath: the breathing mechanism is unfettered, promoting better organization and execution of the subtler and most vital chemical processes of the body, including cellular respiration, production of energy and removal of waste products.

All of this can be achieved by diligent and dedicated long-term practice of the entire range of physical postures of yoga. Yoga is ultimately all about the doing of it. It is about the path and the insights and freedoms that come from the practice and not some final goal which is static and unchanging. Often people are intimidated and put off by visions of skinny women and men performing strange contortions, but the truth is that all of these wonderful benefits of yoga can come from even the simplest practice if performed with mastery of nine very straightforward fundamental skills. These skills apply equally to the easiest of standing poses as they do the most complicated of back bends.

The Nine Fundamental Skills of Postural (Asana) Practice

1. Breathing

Without breath there is no life, both figuratively and literally. Freedom of the breath is the foundation of release, movement and expression.

2. Grounding

Gravity is not just a natural force inflicted on our bodies, it is the medium in which our bodies and perceptions develop. Surrendering to gravity and creating a relationship to the ground underneath us that supports us stabilizes the body, calms the nervous system and the mind and gives us a starting point from which to build and remake postural and movement patterns.

3. Reaching

Reaching is a complex action that we learn as infants that requires a sense of our foundation, a sense of direction and a clear intention. We reach from somewhere to somewhere, recruiting muscles and joints in the process.

4. Opposing

Yoga poses are externally static, but internally dynamic. Finding the equilibrium of body parts moving in careful opposition to each other creates lines of force within the body around which soft tissues, joints and organs can organize and open.

5. Wringing

The geometry of the body is complex and intricate and rarely linear. The act of wringing out the limbs and torso as if wringing the water out of a dish towel takes the idea of oppositional movement into three dimensions, deeply massaging the soft tissues of the body.

6. Widening

In the act of movement, we often find ourselves whittled down by focus to single-pointedness, reduced to awareness of only our intentions and goals. Even in stillness, our bodies are poised to move and react. Widening the planes of the body maintains a sense of the three-dimensionality of the whole being as we act, creating the difference between performance and spiritual discipline.

7. Softening

Enthusiasm and effort often lead to over-work. Just as some parts of the body are recruited and engaged, other parts must soften and lengthen. Otherwise we are acting inefficiently and wastefully, effectively working against ourselves.

8. Surrendering

Effort and action are only one side of the coin. Also necessary is release and surrender, both for the body and the mind. Without these we run the risk of creating more injury and stress, the opposite effect of what we are seeking.

9. Reflecting

The truly spiritual aspect of the practice is allowing enough time between experience and reaction for there to be the possibility of observation and contemplation. It is in that moment that we can learn, adapt and modify our behavior, creating change in our bodies and our lives.

The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with JOY, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty everyday, and if you can source your life on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon.

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Yoga is not Mastered by Flexibility or Strength, by Godfrey Devereux

It is generally agreed that Patanjali is the father of yoga. In the second yoga sutra he defines yoga. Yoga, he says, is surrendering the projections of the mind. To master yoga therefore is to be able to surrender anywhere, anytime. Not only in the quiet of the meditation room, or the peace of the mountain side. Not only in random moments of absorption or rapture. The practice of surrender is subtle and elusive, and can only be an invitation: surrender cannot be brought about directly, but only as a result of the most profound and exhaustive insight. The invitation involves a process of total acceptance, total commitment and total attention. It is detailed by Patanjali as yama and niyama.

The fruits of yoga are not always easy to recognise. Because of this many of us fall into a fatal trap. A trap set by our ambition. A net in which we cast about looking for an equivalent of diplomas, medals, certificates of achievement. We master the art of placing our feet on our heads in backbends. We become adept at placing our leg behind our neck. We amaze and stun our friends by our ability to perform 108 sun salutations. We amaze and stun ourselves by our ability to come up into a handstand from dandasana, from bakasana, from navasana. But satisfying and impressive as these feats are, they are not indications of mastering yoga. Baryshnakov could do them all at first attempt. So too could many dancers, gymnasts, acrobats. But, as long as we are looking to impress, even if only ourselves, we are nowhere near mastering yoga. As long as we look for signs by which our skills can be recognised we are enslaved. As long as we seek credentials which symbolise our accomplishment, we are still driven by a mind disturbed by the winds of passion. We are still slaves to our ambition.

Accomplishment in a specific asana, for example is not so much determined by the movement of our body, but the activity of our mind. Of course, the two are not separate. When we do utthita trikonasana, for example, it becomes asana not when we place our hand on the floor, or align our shoulders with our pelvis. It does not improve just because the feet are aligned, the legs are straight, the spine extending, the chest opening. It improves because our awareness penetrates the activity of each part of our body. And in that penetration the mind must be sensitive enough, still enough, to feel strain, to recognise distortion, and to adjust accordingly. As the body responds to the subtle perceptions of the mind, it begins to align itself more precisely. With this anatomical alignment comes a freedom on the more subtle, vital levels of the body. Within this freedom awareness and energy can flow freely and harmoniously. This flow further deepens the sensitivity and quietness of the mind. And the cycle of competence is enriched further and further, as alignment and awareness take us deeper into the grace and harmony of our bodies, and the stillness and rapture of our minds. As the body becomes more and more stable and free, as the physical effort become less, the mind grows gradually quiet. Not through holding the postures passively for a long time. But penetrating them dynamically, more and more deeply, more and more fully. With mastery this can be achieved rapidly, even instantaneously. The body and mind, through practice become one.

But it is possible to ape the mastery of asana through strength, through flexibility, through agility. But it is not the same thing to do a handstand as it is to do adho mukha vrksasana. It is not the same thing to do the crab as urdhva danurasana. And the difference is clearly visible to the eye that has sensitised itself by going inwards and exploring the subtleties of its own anatomy, its own body-mind. But the rewards that physical accomplishment, that exotic agility give to the ego are very seductive, and inimical to mastery of yoga. They must be abandoned if we are to know the deeper rewards of a quiet mind.

The fruits of yoga are often more obvious in their absence, and more easily to others. Our progress, the level of our mastery should not be a concern to ourselves. We practice yoga only when we do so simply to enter more deeply and fully into the nourishing abundance of each moment. If we do what we do for effect, any effect at all, we are not yogis; simply contortionists, acrobats, clowns. When, however, we practice simply to flower into the moment, to awaken to the depth and beauty of what already exists within and around us, although we will go as far as we can, we do not measure. And we do not compare. We do not struggle to go beyond, or even reach the experience of yesterday. Never do we struggle to reach what we think we know another can do. Nor do we reach towards some intellectualised goal. We simply honour the moment as it is, in its own fullness. In doing that, no matter how free or limited the movement of our body, the opening of our mind is unrestricted, and then we taste the fruit of yoga, the radiance, the peace, the joy, the love. Then we are accomplished. But we no longer care.

Godfrey Devereux
1992 London

Sitting for Meditation, by David Keil

The basic goal of all the asana practice is finding and maintaining a comfortable padmasana (lotus pose) for meditation. There are a few key anatomical components and principles to finding this comfort. The foundation of the pose is the crossing of the legs and "sit bones" comfortably on the floor. With a firm foundation we find an upward energy and lift in the spine, which eventually becomes effortless.

Sitting in Padmasana
Finding your padmasana, much less a comfortable one is a difficulty for many people who practice yoga and meditation. It is difficult to quiet the mind when the knee, hips, back or neck are uncomfortable. Why is it so difficult? What is it that we're actually doing to our hips, knees and back anyway? What can I do to prepare my body for practices that require this posture?

All questions we've asked our teachers or ourselves from time to time. You must understand that yoga (coming from India) practically assumes that one can do lotus. On my trips to India I've observed young and old regularly sitting on the floor in lotus, half lotus or squatting. This lends itself to knees and hips that are ready and available for being crossed fully. Yoga is from a different place. On the contrary are our chairs, desks, cars and our "modern" culture that discourage something as simple as sitting on the floor.

So, what to do? By understanding the basic function of a couple of joints you may be able to save yourself some pain in the leg as well as the uh... back. We'll hopefully get to do a more focused hip and knee article later on but for the moment let's look at some basics around these joints.

There are three main joints in the leg, the ankle, knee and hip. They function together and movement at one often requires movement at another. The knee is at the center of this interconnected chain and therefore regulates the function of the leg as a whole. If the hip or ankles are tight, the force that is created in the leg often finds its way to the knee possibly leading to meniscus tears, or general pain and achiness. We can also use the functioning of the knee to help us focus and isolate the other joints, particularly the hip in lotus.

From dandasana bring your hands together in front of you with palms open and facing upward. Let your leg lift leg and place your foot/ankle into the palm of your hands (lower your hands and move them forward if needed). Now, relax your hip joint and allow your knee to slowly lower. A very important action happens as you do this, and that action is an outward or external rotation of your lower leg (shin/calf), which means your upper leg (thigh) has rotated outward as well. You may even need to exaggerate this action if you feel a pinching on the inside or outside of your knee by lifting your calf muscles out of the way as you flex (bend) your knee. Draw your heel towards your navel and take half lotus.

In any lotus type position, if you feel an excessive amount of pinching or pain simply lift your knee up toward the ceiling and you'll find the pain disappears. This is indicative of the force created by a tight hip joint being relieved.

Developmental poses
Baddha konasana
Squatting
Virasana

Upward and Onward
It may take some time to create a stable base for the spine to sit on in a lotus position. All seated poses rely on the "sit-bones" for foundation. These large boney areas are actually called the ischial tuberosities and are the inferior (lower) and posterior (back) part of the pelvis. The pelvic bowl has a major influence on the spine above it as it is connected to the sacrum (via the sacroiliac joint), which is base of the spine.

The pelvis is doing an anterior tilt when the pubic bone in the front heads down toward the floor. The pelvis is doing a posterior tilt when the pubic bone comes upward toward the ribs. If the hip joint and associated hamstring muscles on the back of the thigh are tight, when we sit on the floor our pelvis is pulled into a posterior tilt. If the hamstrings are looser then we find an anterior tilt or a neutral position coming more easily.

The tilts of the pelvis are also associated with the curve in our lower back (lumbar spine). An anterior tilt increases or exaggerates this curve in the lumbar and a posterior tilt reduces the curve in the lumbar spine. Over a long period of time the removal of this curve can be detrimental to the integrity of the entire spine and particularly to those very important and needed discs in the lumbar vertebrae which are the most common to dysfunction. Sitting in a car, office seat, or regular chair almost always removes the lumbar curve from our spine and is associated with a posterior tilt. Check yours now and see for yourself.

The effect of the loss of curve in the lumbar reduces the integrity and stamina of the muscle of the back and will affect the spine above. If in a seated position your pelvis is free to tilt forward in an anterior tilt, the lumbar curve is present you'll find a natural and comfortable energy that helps the rest of the spine above be comfortable for a longer sitting period. This is the reason for a small blanket or bolster under our sit-bones for meditation.

All asanas require a strong and stable foundation. Padmasana starts with the sit-bones on the floor and the legs comfortably crossed. With this foundation the spine comes to its natural alignment more easily and helps increase comfort as well as the movement of prana through a nice and easy breath. Take some time in the evening to do what I refer to as "homework" poses. Try virasana, baddha konsana, and a nice deep squat.

With the right preparation and some regularity of practice of the aforementioned "homework" poses you'll find more openness in the joints of the leg, a comfortable lotus and the ability to sit for much longer with more comfort for the ultimate yoga practice, meditation!

© 2005 Enlightened Practice Magazine Meditation Issue

Meditation: Sitting in the Seat of the Soul, by Sharon Gannon and David Life

Excerpts from: Juvamukti Yoga, practices for liberating body and soul

Meditation is not the same as prayer or contemplation. Prayer often means asking for something from someone other than yourself. Contemplation means to dwell on thoughts or concepts. Meditation means to listen within. To listen, you must stop talking. Trusting that everything is exactly the way it should be, the meditator rests in the timeless.

In the first chapter of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali answers the question: What is Yoga?

Yogash chitta-vritti-nirodhah
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind

When you stop identifying with your thoughts, the fluctuations of the mind, then there is Yoga.

To practice meditation we must first practice pratyahara, drawing the five senses inward. Once we can sit down and draw inward without being distracted by the senses, we are prepared for meditation, which may happen spontaneously and naturally when the ability to concentrate the faculty of attention on one object and hold it there for some time has been mastered. We cannot make ourselves meditate. We can only make ourselves concentrate.

To develop our ability to concentrate, we have to learn to not allow our faculty of attention to become distracted by every thought that passes though the mind. It is the nature of the mind to think. Thinking is a form of talking. The mind is usually chattering on and on, and we are engaged in constant dialogue with this chatter. To interrupt, Patanjali recommends that we concentrate on something else – the flow of breath, for example. Let the mind go on talking to itself, but you disengage. This concentration is called dharana.

The various schools of meditation differ from one another primarily in the object chosen for concentration. This object may be elaborate or simple visualizations, a mantra, a candle flame, a mandala, or the movement of breath. Only through prolonged concentration can the experience of meditation begin to dawn. You cannot make yourself meditate, just as you cannot make yourself fall sleep. If you want to fall asleep is helps to create a situation that invites that shift into another state of consciousness. You brush your teeth, wash your face, put on your pyjamas, lie down in a comfortable bed, turn out the lights, close your eyes, and within a few minutes you are asleep… maybe.

Meditation is similar. It is an effortless state that can arise only after you have trained yourself to sit still and concentrate on one object without distraction. Even with all that preparation you may not be able to shift into the meditative, thought-free state. But through practice you do get closer and closer. You don’t give up on sleep if you have a sleepless night. The next night you try again. The same is true for meditation. Don’t give up – try again.

Impurities of Intelligence, by BKS Iyengar

Excerpts from: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

The whole educative thrust of yoga is to make things go right in our lives. But we all know that an apple that appears perfect on the outside can have been eaten away by an invisible worm on the inside. Yoga is not about appearances. It is about finding and eradicating the worm, so that the whole apple, from skin inward, can be perfect and a healthy one. That is why yoga, and indeed all spiritual philosophies, seems to harp on the negative -- grasping desires, weaknesses, faults, and imbalances. They are trying to catch the worm before it devours and corrupts the whole apple from inside. This is not a struggle between good and evil. It is natural for worms to eat apples. In yoga we simply do not want to be the apple that is rotted from inside. So yoga insists on examining, scientifically and without value judgment, what can go wrong, and why, and how to stop it. It is organic farming of the self -- for the Self.

To reach and penetrate as far as the fourth sheath is a considerable achievement, but I would be doing the reader a disservice if I did not point out that considerable achievements also bring in their wake considerable dangers. An obvious one is pride -- not satisfaction in a job well done -- but a sense of superiority and difference, of distinction and eminence.

It is an obsession in our modern society to focus on appearance, presentation, and packaging. We do not ask ourselves, "How am I really?" but "How do I look, how do others see me?" It is not a question of, "What am I saying?" but, "How do I sound?"

There are those, for example, who perform polished, well-presented, highly attractive yoga asana. They are pleased with this, and with themselves, and are perhaps financially well rewarded for this outward excellence. When I was young, struggling to earn a living, to raise yoga in public esteem, to exemplify in my visible body the art and aesthetic beauty of yoga, I was always seeking to present asana in the best possible way, symmetrically, precisely, and in stimulating, coherent sequences. I was, when occasion demanded, a performer and an artist. This was my service to the art of yoga. But in my own personal practice I did not have this type of idea. I was concerned only to explore, to learn, to challenge, and to transform inwardly. Above all to penetrate. Yoga is an interior penetration leading to integration of being, senses, breath, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and Self. It is definitely an inward journey, evolution through involution, toward the Soul, which in its turn desires to emerge and embrace you in its glory.

You need a good teacher as guide so you will not hurt your body, overstretch, wrench, or nip the inner fibers, tendons, ligaments, mind, and emotions. This is yoga inadequately or wrongly practiced. I know; I have done it. But when yoga is only outward facing, exhibitative, and self-gratifying, it is not yoga at all. Such an attitude will deface and deform even the character you started out with. In class when pride rises or its complement, insecurity, as you look around at others, recognize it for what it is and send it on its way.

It is certain that there is much pleasure and satisfaction to be gleaned from life. Patanjali said the correct fulfillment of pleasure is an essential component not only of life but of liberation. But Patanjali also warned that wrong interaction with nature (where the afflictions or klesa still rule us) can bring about our confusion and self-destruction. The pursuit of pleasure through appearances, which I connect here to superficiality of intent, is quite simply the wrong way to go about things. To pursue pleasure is to pursue pain in equal measure. When appearance is more important to us than content, we can be sure we have taken the wrong turning.

The achievements of intelligence therefore also have their pitfalls, even more difficult to identify than the lure of the senses. We are only too ready to admit, "Oh, I can never resist chocolate." But how many of us would admit that we would willingly stab any colleague in the back in order to gain a promotion? We shy away from such self-knowledge as we instinctively feel that its ugliness lies closer to the Soul.

Most of us, at least in maturity, with or without yoga, fall into a dutiful routine, a comprehensive conduct of trying to "be good" and fearing the consequences if we are not. This is neither solution nor resolution, but it is a livable cease fire, or decency by dint of moderation. Controlling our desires is a continual pruning process, rather than a Damascene conversion.

Copyright © 2005 B.K.S. Iyengar

Stress can make you sick, by Judith Lasater, Ph.D

Excerpts from: Relax and Renew, (On Restorative Yoga)

Stress begins with a physiological response to what your body-mind perceives as life-threatening. For our ancestors, this may have been defending against the aggression of a hungry animal. For modern-day humans, this may be living with the fear of losing a job in a sagging economy, or the health crisis of a family member.

Whatever the stressor, the mind alerts the body that danger is present. In response, the adrenal glands, located above the kidneys, secrete catecholamine hormones. These adrenaline and noradrenalin hormones act upon the autonomic nervous system, as the body prepares for fight or flight. Heart rate, blood pressure, mental alertness, and muscle tension are increased. The adrenal hormones cause metabolic changes that make energy stores available to each cell and the body begins to sweat. The body also shuts down systems that are not a priority in the immediacy of the moment, including digestion, elimination, growth, repair, and reproduction.

These adaptive responses have been positive for the survival of the human race over thousands of years. For our ancestors, a stressful situation usually resolved itself quickly. They fought or they ran, and, if they survived, everything returned to normal. The hormones were used beneficially, the adrenal glands stopped producing stress hormones, and systems that were temporarily shut down resumed operation.

To his detriment, modern man is often unable to resolve his stress so directly, and lives chronically stressed as a result. Still responding to the fight or flight response, the adrenals continue to pump stress hormones. The body does not benefit from nutrition because the digestion and elimination systems are slowed down. Even sleep is disturbed by this agitated state.

In a chronically stressed state, quality of life, and perhaps life itself, is at risk. The body's capacity to heal itself is compromised, either inhibiting recovery from an existing illness or injury, or creating a new one, including high blood pressure, ulcers, back pain, immune dysfunction, reproductive problems, and depression. These conditions add stress of their own and the cycle continues.

The relaxation solution
The antidote to stress is relaxation. To relax is to rest deeply. This rest is different from sleep. Deep states of sleep include periods of dreaming which increase muscular tension, as well as other physiological signs of tension. Relaxation is a state in which there is no movement, no effort, and the brain is quiet.

Common to all stress reduction techniques is putting the body in a comfortable position, with gentle attention directed toward the breath. Do these techniques really work? Scientists have researched the effects of relaxation and report measurable benefits, including reduction in muscle tension and improved circulation.

Among the first to study relaxation was Edmund Jacobson, M.D. In 1934, he wrote You Must Relax about the benefits of his progressive relaxation techniques. He reported success in using his approach to treat high blood pressure, indigestion, colitis, insomnia, and what he called "nervousness."

One of the foremost writers and researchers in the field of stress reduction today is Herbert Benson, M.D., who coined the phrase "Relaxation Response" to describe the physiological and mental responses that occur when one consciously relaxes. In The Wellness Book, he defines the relaxation response as "a physiological state characterized by a slower heart rate, metabolism, rate of breathing, lower blood pressure, and slower brain wave patterns."

David Spiegel, M.D., author of Living Beyond Limits, reports, "In medicine, we are learning that physical problems, such as high blood pressure and heart disease, can be influenced by psychological interventions, such as relaxation training. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration issued a report recommending these non-drug approaches as the treatment of choice for milder forms of hypertension. Mind and body are connected and must work together, and this should be a powerful asset in treating medical illness."

Indeed, body and mind are connected. Relatively new in medicine is the specialty called psychoneuroimmunology, another way of saying that body and mind-or psyche, nervous system, and immune system-are connected. This specialist understands that the health of the psyche is reflected in, and partly created by, the health of the body, and vice versa.

Among those whose scientific study supports the body-mind connection is Dean Ornish, M.D., author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease. He studied those with atherosclerotic heart disease and concluded that daily periods of relaxation are essential in preventing further deterioration. Ornish also created a unique lifestyle program which includes diet, yoga, and meditation.

Restorative Yoga
The word yoga comes from Sanskrit, the scriptural language of ancient India, and means "to yoke" or "to unite." Dating back to the Indus Valley civilization of 2000 to 4000 B.C.E., yoga practices are designed to help the individual feel whole. Ancient yoga texts present teachings that include the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of the practitioner. The physical aspects of yoga -- poses (asana) and breathing techniques (pranayama ) -- are the most popular in the West.

Traditionally, a yoga class or personal practice session begins with active poses followed by a brief restorative pose. In this book, I'll place the entire focus of practice on the restorative poses. The development of these poses is credited to B.K.S. Iyengar, of Pune, India. Author of the contemporary classic Light on Yoga and numerous other books, Iyengar has been teaching yoga for more than sixty years. Widely recognized as a worldwide authority, he is one of the most creative teachers of yoga today.

Iyengar's early teaching experience showed him how pain or injury can result from a student straining in a yoga pose. He experimented with "props," modifying poses until the student could practice without strain. Iyengar also explored how these modified poses could help people recover from illness or injury. It is because of his creativity that the restorative poses in this book-most of which have been developed or directly inspired by him-are such powerful tools to reduce stress and restore health.

I often refer to restorative yoga poses as "active relaxation." By supporting the body with props, we alternately stimulate and relax the body to move toward balance. Some poses have an overall benefit. Others target an individual part, such as the lungs or heart. All create specific physiological responses which are beneficial to health and can reduce the effects of stress-related disease.

In general, restorative poses are for those times when you feel weak, fatigued, or stressed from your daily activities. They are especially beneficial for the times before, during, and after major life events: death of a loved one, change of job or residence, marriage, divorce, major holidays, and vacations. In addition, you can practice the poses when ill, or recovering from illness or injury.

How restorative yoga works
Restorative poses help relieve the effects of chronic stress in several ways. First, the use of props provides a completely supportive environment for total relaxation.

Second, each restorative sequence is designed to move the spine in all directions. These movements illustrate the age-old wisdom of yoga that teaches well-being is enhanced by a healthy spine. Some of the restorative poses are back bends, while others are forward bends. Additional poses gently twist the column both left and right.

Third, a well-sequenced restorative practice also includes an inverted pose, which reverses the effects of gravity. This can be as simple as putting the legs on a bolster or pillow, but the effects are quite dramatic. Because we stand or sit most of the day, blood and lymph fluid accumulate in the lower extremities. By changing the relationship of the legs to gravity, fluids are returned to the upper body and heart function is enhanced.

Psychobiologist and yoga teacher Roger Cole, PhD, consultant to the University of California, San Diego, in sleep research and biological rhythms, has done preliminary research on the effects of inverted poses. He found that they dramatically alter hormone levels, thus reducing brain arousal, blood pressure, and fluid retention. He attributes these benefits to a slowing of the heart rate and dilation of the blood vessels in the upper body that comes from reversing the effects of gravity.

Fourth, restorative yoga alternately stimulates and soothes the organs. For example, by closing the abdomen with a forward bend and then opening it with a back bend, the abdominal organs are squeezed, forcing the blood out, and then opened, so that fresh blood returns to soak the organs. With this movement of blood comes the enhanced exchange of oxygen and waste products across the cell membrane.

Finally, yoga teaches that the body is permeated with energy. Prana, the masculine energy, resides above the diaphragm, moves upward, and controls respiration and heart rate. Apana, the feminine energy, resides below the diaphragm, moves downward, and controls the function of the abdominal organs. Restorative yoga balances these two aspects of energy so that the practitioner is neither overstimulated nor depleted.

Opening the Onion

In yoga, as in life, peeling off layers of the onion is the process of revealing our true nature, of growing.

A regular yoga practice asks much more of us than learning how to twist, stretch or balance, we are encouraged to observe ourselves closely in order to expand our boundaries, to grow.

Next time you take a yoga class try observe your actions and reactions to different challenges that arise. For example, some asanas (postures) may trigger feelings of frustration, euphoria, anger or even vulnerability. If this happens to you, yoga asks that you acknowledge what you are feeling, deal with it and release it so that you do not get locked into the same emotions every time.

There may also be some postures that you simply do not like doing. If this is true for you, ask yourself why, what is it that you do not like? Is your ego in the way? Is it painful? Is it a pre-conceived idea of what the postures should be? Observe yourself closer.

Growth and transformation in yoga slowly moves you to balance your extremes, including extreme likes and dislikes, so that you are free, not restricted by your mind. You may hear your yoga teacher tell you not to expect a particular result or to breathe through the difficulties instead of being consumed by your emotion. In this way you start to break through your own limitations, peeling off another layer of the onion.

Some say that if you observe yourself properly, there is nothing left over.

Learn the names of asanas (postures)
tittibha (tittibhasana) = firefly
ustra (ustrasana) = camel
kurma (kurmasana) = tortoise

Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children. - Sitting Bull

Foot Foundation, by David Keil

Those wonderful glorious feet, unfortunately kept in containers (shoes) most of the day. Poor things have quite a responsibility in both our everyday walking/living life and particularly in our yoga practice. The feet are our foundation in both. As a therapist the feet are one of the first things I look at as it's important to see what someone is standing on all day. As a yoga teacher I've learned to look at foundation first which is feet in standing postures.

The foot itself is made up of 26 bones all inter-relating and articulating against one another in a complex bone structure. Why so many bones in such a small area? Don't you find it helpful that our foot is able to adapt to a myriad of surfaces and terrains such as rocky roads, a forest walk including sticks, twigs and holes in the ground? Our foot is able to mold to the ground because of the interaction of these 26 bones and then transfer the force from below up through the ankle joints and to the rest of our body in such a way that we stay balanced.

The foot is foundation because it is meeting with the ground which generally doesn't change, particularly in our yoga practice. I don't know about you but I haven't practiced on a particularly uneven surface in years. So we build our foundation on the ground and if the foundation isn't right everything above has the potential to go awry. We find a similar principle with the foundation of a house. If you lay the foundation and it settles unevenly or one side drops significantly more than the other, will the windows upstairs close properly? Will the front door close properly?

Our foot foundation is built on three arches, yup, you read correctly, certainly we're almost all familiar with the one on the inside (medial side) of the foot which teachers are constantly telling us to engage but there are also two others. One of these is found on the outside of the foot although not quite as prominent. The third arch runs across the base of the toes, ever notice that your foot gets wider when you stand on it? This is the reason you measure your foot when standing, because your foot gets slightly longer along the lines of the first two arches mentioned and wider along the third.

Essentially we're standing on a triangle with one point at the base of the big toe, one at the base of the little toe and one at our heel. Connect these three points together and you get a triangle. Now take these three points and connect them to the top of the ankle joint and now we've created a pyramid and that my friends is a very stable structure to be standing on.

The arches have 3 elements, the bone shape, the ligamentous and fascial connections, and third is the musculature in the front, back and sides of the calf. All of these together maintain the arches. A problem with any one of these structures and the arches may fall and the windows (i.e. shoulders, hips, ribs etc) don't function as well.

There are two rather important muscles surrounding the foot that are intimately tied into the arch on the medial side. They wrap around the foot like the stirrup you would get into on a horse. In fact they're referred to as the "anatomical stirrup". The two muscles are the Tibialis Anterior and the Peroneus Longus. The first of these two is the same muscle associated with shin splints and can be palpated quite easily. Find your shin bone (Tibia) and move your finger over to the outside (lateral side) of the bone. Now, lift your foot from the ankle joint and you'll feel the muscle beneath your fingers and you can also follow the muscle down and find a very thick tendon heading to the inside of your foot, right to the medial arch.

The second muscle is harder to find so I'll just describe it. It runs down the outside of your calf behind the bump on the outside (lateral) of your ankle then under your foot from the lateral side and heads across the bottom of your foot to meet up with Tibialis Anterior on the medial arch. These two muscles together become balancers of the foot and the way your arch is either drawn up or falling down in standing. There are a myriad of muscles assisting in the arches but let's just play with these for today.

Enough talk let's take it into practice. Stand in Tadasana and become aware of where your weight is over your feet. Perhaps the weight is more on the heels or more on the toes, no need to judge where it is, just create some awareness. There are a number of ways to engage the arches, one way is to simply lift your toes. Another way that I like is to focus on pressing the base of the big toe into the ground while also pushing down with the outer back heel, the sensation is almost like your foot is getting shorter between the base of your toes and your heel. While doing this draw the awareness up the inside of the leg all the way up to the inside of your thighs and if you read last issues article, draw it up through the psoas.

Let's look at warrior I for a moment. There are two feet on the ground, therefore two arches to be aware of. In the front foot we're always told to have the knee over the ankle (great idea) but let's play for a moment with this instruction, take your knee in slightly and carefully notice what happens to the arch in your front foot. Did you notice the arch collapsing? The back foot is a common place to find yourself with half a foot on the floor and it's not the outside half. Play with the same instruction above for engaging the arch here. Press into the ball of the foot and the outer heel and watch your arches grow.

Playing with engaging the arches in this way utilizes the interaction between the muscles discussed above. Take these simple instructions and apply them to your standing postures, develop a strong foundation and the pose will be much stronger and functional above it.

How to Choose a Yoga Teacher

As yoga continues to gain popularity so too are more and more new yoga teachers coming onto the market offering a variety of classes. For students this often brings confusion when choosing a suitable teacher to guide the journey.

For thousands of years Yoga was passed from teacher to student on a one-to-one basis, group classes are a relatively recent teaching format. The relationship between student and teacher is still taken seriously by both parties and, as a result, time should be taken to search for teachers who are able to assist you grow your practice in a safe, intelligent and supported way.

Certification alone is seldom a good enough reason to study with a teacher. The yamas and niyamas (ethical guidelines in yoga), were laid out by Patanjali thousands of years ago to guide and protect students as their yoga practice developed.

The 5-Yamas in Yoga (behavioral restraints)

Non-violence
Truthfulness
Non-stealing
Moderation and integrity in sexual conduct
Non-attachment

Characteristics and values to look for in a yoga teacher
From the Yamas come the following core values and characteristics that yoga teachers should be developing in themselves:

Integrity
Initiative
Honesty
Has a regular yoga practice and teacher of his/her own
Responsibility and consistency
Competence (constantly improving and developing as a teacher)
Confidentiality
Mindfulness and compassion
Ability to separate yoga from religion (yoga is not and never has been a religion)
Project an image of health and cleanliness

Tips

Like any other meaningful relationship in your life, the relationship you have with your yoga teacher develops over time. As a student of Yoga you are also required to display equally clear values and characteristics to your Yoga teacher in order to build a relationship that will have lasting value.
Learning Yoga is a two-way exchange; teacher-to-student and student-to-teacher.

Learn some Yoga Terms

shanti = peace
asteya = non-stealing
ahimsa = non-violence

Yoga: Not a 12-Step Program

The ancient science of yoga does not pretend to offer a simple, quick-fix formula to release tension or achieve a healthier state of mind and body. Yoga is a practice that is mindful of the messy and often complex parts of being human in this challenging world.

With a regular, sincere and consistent practice, yoga can offer a deeper sense of peace and a measure of meaning and happiness.

Regardless if you are a beginner or a more advanced practitioner, the practice of yoga is itself the reward.

Of Asanas and Animals

Many postures are named after and reflect the movements of animals.
Through observation the ancient sages understood how animals live in harmony with their environment and their own bodies. By imitating animal postures the sages found they were able to achieve and maintain a high quality of health and were able to meet the challenges of nature.

Yoga in Every Cell

In the asanas every cell of the body becomes full of life. This makes the body vibrant. Each part, from the toes to the fingers is active and each has its own job to do... If one part is not sensitive, the posture is not complete. "
- BKS Iyengar

Lessons from a Pencil Maker

Everything you do will always leave a mark.

You can always correct the mistakes you make.

In life you will undergo painful sharpenings, which will make you a better person.

To realize your full potential you must allow yourself to be held and guided by the hand that holds you.