Each of our bodies is a unique constellation of tension and ease born of the musculoskeletal landscape we were born with, the impact of habits of movement, the impact of emotional, psychological and physical trauma, and bodily awareness, In Hatha Yoga, we are invited to iron out these differences – bringing the ecosystem of our individuality into a harmony embodied in the sound vibration of Om.
The seasons are turning cooler, our attentions turn inward yet again, and we are invited to shift gears in our yoga practices. This subtle adjusting of focus and style to harmonize with the seasons is a classical organic element of yoga practice which invites us to consider balance in our lives, our practices and our creative work. In yoga the balance emerges as the fine tuning of our awareness and integration in the pairs of opposites – activation and ease. The foundation for this teaching is found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.
The postures develop our capacity to discern. We can consider the following in crafting our personal practices – the perfect posture is born of cultivating a personal understanding of places in the body you need to activate, and the places in the body that you to would benefit from bringing ease to. For this – we can work with large areas of the body (the back of the legs) or more specific areas of the body(the juncture of my sacrum and vertebrae L1) depending on the degree of awareness we have of the nature of the sensation.
A tool I use to discern tension and holding versus slack and unconsciousness (or lack of any feeling of awareness at all)l is to work with repetitions.
- Choose a basic posture, one that is reflective of some physical discomfort you have in life.
- Practice this base posture – breathing and scanning the body nonjudgmentally for various sensations.
- Practice some postures you believe might be helpful – scanning the body and breathing throughout.
- Repeat the base posture – scanning the body again. What feels different?
- Repeat the repetition.
I’ll sometimes go through a repetition sequence several times with several small sequences within a day of practice if I have time. Sometimes I just run through it once.
Note that many discomforts in the spine are born of tension in the neck and hips, so you may want to include postures that dress the neck and hips in repetition sequences.
Did you like the post? In my newsletter I dig a little deeper into the philosophical aspects of working with the postures. You will never get more than newsletter a week, and the newsletter is meant for edification and entertainment – not sales.
Natalie Ullmann 