Balance Face

Brilliant photo via  orbityoga
from South Dakota, 1959.

Do you have a concentration face?

Nice little exercise in awareness, notice which bits of your body get involved unnecessarily when you are trying to complete a new task. For example when trying to wiggle just your left big toe, does your right big toe try and join the party? When balancing do you stick your tongue out or clench your jaw?

Your body is one big conversation. When something is challenging or new sometimes your methods of communication misfire or get their wires crossed. The more you practice the new movement the better at communicating you will become.

Simple practice.

Your first job when approaching movement is to lose tension.
Tension = unnecessary effort in any given movement or shape.
The skill is in moving without bringing your old tension with you. Ofcourse, this takes time and regular interested practice.

Whatever your 'movement practice' is today can you watch for when unnecessary holding/griping/tension creeps in and then repeat the movement without tension if necessary? Make your practice about the quality of the process rather then a final shape or number of reps or time held.

Ofcourse this process is about developing awareness more then anything else, and the intention is that that awareness seeps into every aspect of your moving life - not just the way your knee is pointing in a squat...

Where there is quality and attention there is LOVE. 

“I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally—that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then—if you’re hard on yourself, in good ways—pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale. That’s interesting—like, what good is “awareness” on its own? Is it good on its own?” 

 

— The Rumpus Book Club Chat With Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exam. 

Nice read!

Staying with the note

Do you ever listen to music to meditate? It's one of my favorite methods. It doesn't matter what the music is, it just has to be something you enjoy listening to.

Press play.
Sit back.
Listen with attention to every single note, word, beat and silence.

Meditation should be enjoyable. We only consistently do things we actually like doing!

(image found here.)

"Awareness: Every pore of the skin has to become an eye."

-- B.K.S. Iyengar

Yoga is Choice

The direct experience of the a yoga practice keeps it forever in the present. Practiced with intelligence Yoga helps cultivate self trust and self knowledge, which provides choice. 

"The world is shaped by individuals. The more clearly we understand ourselves and our motivations the better chance we have of acting well in the world. Yoga can help us to act with understanding and self awareness. 

A positive force in a world that struggles to accommodate change!"

 (quote from Peter Blackaby and image from here)

When moving through your asana practice, can you try resting your attention on, or in, any part of the body which feels like it may benifit?

Raise Your A-Game!

a·wareness n.

Synonyms: aware, cognizant, conscious, sensible, awake, alert, watchful, vigilant

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something.

As you continue to hone moment-to-moment awareness of your body, breath, emotions, and thoughts in your yoga practice, you'll bring that awareness to your daily life. When you're paying attention, you're more in touch with your thoughts and feelings as they arise in the moment, which is half the battle of resolving them. In other words, when you're able to identify that something is wrong, you can address that particular issue in the moment, rather than ignoring it and unleashing it later in some painful way.

Sources: yogajournal, wikipedia,