Practice

Your Yoga practice, if preformed intelligently, is a self exploration. You can learn about the way in which you inhabit your body. You can learn about muscular habits and patterns that you have laid down in your life and you can start to find out what these patterns mean for your body. You can also start to re-write the script and change the patterns that are not helpful.

YOUR BODY REPRESENTS THE LIFE YOU HAVE LIVED THUS FAR, YOUR HISTORY.

image from here

Workshop

I spent my Sunday in a beautiful (cool!!) studio in South London yesterday for yoga a workshop with Peter Blackaby . It was brilliant. 6 hours flew by and it has sparked so many interesting ideas about my own practice and the way I teach. If you ever get the chance to go to one of his classes/workshops then take it! I also highly recommend his book Intelligent Yoga, it's been a favorite of mine for some time now.  

"...Drop people into their bodies and encourage them to be honest with themselves about what they feel.

All yoga postures are there to help us notice how we are as we act and we can use the practice to change from working/feeling/responding from our own histories to creating new, more helpful patterns, which ultimately gives you choice."

 

Practice

"You should not be practicing to have a “good” practice, but instead to keep steadiness within yourself. Practice happily regardless of whether it is “good” or not. Sometimes some postures will not be possible, but when you accept the good and the bad and everything becomes equal for you, that is yoga."

 -- R. Sharath Jois

Home practice can be a challenging thing to get started with, but once you get going it is well worth the effort. You get to learn, explore and play at your own pace, to suit your own energy needs and (most importantly) you learn to listen to your own intuition. 

There's is no template for a perfect home practice and it certainly doesn't need to be complicated. All you need is yourself so lets go over a few of the things you do not need... 

1. You do not need a dedicated yoga space, you don't even need a mat. you just need enough space to move and breath. simple. 

2. You do not need to practice for a set or extended period of time. Sometimes I only have time for 5mins sometimes 2 hours. It all counts. 

3. You do not need to find a space where you will be uninterrupted. There will interruptions, invited or not. Can you remain in your body, gather your focus, and start again?

4. You do not have to be a yoga teacher to come up with sequences. Go to class to learn the basic rules (I gravitate to teachers that teach to make themselves redundant) and then come home and play with those rules...maybe even break them...I do what feels good for me in the moment, it's fun!

5. You don not need to achieve anything. It's not a competition and there is not final goal and that's the beauty of it all.

Now go, be free and PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE.

(photo of me and my dirty feet...more Yoga Do's)

Breath

"There is no right way to breathe. There is only breathing appropriate for the particular situation an individual finds themselves in. Breathing needs to be responsive to variations in posture, to our emotions , and to our oxygen demands; it can only do this if the entire respiratory system is flexible and reactive."

-- Peter Blackaby Intelligent Yoga

Yoga, if practiced based on feeling and understanding your own body can help!

Sūtras

SUTRAS 500-100 B.C 
Literally it means a thread or line that holds things together and is derived from the verbal root siv-, meaning to sew.

Sutras sew meaning together.
It outlines classical understanding of the mind.

196 sutras = threads of yogic
wisdom

From here
Image source

When practiced consistently, patiently, and well, yoga makes you feel good.
nuff said.