Finding Your Edge in Asana Practice | Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
Obey Your Breath
If you obey the breath as the central feature of the asana, where the body is an outward expression of the breath activity, then you are safe in any asana. If your practice is appropriate the capacities of your body type, age, and health then you can do quite demanding and challenging sequences.
The gauge to the asana is the number of breaths, the breath ratio, and the retentions with bandha that you can do without exhausting the breath. If you ever lose the breath, then you need to make adjustments.
Krishnamacharya would say, “You can cheat the body with will of mind, but you cannot cheat the breath, so obey the breath. The breath is the guru to the asana. Obey your guru!”
We emphasise that the breath is a continual monitoring process that allows you to self-correct during your practice. In Patanjali Yoga Sutra, it is called Svadyaya — which means “self-seeing.” As you practice, you become intimate with your breath and its capability. You learn how to calibrate your breath; to extend or reduce it according to your energy levels, the time of day, and the goal of your practice. In general, we recommend that you go to the edge of your capability and then step back; go to the edge of the cliff and then walk back a few feet so that you are safe.
No Heroics Necessary
In the Yoga world, people are competing with themselves and with each other within the psychologies of male heroics and they are getting seriously hurt. We miss the essential point that actual Yoga is not a muscular struggle for a future result. Yoga is direct intimacy with reality itself, the nurturing force of Mother Nature. When the psychology of struggle is taken out; when we the body’s natural limitations are respected; and when asana is understood to be in service to the breath then our Yoga becomes efficient, powerful, and safe.
When we know the pleasure that comes from being intimate with our own embodiment then we simply would not even consider doing heroic asana that wears out our joints and over taxes our system.
That being said, we say that it is necessary to give people what they want so that we can give them what we want to give them.
In other words, for many people who come to asana class, especially if they are young, fit, and ambitious then there must be a challenge. You can offer them a strong asana practice with standing vinyasa, surya namaskar, headstand at the mid-point, shoulderstand with leg movements, and demanding backbends on the abdominals. And make them feel it. For example,
“Come on! Updog. Down Dog. Chaturanga Dandasana. Pump it.”
But not without the breath principles.
And we can be as emphatic about these principles as about the heroic effort in the asana. You can say, “I want to hear your inhale. Come on!”
So take your students to the edge and then step back a few feet so they don’t fall off the cliff. When we go beyond our limits then we explode the pranas out of the body instead of bringing them into the body. Learn the play of keeping the pranas flowing in rather than bursting out of the body with muscular effort.
It is easy to do asana without the breath. It is easy to flip-flop the body around. But to put the breath in requires more focus, more strength, and more sincerity. It is a deeper life activity.
Unpatterning the System
If you practice and teach Yoga asana and include the five basic principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth, your Yoga practice will undo the male patterning of heroic struggle for a future glory that has been put into us by the culture. Actual Yoga releases is our direct participation in the natural state in which strength is utterly receptive; in which strength is understood to be for receptivity only.
- Establish a home Yoga practice that is perfectly suited to your body type, age, health, and cultural background, that equips you with the principles of practice that Krishnamacharya brought forth, through the 8-week by-donation online immersion into personal practice.
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