Key Points For Evaluating A 'Good' Practice

The most important thing to me at the end of a yoga class is that I feel good.  As a teacher, I want my students to feel good as well.

I try to make this clear by asking how people feel at the end of the class and by reminding people if that they don't feel good, or if (gulp) they somehow feel worse than when they came into class, that they should come and talk to me so we can try and nut out what might be going wrong.

Feeling good is understood differently by different people.  And sometimes things that might feel good while we are doing them can actually have harmful consequences.  Here I am thinking, for example, of people engaged in addictive activities that ultimately lead to suffering for themselves or others.   

So I thought it might be good to explore what it is I mean when I say do you feel good and I came up with the 5 points below.

1. You feel like you have done something but you don't feel exhausted or like you need to go and relax because you have done yoga.  Instead you feel energised.

This is an important point.  It means you come to the end of your practice without feeling like you need to 'recover' from the yoga session.  In my recent practice it means I also practice in a way that is nourishing and which means I hardly feel the need to do savasana. Instead of needing to lie down and relax, I feel like I can sit and mediate peacefully.  

2. You feel energised in a way that makes you feel calm, focussed, and relaxed rather than 'buzzing'.

I want to suggest that the 'energy' you feel is one that focusses you and allows you to feel like you can go away and do things in a calm way.  It is not an electric or buzzing 'high' that might be more of a feeling that you have over-stimulated your nervous system.

3. The relaxation you feel is not one that makes you sleepy, scattered or spaced out. 

By the same token, I want you to feel relaxed but not sleepy.  Don't worry if you do fall asleep if you do savasana--it might mean other things are going on.  It is just that I am hoping that your yoga practice has not been so dull (and I mean this in a nervous system way not in the sense of being boring) that you  are under-stimulated or, conversely, that you have worked so hard in class that you need to 'sleep off' your practice. 

4. You feel content with where you are right now and with what you have done.

This is really important.  A part of being content means worrying less about whether you are doing things perfectly or whether you can do everything.  See if you can find contentment in every moment of just being.

5. The body is relaxed in a way that you can move without pain or stiffness (or with less pain and stiffness than you came to class with and certainly not more).

At the end of a physical yoga practice one of my aims is that you have moved your body in specific ways that unblocks any blockages and which allows energy to move through you so that you physically feel good.  If you have pains or aches that are present after class that were not present before class then we need to figure out why so please come and talk to me (or your other teachers). 

Notice how none of the points mentioned above have anything to do with what poses you did, how much you sweated,  how many calories you burned, how deeply you came into a posture, how flat your stomach is (I know people worry about this--my blog posts that have something about stomach in the title are always the most read!), or how long you practiced for.  None of those things will make you a better person and, ultimately, will probably not make much difference to your life.  

Ultimately, I practice because I want to feel good, happy, and healthy.  I want to be a kinder more generous person to myself and to others.  So in my practice I feel for those things.  I feel for them as I practice and at the end of my practice.  

In following posts I will explain some of the 'hows' to generating a practice that makes leaves you feeling good.  Until then, happy and safe practicing!

Much metta,

Samantha

Savasana: Just Relax

At the beginning of nearly all yoga classes I get people to lie down so they can relax.   We do the same at the end of class.  Most of us are very good at lying down but many of us are not good at relaxing--be this physically or mentally.  Sometimes people think they are relaxing when they are not.  I see this often at the end of the class when I go around to make adjustments as people lie in savasana (corpse pose deep relaxation pose) and ask them to relax as I move them into position.  Here is what often happens:

Me (bending over a person reaching for their shoulder from behind so I can draw the scapula down, however, as soon as I reach under the shoulder it magically lifts without me doing more than touch it): Just relax

Student (lying in Savasana): Mmmm

Me (barely touching the shoulder, which somehow still hovers above the floor): Just relax

Student (lying in Savasana): Mmmm

Me (jiggling the shoulder a little in an effort to get the student to feel the tension and sense that they are holding their own shoulder up rather than letting go of tension and allowing me to hold it): Relax, relax, relax [soothing voice of course].

Student (lying in Savasana): Mmmm 

Me (gently letting go of the shoulder, which stays in mid-air rather than fall to the ground because the student was the one holding it up anyway): Silence (speaks louder than words)

Student (opening eyes in surprise): I thought I was relaxing!

Aside from the fact that it must be slightly annoying to be told to relax when you think you are already relaxing it seems to me that this is one very powerful learning exercise in understanding how you can hold tension without even knowing it.

One of the joys of yoga is discovering yourself again.  This includes uncovering 'secrets' such as the secret tension you might be holding in parts of your body.  But tension does not have to be muscular.  We can also hold tension in our breathing patterns (e.g., when we hold our breath or it becomes laboured or forced), while the tension we hold in our minds is more often referred to as stress.

Savasana is a great opportunity to consciously relax body, breath, and mind, and, like all yoga postures, to go within and experience what it is like to be yourself from the inside.  There are many ways to practice savasana and many guided relaxations you can try.  I like Erich Schiffman's description of savasana (he writes shavasana) in his book, Moving into Stillness. I have extract parts of his guided savasana that might help you consciously relax for you to try below (see pp297-299 of his book).   You can read more from Erich's book at:  http://www.movingintostillness.com/index.html 

• Start in comfortable lying. 
• Relax.  It feels like melting.  Do this by scanning your awareness around and through your body--the space inside your body and the space around your body--alert to where there is unnecessary contraction, discomfort, tension, or excessive energy.  Let go of every hint of holding on.
• Start at your hands.  Rest your awareness in the area of your hands: the palms, thumbs, fingers, the space between your fingers, the fingertips, fingernails, the back of your hands, the wrists, the space inside your hands, and the space around your hands.  Forget about what they look like, what you remember they look like, and instead immerse your awareness in the way they actually feel to you now.  Go into your hands and feel them.  Gradually, you may begin to sense heat or warmth, then a pleasant, tingling, electricity-like sensation.  Feel the energy in your hands.
• As your hands relax, feel them expanding.  Feel them becoming less dense, less thick, less contracted--more spacious inside, more comfortable.  Feel this happening and let them expand without limit.  Notice how as they relax and expand, hands aren't there. as though there's just wide open tingling space where your hands once were.  Enjoy the way this feels.
• All this new sense of expanded and tingling openness to flow upward through your arms at its own leisurely pace, until your hands, arms, and shoulders feel tension-free, transparent, clear.  
• Direct your attention to your fee.  Go into your fee and feel them.  Relax the sole of each foot, relax the arches, relax the spaces between the toes, the top of each foot, the ankles, the heels, the space inside your feet, and the space around your feet.  Feel the energy in your feet.  Again, forget about what they look like, what you remember they look like, and instead immerse your conscious awareness in the way they actually feel.
• When the tingling sensation in your feet becomes established in your awareness as with your arms, now allow it to flow slowly upward through your legs, horse, and head--until your whole body is experiencing this pleasurable tingling vibration. 
• Savor the way your legs feel: the ankles, calves, shinbones, knees, thighs, inner thighs, back of thighs, all the way up into the hips, pelvis, genitals, and buttocks.  Feel the energy in your your legs and pelvis, feel the space around your legs, and allow your awareness to roam through this whole area at its own comfortable pace.  Again, enjoy the way this feels, and allow yourself to be intrigued with your actual now-experience.  Forget about what your legs look like, and instead experience yourself and body as you actually are.  Experience your legs becoming transparent and clear.
• Relax your abdomen and belly, and let your breathing be normal, free, unrestricted.  Feel your belly rise and fall with each breath, and experience how this gentle, continuous movement ripples through your whole body and can be felt everywhere.  Ride the breath.  Stay aware of your breathing.  Savour the air on both the inhale and exhale. 
• Keep bringing your awareness slowly upward through your torso, and let the movement of your breathing relax your lower back, diaphragm, ribs, chest, heart.  let this whole area relax, expand, and become tension-free.  Release every hint of holding on.  Let go completely. 
• Relax your neck, throat, face, and head.  Relax your moth, the corners of your moth, the lips, the jaw.  Relax your nose, your cheeks, your ears. the back of your head, the scalp, your forehead, your eyebrows, and especially your eyes.  Relax the muscles around the eyes, the muscles deep in the eye sockets, the inner corner of each eye, the outer corner, the space between the eyes, the eyelids, eyelashes, the eyeballs themselves, the pupils.  Be intimately aware of this whole area.  Soften every tension you come upon, even little ones, even just a little.  Relax areas that do not feel tense too. Relax everywhere, letting your eyes fall backward away from the eyelids. Let go of all the usual tensions that feel like you.  Feel the energy in your face.  Glow.  
• Feel the space inside your body and the space around your body.  Notice that as you relax and expand, every tension evaporates, disappears.  It may even begin to feel as though your body isn't there, as though there's just wide open tingling space.  Be aware of what's happening.  You're releasing tensions, melting, and therefore expanding--everywhere.  You're deliberately letting go of all the lumps in your energy field, all the areas of compacted, held, blocked energy.  You're clarifying, purifying, washing yourself clean with awareness. Your actual now-experience of yourself is becoming, more and more, that of being less dense, less blocked or held in, less physical, in a sense, and increasingly transparent or luminous, more consciously spirit like.  Notice how comfortable you are, how awake and at ease, unusual perhaps at first, but normal, familiar.  it feels good to let yourself be this open.  Enjoy the way you feel. 
• Continue releasing tensions until there are non left, until you feel wide open like the sky.  This spacious, conscious comfortableness is known as the "sky of mind", or pure conscious awareness, and relaxing into yourself like this is how you can consciously experience your unity with infinity.  Become thoroughly familiar with what it feels like to be this open, relaxed, fearless, and undefended.  Feel the peace of stillness.  
• As you relax you will expand. You will begin to feel big, huge, spacious.  Pretty soon it will feel as though you--as awareness--are infinite; infinite in the sense of not finite, not limited, not what you thought you were, not body, only that you can't actually sent a limit or stopping point to where your consciousness is, to where you are--and that you are therefore not body only, nor body with mind, but the space, mind, or awareness in which everything you are aware of is happening.  You real body, therefore, is mental.  The sound of that airplane or barking dog for example is happening within your awareness.  Even your experience of having a body is happening within awareness.  Everything you are aware of is happening within your awareness.  And therefore, and this is the point, you are the Awareness in which everything is happening.  You are Awareness being specifically aware.  You are that big. You are infinite and specific, both at the same time.  Relax inside, expand, forget about yourself as body, and stay with your actual now-experience.  Experience yourself as huge, spacious, without limit, infinite.  Experience the peace of infinite Being.
• Continue to relax, feel, and pay attention to see what happens.  
• Stay for five to twenty minutes.  When you have had enough you will know. At that point, ready yourself and open your eyes.  Just before opening your eyes, be aware of how relaxed you are, how peaceful, how at ease, and then open your eyes without disturbing your peace, without shrinking or tightening up.  Stay relaxed, spacious, undefended, and wide open, and be like a child who is seeing the world for the very first time.  Look at things without being quite so sure what everything means.  Enjoy this awareness.  Then roll to your side, linger there a few moments, and come to a seated pose. 

Happy relaxing!

No Sweat Yoga, Part I

No need to break a sweat doing yoga!

When I first started yoga, I was attracted to much more physical styles.  Some of the first serious yoga classes I took were from a particularly vigorous style of yoga that that involves some great and challenging postures, invigorating breathing, and a whole lot of sweat.    At the time I was also doing a lot of running (about 60km a week) a lot of cycling (about 100 km a week) and a lot of rock climbing (about 4 nights a week), and it appealed to me to be doing a style of yoga that suited my otherwise athletic lifestyle.  I was very much in the mind-set that I needed to sweat to be doing something good for myself.  

However, within a few months I had stopped these classes, realizing that what I really needed from my yoga was something that slowed me down to balance the other activities that were going on in my life.  It was a pivotal shift in my own thinking—that I could do something good for myself by slowing down both mentally and physically. 

I wonder if there are a lot of people similar to me, who came to yoga with the idea that you have to be bathed in your own sweat puddle by the time you lie down for a few minutes of savasana at the end of your yoga class? 

Nowadays, I prefer my sweating to take place while out on a run rather than on my yoga mat, although that is not to say I still don’t enjoy getting my heart rate up in some challenging yoga sequences as those of you who come to Monday and Thursday classes will no doubt experience! 

But, more and more, my own practice is becoming quieter and quieter.  And so I wanted to share a series of blogs dedicated to lying down yoga.  I have found I can practice yoga quite happily for an hour or more without standing or even sitting up. 

The first pose I want to share is supta padangusthasana.  For those of you who are interested, whenever you see ‘supta’ in the name of any yoga pose, you can get the idea that you are going to be trying to do something relaxing.  All of the ‘supta’ poses are lying down. 

This pose is great to stretch your hamstrings.  I would recommend it for anyone who wants to cultivate hamstring flexibility and, in particular, for anyone with lower back issues.  This is probably the safest forward bend ever.  It’s a big claim, I know, but the reason it is so safe is that your spine is naturally elongated along the floor.  There is no movement or bending of your spine at all and the movement comes from your legs only. 

I would recommend that you practice this daily if you are trying to improve your sitting forward bends.  Importantly, unless you can get your legs past 90 degrees in this pose then you are probably not ready to do straight leg sitting forward bends like paschimottanasana (where you sit on the floor with both legs straight and try to fold forward over your thighs).  This is because if your hamstrings won’t allow your legs to move beyond 90 degrees in the lying down version, the only way you will come forward in a sitting forward bend is to round your spine.  In fact, if you find that you cannot get your legs beyond 90 degrees in the lying (supta) version, then you should either be sitting on a block in the sitting version, or bending your knees.  If nothing else, supta padangusthasanawill force you to be honest about your true hamstring flexibility.

The most relaxing version is to come to a doorframe or pillar, as I have done in the photo below.  I have placed my bottom at the pillar edge and lengthened one leg through along the floor, keeping it straight (if you do this at a door frame your leg will go through the doorway).  The other leg goes up the pillar (or up the doorframe).  To straighten your leg up the pillar/doorframe, you need to have 90 degrees of flexibility.  If you cannot straighten your leg (or if the leg going along the floor starts to bend) then you know you are not ready to sit on the floor in a forward bend without props or adjustments.  If you cannot straighten the leg then you can move your bottom slightly away from the wall so that you can straighten it. 

If you can take your leg up the wall then, if you want to lengthen your hamstrings more, you can take a belt or towel or scarf around the foot and start to draw the leg towards your face.  Keep your shoulders on the ground and your neck relaxed.  One of the most common things I see as a teacher is the displacement of tension into muscles completely unrelated to the ones you are trying to target and in this posture it is not uncommon for people to struggle to reach their foot by lifting their shoulders off the ground or straining their neck. 

Only when you can bring your leg back far enough that you can reach your foot without moving your shoulder away from the ground should you attempt to take your toe with your hand.

A few things to remember in this posture:

·         Don’t displace tension into the neck or shoulders;

·         Take deep, relaxing breaths;

·         Your hamstrings might attempt to escape the stretch by one of two main methods.  Watch out for these.  First, your knee might bend—keep it straight.  Second, your hip/bottom might jut out to the side.  You will feel this as a shortening of the side waist of the raised leg side.  Make sure to keep both side waists equally long and keeping your pelvis level;

·         Lengthen the raised leg heel up into the sky, creating as much distance between the back of your knee and your heel as possible.  This will increase the sensation down the back of your leg dramatically and you may feel a stretch from the heel to the sitting bones;

·         Hold for as long as you like on both sides.  Why not try a couple of minutes?

Enjoy your practice.  I will be back with more sweatless yoga poses soon!

with mettha,

Samantha