The Importance of Practicing Yoga in Your OWN Way
The Importance of Practicing Yoga in Your OWN Way
While Bryan Kest's Power Yoga consists of instructor-led videos, yoga practice should be a personal journey. Here's how to find your own. Essentially, this is how it’s done!
There are 7,000,000,000 ways to do a yoga pose every day. What this means is we are all unique and different from each other. Since every moment we are aging and changing we are unique and different from ourselves the day prior. To discover where you belong in each pose is the key not only to the poses but to healthy and contented life.
Out of these seven billion ways how do I discover “my way” of doing the pose? Especially when attending an in-person or livestream class where everyone is expected to do what the instructor is asking?
Most importantly, we recognize our uniqueness and the fact that our needs are unique! It also helps to have an instructor who also recognizes this as well and is encouraging us to tune in to what we are feeling. Once we acknowledge our uniqueness it follows that our needs are grossly or subtly different than others in everything including these yoga poses. Once we understand this, we can see the absurdity of comparing and competing. We cannot compare or compete without disrespecting our uniqueness.
The art of yoga is the same as the art of living. This art involves paying attention (awareness) to the experience one is having and according to the experience making intelligent decisions about what’s needed. This is when yoga becomes healing, when we are tuned into and honoring what we are feeling. Sensation is the language of the body! As we enter these poses the body will talk to us in its language. Sensation that feels good means go deeper and sensation that is painful or causes strain means back off. This is how we discover our place in each pose. This place is somewhere between too much and not enough and is different from everybody else, even different from ourselves the last time we practiced yoga.
This is not easy to recognize and embrace as our brains have been programmed by our culture to believe “more is better” and “no pain no gain”! This programmed mentality needs to be recognized and eradicated by no longer feeding it mental energy and unconscious loyalty.
To be contented we need to be accepting of our uniqueness on every level and since we need to start somewhere, why not start with our bodies within these poses? The art of yoga is the same as the art of living because in both cases we need to be quiet and present. When your mind is quiet, we are not facilitating stress and when the mind is present, we can suck the juice out of every moment. This is what we are practicing within a yoga class. Loose hamstrings don’t really help much if anything, but a quiet, peaceful, and present mind helps everything.
All of this is what we incorporate into our Power Yoga in-person or livestream classes. Once all of this is truly understood, it can then transcend the yoga studio and permeate our life. Amen!
Love,
BK