Effortless Yoga

a Work in progress, thank you to my students, who are always willing to learn. This has inspired me to learn more, to teach more and to process and accumilating this knowledge.
My aim is:


To explain the basic principles of the body and mind, creating effortless yoga and effortless progress on the path.

A few unedited drafts...collecting to become a collection of some sort.


Yoga

Yoga is Yog, Yuk, meaning to yoke. The joining of matter and spirit. The practice of yoga is alignment of energy. To align the body to allow energy to flow. Logically thinking about this it means returning to natural state of being. We will be exploring why we are not in natural state and where these blockages come from and how to release them through breath, meditation, relaxation and alignment of the body which generates divine alignment of mind and body.These four different elements of yoga, in my opinion, are to be taken equally into your practice, neither one is more important than the other. They dance together and compliment each other in the journey of alignment. Breathing, pranayama, is part of the asana, posture practice, as well as done separately in seated pose. Relaxation, shavasana and meditation, dhyana and dhrana are practiced during the practise of pranayama, asana and relaxation and separately. These four techniques in yoga dance and weave through each other, giving the gifts of yoga freely through our dedication and practice of them.


More doing, less thinking
More mind, less body.

Effortless breath retention, kumbhaka. Slice the breath with a samurai sword, Don’t make a big deal out of it, just merely stop the breathing. Expand and relax into the retention.
Do not let the mind fixate on the holding of the breath, but allow the mind to expand, allowing the air to move inside the body to every single part of the body. Thus, holding is not such a good word to use, we tend to grip and hold. Instead utilize the word suspension with expansion, “suspend the breath…expand”. Allow relaxation to happen during the retention. I enjoy allowing the mind the become conscious of the body, such as shoulders that tend to lift, ribs that tend to be held hard, soften. Softening the entire body will create a relaxed mindset around breath retention. The reason why this is quite a practice is that the reptile mind is built to panic when there is no breath flow. The inhale seems to be easier to suspend than the exhale, because of the lungs that are full. So relaxation on the breath retention of the exhale is even more needed, because the lungs are empty and the mind could rebel against this action. Practice to cut the breath, we tend to take a little sip of air in just before breathe retention on the out and a little exhale just before breathe retention on the inhale. Think of slicing or cutting the breath off sharply, merely stop breathing.
It is a practice of retraining the mind, not allowing it to go into to its habitual pattern of panic, but knowing that I am governing the body and asking for it to follow my commands.
Breathe
Breathe during asanas, harmonizing breath and movement Breathe movement or control (pranayama) Conscious of natural flow of breathe (meditation)