#yogateachertips

Yin yoga is a beautifully delicious practice that helps us heal both our heart and our mind. It allows us time to sit within ourselves, to just be still, and to notice what the body and mind are telling us.

It differs enormously from Vinyasa yet is the perfect complement! By having a Yin and a Yang yoga practice, you are creating a beautiful balance within your energy systems and a unique sense of calmness you will feel both physically and mentally.

Yin yoga is a slow and steady practice, which blends with meditation to bring you back to a sense of ease.

Yin and Yang tissues respond differently to being exercised. Muscles require heat and movement to release in a Yang practice like Vinyasa, while connective tissue responds best to the long steady holds within a Yin practice. Here are nine reasons to practice Yin yoga regularly.

1. Yin increases your flexibility.

Yin yoga stretches and targets both the deep connective tissues between the muscles, and the fascia throughout the body. The aim is to increase circulation in the joints and improve flexibility as the poses stretch and exercise the bone and joint areas. It also helps us to regulate the body’s flow of energy.

2. You can practice it almost anywhere.

Yin yoga is very portable. You don’t always need a mat—the only thing you might need to introduce Yin into your day is a cushion or bolster! Most Yin yoga poses can be held while sitting at your desk, watching the TV, reading, or lying in bed!

3. Yin fosters self-love.

Yin yoga is amazing for opening up our hearts, calming our nervous systems, and providing a space for the body to deeply relax. It also allows us to recover and nourish ourselves, wash away our fears, and cultivate compassion and love for ourselves.

Practicing Yin is like thanking yourself for being so awesome. It helps us build absolute self-belief and faith in how wonderful we are, each and every day! This practice is a beautiful way for those who have disconnected from their bodies to reconnect in a gentle, compassionate way.

4. It melts your stress away.

Question: What is the part of the body that we use the most, but probably spend the least amount of time taking good care of?

Answer: Our minds!

We live in a world of deadlines and appointments, craziness and social media, anxiety and stress. What better way to switch off than to sit still in poses anywhere from three to ten minutes? By doing Yin, you are giving yourself plenty of time to do nothing other than ‘just breathe.’

It is a truly perfect way to find space, to slow your mind down, and to be guided deeper into your practice.

5. Yin allows you to become intimate with yourself.

Get ready to get intimate with your feelings, sensations, and emotions—something that can perhaps be ignored during a faster paced class.

When we begin to practice Yin, we learn to listen to our bodies, slowing everything down. We learn to recognize our thoughts, to see them coming in and out of our mind, and to experience and digest them, instead of having them race through our mind like an escaped rollercoaster.

This in turn increases our ability to be in the present moment and practice gratitude, slowly bringing us closer to our authentic self.

6. It builds fortitude and perseverance.

When life gets tough, you’ll find me on my mat practicing Yin—and the world quickly becomes a better place! When you are stuck mentally and the power to walk away is overwhelming, Yin teaches you that staying still and dealing with whatever comes up one breath at a time will actually help you grow.

As we hold our Yin pose, the drama peaks, it gets harder to ignore the monkey mind, and we start really wanting to leave the pose. Yin teaches us to find a place of comfort in a not-so-comfortable place and observe our thoughts and reactions from a perspective of calmness.

It is a practice that can be brought into our daily lives.

7. Yin is like meditation for beginners.

During Yin practice you will find yourself with a lot of time on your hands. Here, you find yourself face-to-face with the chance to begin a gentle meditation practice, to slow your breath and calm your mind.

Your teacher will guide you through your practice, offering ways to keep your mind focused and to stop your body and thoughts from wanting to escape.

Yin yoga provides a safe place for your mind and body to enter into and consequently gain greater personal growth through a meditative and blissful experience once you open yourself up to the vastness within yourself.

8. It enables you to release your demons.

When held at length, what seems like an easy, inoffensive pose can change into something super challenging. This is what Yin does—the poses and the way they are held can release incredibly strong sensations, both physically and emotionally.

See, we store our emotions in the various parts of our bodies. Memories, anxieties, and tension linger on in cells stored deep in our tissues. When we go into a yoga pose that opens a part of the body left untouched for a while, these deeply stored memories and emotions resurface.

Doing so can be challenging in the moment, and can lead to a wide array of reactions such as tears, anger, and sheer frustration, but afterwards it leads to our final point…

9. Yin gives you a fabulous afterglow

Practicing Yin gives you that dreamy afterglow where you find that moment of absolute peace within yourself.

While you may feel like you have not even broken a sweat by the end of the class, your mind, body, and spirit have been performing on a much deeper, more intense level, leaving you with a clearer mind, a lighter body, and a fuller heart.

Don’t think about that white elephant! Of course, now that’s all you can notice in your mind. Where we place our attention is where we rest our power.

What you put attention on, you grant power. Where you choose to place your attention, then, is a crucial decision.

Yoga and meditation teachers often use the words ‘attention’ and ‘awareness’ interchangeably. To me they are fundamentally different, as they create two fundamentally different experiences of reality.

Attention means being focused on one thing. Awareness means taking in multiple things at once. Focusing on one thing gives us a distorted view of reality, especially when we focus on the most negative thing happening in any given moment. Learning to move from attention to awareness can transform your practice both physically and mentally. Ultimately, it can transform your life.

Attention can be focused and steady, and when it is, it can be quite helpful in quieting the monkey mind. Our normal mode is to be stuck in attention that is reactive rather than steady. Our minds tend to zero in on what appears to be the most pressing thing at any given moment. We do this to the exclusion of everything else, only to become obsessed with something different a few moments later.

This obsession over whatever seems most important at the moment literally distorts our perception of reality. It dramatically over-emphasizes one aspect of reality, while it erases from your view everything else that is happening. The problem is that we have an inbuilt tendency to zero in on the most negative thing happening in any given moment. Ignoring all the other things happening in each moment means ignoring countless things that are actually going well. Cultivating awareness is not the act of putting on rose-colored glasses. It’s the act of taking off the cracked, smudged, and soot-stained glasses you have been wearing all your life.

How moving from attention to awareness can transform your yoga

In yoga reactive attention manifests itself often as a fixation on a particular body part. Sometimes we fixate on the body part that seems to be working hardest at that moment. Sometimes it’s the one that is feeling the most intense stretch. Reactive attention also manifests itself as an over-focus on the front of the body (associated with individual consciousness), and a tendency to forget about the back body (linked to universal consciousness).

In yoga, allowing reactivity to rule us means we forget about the energetic shape of a pose. We forget about spacious alignment as our mind tries to convince us that we need to straighten that front leg NOW in Warrior II because the bent leg can’t support our weight any longer. Ironically, being able to move from attention to awareness is exactly the solution to the front knee turning to jelly.

Bringing awareness to body parts that don’t seem important right now is transformative. Spreading awareness allows you to realize that there are actually muscles you are not currently contracting that, when engaged, would really aid the pose. When you notice non-essential body parts you also notice that you may be holding tension where it is actually detrimental. Engaging what you forgot to engage, and relaxing what you forgot to relax can make poses dramatically more effortless. Of course, making poses more effortless is a mere side-effect of moving from attention to awareness, cool as it is. The real point of distinguishing between attention and awareness is to notice how reactive attention keeps us out of the here and now. The point is to notice that attention keeps us away from serenity.

Spread awareness to increase happiness

We will focus this week on spreading awareness to the body parts that don’t seem important in any given pose. Hopefully you will discover how seemingly minor and usually forgotten alignment details can transform a pose. Perhaps you will also discover how spreading awareness can transform your experience of that pose.

While hindsight is 20/20, often the things we perceive to be major hindrances become our greatest teachers. In the moment, though, when obstacles present themselves, our response is often one of frustration or defeat.

We fight to hold onto the past, to hold onto only the positive moments in our lives. We build this illusion that our lives would be different, and happy if we only it were different, or like it used to be.

Yet, life flows. Pain and death are inevitable just as the seasons change.

We suffer in missing this flow of life. We suffer trying to hold onto the attachment of an ‘if then’ world. A world of yesterdays and should have beens. We suffer in resisting change.

Yet, what we do not realize in our suffering is that the obstacle is the path.

This is our journey.

How can we know light if we do not also know darkness? How can we know love if we do not also know hate? Joy without sadness?

There is no destination on our journey. There is no end point. Our path is not straight it has ups and downs, birth and death, pain and happiness, joy and sadness. When we fight the flow of life we try to change nature and the universe itself.

Life happens. Pain is inevitable, we cannot change this no more than stopping time itself. The Dalai Lama stated “True change is within, leave the outside as it is.”

The obstacle is the path. Embrace it, don’t fight it. Give gratitude for these moments, these moments are what make you. There is beauty in every step along the journey, gratitude in our experiences. Give thanks and gratitude for the ability to experience these moments no matter how painful they may be.

This is growth. This expands our circle of compassion and our connection to all living beings. This is putting our heart out, fully open and vulnerable.

This is life, beautiful with all of its warts and changes. When we remove the cocoon of illusion life transforms, and we are free to fly in all its beauty, the concept of good or bad dissipates and we are simply left with this present moment.

What you need to know:

Pricing

Outdoor classes can be paid for using your monthly subscription or as drop in. Drop in classes are R110 per person.   Address

Classes will be held at my home

The gate will open 10 mins before class starts

There is parking on the property

Times

Thursday 10.30 am Gentle Vinyasa Sign up

Thursday 6 pm Sunset Yin Sign up

Saturday 9 am Vinyasa Power Flow Sign Up

I am also looking at doing an outdoor workshop/intensive 30 minute class on a Monday or a Friday morning. If you are interested please let me know which time you would prefer

These classes will be available as outdoor classes from next week.

Cancellations

Outdoor classes are dependant on the weather. Cancellations will be announced an hour before class in the WhatsApp groups so please make sure that you are in the correct group.  You do have the option to attend the cancelled class on zoom in your own home.

What to bring

Bring your mat, blocks, straps, bolsters and blankets. I don’t have any props at home any more as they have been temporarily re-homed by my zoom yogis. You may want to bring water with you when the weather is very hot. A sunhat and sunglasses might also be a good idea.

Booking is essential  You need to book to ensure you have a spot.

We don't notice our breath because we don’t have to. It is one of the body’s many miraculous and autonomic functions. From our first gasp at birth to our last rattling sigh, we may never give our twenty thousand breaths per day a second thought. However, in a yoga or meditation practice, breath is the focal point. As any yoga practitioner, meditator, laboring expectant mother, or athlete knows, the breath is where the magic happens. It is the bridge between the body and the mind and links the physical and subtle dimensions.

As we practice asana, we learn to keep the body calm through the breath. The combination of movement and conscious breathing produces a unique physiological response. By maintaining a steady, slow breath, we cultivate relaxation and keep thoughts at bay even while we may be pushing our physical limits. Conscious breathing and asana become a moving meditation.

Our mental state and our breath are interwoven. If we’re relaxed, the breath is slow and deep. If we’re stressed, it is shallow and fast.

The breath is one of the rare essential functions in the body that is both voluntary and involuntary. Like blinking our eyes, we don’t have to think about our breath, but if we choose to, we can interrupt the natural breathing rhythms. When we do so, we also interrupt that breathing pattern’s associated biological reactions. For instance, when the body begins shallow breathing due to anxiety, we can reverse the response loop by initiating deep, slow breathing. When we are slowly “belly breathing,” it’s difficult for the fight-or-flight (anxiety) response to take hold.

Sit comfortably in an upright position, either in a chair with your legs uncrossed and your feet flat on the ground, or in Sukanasa on a cushion.

Close your eyes and begin to take slow, deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Next, bring to mind any thoughts, ideas, or beliefs that have become stagnant, non-serving, or irrelevant.

One by one, or all at once, see if you can connect to what their original purpose was. Do they have a reason for still existing? Is there something further to explore or is the energy ready to be dissolved and returned to its purest form?

When you come to the realization that it's time to let go of mind clutter—much in the same way you would give away an old jacket that you never wear anymore—thank it for having served its purpose and take in any learning or wisdom it has to impart.

Next, imagine seeing it dissolve like a morning layer of fog as the sun shines through, or visualize erasing it from a chalkboard to reveal a fresh, clean slate.

Once you've cleared away that which no longer needs to occupy your mind, spend some time connecting to the open space you have created in your internal world. The space that you've cultivated doesn't mean the mind is now empty. Rather, see it as being filled with the element of space, which represents pure potentiality.

Next, invite in a new thought or belief in the form of an intention for something you would like to manifest in the coming days, weeks, or months. Perhaps there is an old idea that you want to take off the shelf, dust off a bit, and revisit—maybe it's finally writing that book or starting the project that's been in the back of your mind for years.

Bring your new intention to the forefront of your mind and imagine planting it like a seed in the fertile soil of your soul and then ask the Universe to orchestrate the mechanics for its fulfillment on your behalf.

Then, let go of the intention—trusting that the Universe will work out the details—and take a few slow, deep breaths before opening your eyes.

How to Dry Brush

Dry brushing can be done daily over the whole body, preferably in the morning before showering. Start with a gentle brush and soft pressure. Work up to a firmer brush and more firm pressure over time.

Ingredients

a gentle brush is best

lotion is optional

Instructions

Starting at the feet, brush the bottoms of the feet and up the legs in long, smooth strokes. Brush each section of skin about 10 times. It's important to brush up toward the heart/chest area where the lymph system drains.

Repeat the same process with the arms, starting with the palms of the hands and brushing up the arm toward the heart. Again, brush each section of skin about 10 times.

On the stomach and armpits, brush in a circular clockwise motion.

Repeat the process on the abdomen and back.

Use a more delicate brush on your face to finish off the dry brushing process.

Follow up with lotion if desired.

Notes

“We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” —Joseph Campbell

There is extra delight in the unexpected joys. Once you keep your eyes open for them, you’ll find them everywhere. Joy can find you in an image, a phrase, a touch.

Perhaps you have an eye for four-leafed clovers or heart-shaped rocks. Maybe you delight in a turn of phrase or an unusual, but heartfelt complement. Or you could take pleasure in a high-five, fist bump, or shoulder pat. As you appreciate the unexpected joys in daily life, you can also find new wonderful elements of your yoga practice that bring joy: a tiny shift in alignment that feels huge; a particularly sweet exhalation.

Here are some tips for doing so:

1. Find Magical Light

Study the light in your life… what time of day the shadows fall just so… what the local spaces look like at certain times of the day. Light is a magical place to let go.

2. Find treasure

With your kids, partner, friends, self… give yourself a daily mission… to collect a feather, or find a leaf or smell a flower… something simple and accessible that will bring joy to you and those around you.

3. Smell the world

Smell brings on memories like no other sense. Fresh cut grass, a beloved ones’ perfume, laundry drying in the breeze. Smells bring us back and help move us forward.

4. Take photos

Snap photos of the things that inspire you and then marvel at the results when you put the two together.

5. Listen

Listen to the stories of loved ones and strangers. Listen to yourself. Listen to your body. Love is listening and the key to a well-documented life is learning how to listen and really hear people, music and all sounds in this life.

6. Expect Magic

Unexpected joys can spring from a certain expectation that, no matter what happens, there will be magic. (There always will be.)

The Orange by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange — The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave — They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. This is peace and contentment. It’s new.