yoga seeds

yoga seeds #25 – A home practice – 2/ What do I do?

| María Ferrara

There are many approaches to building a sequence, so the question is very legitimate! If you’re regularly attending someone’s class, your body has very probably already internalized some of their sequences. A possible approach is to just let your body lead you. It is likely that it remembers more than your mind. That’s how I started practising at home :) You could also decide beforehand what you’re going to do, based on how you feel or on a certain long-term focus that you’re working on. Start your session connecting to your breath, make it balanced by including the five movements of the spine -forward bend, backbend, side bend, twist and elongation (this one should be there transversally, in everything)- and finish lying down to relax and integrate (savasana). If you’re working on an asana, you can approach its component parts in the previous asanas, starting with the least challenging . I try to signpost my classes, so that you know what each thing is for. My intention is that, with time, you can play with these building blocks yourself and combine them in different ways. Give it a go! You might be surprised how much you’ve already in-corpo-rated.

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.

yoga seeds #24 – Expectations

| María Ferrara

I was riding my bike to teach last Sunday morning. On the side of the road I spotted a small red ball. The kind with which children’s pools are filled. After a couple hundred meters there was a blue one. Later a yellow one. Then I noticed myself getting impatient about not finding the next one. My mind had created an expectation based on the pattern. But milestones don’t appear regularly or when we want them. Moreover, what other details along the way did I miss while I was busy getting frustrated with the ball sequence that didn’t continue? Note to self: deactivate expectation as much as possible to stay in the now!

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.

yoga seeds #23 – Flexibility and strength

| María Ferrara

My motto since I started teaching yoga has been

Your body, your mind and you – a balance between flexibility and strength, will and surrender, concentration and expansion.

I was listening to the latest Yogaland podcast in which Andrea Ferretti talks to Jason Crandell (These are my favourites. Highly recommended! Check out the link and the series.) and was reminded of the process that took me away from an I-just-can’t-get-enough-flexibility approach into also developing strength. After an accident I was left with a painful sacroiliac joint. A teacher at the time was trying to get me to stretch more and more with the idea that that would get rid of the pain, but this was not working. I later discovered that my SI joint was unstable and what I actually needed was strength to hold the joint in place.

A functional muscle is a muscle with tone. That means that it can both contract and relax, with a wide range between extremes. A healthy practice includes a balanced recipe of isometric contraction (the muscle contracts without generating movement), concentric contraction (the muscle contracts bringing its ends closer to each other), excentric contraction (the muscle contracts while its ends come away from each other – imagine you sit down while also resisting the pull of gravity, as if in slow motion), stretching and letting go. The way I see it, the ultimate aim of yoga is integration. Starting with the physical not only gives us healthy functionality but helps us progress towards integration and equanimity at the more subtle level of the psyche.

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.

yoga seeds #22 – Home practice – 1/ Home!

| María Ferrara

Rebecca, who is the karma yogi at the reception desk on Saturdays suggested the other day that I address the topic of developing a home practice. A great idea! In fact so great and big, that I will be covering it in different posts, not necessarily one after the other.

I like to call it home practice, even if we are talking about practising in a hotel, on the beach or hidden in one of the many dead-end corridors of an airport (yes, I’ve done it!), because I like to think of my practice as coming home. Coming home as in returning to a place where you can be exactly how you are in the moment and give yourself whatever it is that you’re needing. I once heard that,

rolling out the mat is the most difficult asana

I know the feeling! So what I do is make this “asana” easier by meeting myself exactly where I am. If I’m all agitated and speedy, I don’t start with stillness, even though that’s where I ultimately need and want to go to. I would need too much effort to bring the speed down to zero all at once. So instead I start with something closer to my energy level (some rounds of no-pause sun salutations, cat-cows, or even dancing!) and let the deceleration offer itself. Likewise in the other direction. If I feel stagnant I will begin by lying down and doing very minimalistic things (twist the head to the sides for several breaths, rock in happy-baby pose, reclined twist fanning the arm that’s far from the legs on the floor like a wing…). I will repeat until I feel the wish to do something else and that slowly starts to pick the energy up – even if that means staying on the ground! To encourage yourself to roll out the mat, make it feel like home. Rather than thinking about what you “should” or “must” do, think about what will make you feel at home, exactly as you are there and then. And see where it takes you!

Do you have any specific questions about your home practice? Do send them to me here!

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.

yoga seeds #21 – In transit

| María Ferrara

The last asana I’ve been focussing on in class is upward-facing dog (urdhva mukha svanasana). Several people have told me they had never actually been given any instruction regarding this asana, which just got called out as part of vinyasa. So, although they had transitioned through this pose lots of times before, they had actually just muddled through it. I really enjoy movement and, therefore, vinyasa-based yoga, but this is one of the reasons why I also like to hold poses. It gives me a chance to access the details both in doing and in perceiving. Keeping the awareness when I am in action is a greater challenge than when I’m still, be it while flowing through asanas or while moving through life.

PS: This week I will deal with the chaturanga to upward-facing dog transition in my classes, by public demand :)

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.

yoga seeds #20 – The hip way to your back

| María Ferrara

Last week somebody told me how wonderful their body had felt after the class the previous week. They suffer from ongoing back pains and they all seemed to be gone as they woke up the next day. The current theme block I’m working on is backbends and on that specific session we had focussed intensively on stretching the front of the hip. What does the hip have to do with the back? A lot! The hips are the gateway between our core and our connection to the earth through our legs. If the trunk is not sitting how it should be on top of the legs, the spine will be thrown out of its beloved natural curves into a strenuous shape in order to keep us balanced and in relationship with the world. The ubiquity of the chair in our society, both for work and for leisure, means that our hips spent a long time flexed forward. If we don’t stretch our hip flexors to counteract this, they will be permanently pulling together the abdomen and the thighs. If the muscles cannot open this angle when we stand up, this will pull the top of the pelvis forwards. To compensate and also so that we can look ahead of us, the spine will need to curve backwards. The easier points where the spine can do this are the lower back and the neck. What a coincidence… two very usual spots for tension! Of course, back problems can have many other origins. However, if you spend a long time on a chair, do treat your back regularly to some hip low lunges (anjaneyasana) and high lunges (ashwa sanchalanasana). Your back will thank you for it!

Thanks to all my students at Yoga Hub Berlin, who inspire me with their practice.

Visit the Yoga Seeds index to go straight to what you’re looking for.