Day 21 - Move with absolute awareness

I discovered Seanne Corne, and really love what she has to say here. She discusses breath and movement in Vinyasa Flow. I have replayed this over and over again at least 6 times today.

The Vinyasa practice is all about connecting the dot. It means linking movement and breath. It's learning how to move moment to moment, movement by movement, breath by breath. You want to bring into the Vinyasa practice, and into all of yoga, is your sense of humor, and a sense of play, and joy.

Obviously there's gonna be things that are gonna be challenging. The point is not to judge the experience, the point is to get into your body and explore, see what happens when you move towards the pose, and then you take the breath into it, and the breath, you start to link the mind and the body, and you're able to stay steady, and calm, and focus and aware and grounded.

What we're doing on a physiological level is stacking the bones in an appropriate way so that the muscles can stretch and tone evenly. We get into habits in our body, and if we find one little area that's somewhat flexible, we'll exploit it over and over, and that makes that area, as well as the area above and below it prone to injury. We can tend to move too quickly, we can tend to get careless, and we can put ourselves at risk of injury, so it's very important that we learn how to really integrate the technical pose, integrate the breath, and move with absolute awareness. And as you feel more confident you move in the next pose and you let the breath carry you there, and you make your adjustment and do what you need to do, and you get out of your head that your leg should be straight, or that it should look a certain way.

If you're breathing and you're not compromising your body, you're doing yoga brilliantly, beautifully.

Yoga practice is all about your inner awareness, and inner intention that you're creating, and your intention is to open your heart, your intention is to open your mind. If you're connecting with spirit, and if you're breathing, and if you're moving, you're gonna feel good. It may not be in your mind, "beautiful", but your connection to spirit is what's really important in this practice, beyond the physical expression. You'll get this, keep practicing, you'll get this, take care of your body, you will get this. You will memorize these poses, your body will start to feel more and more comfortable. For everybody who practices yoga, it's a process.

The Viyasa practice tends to be very physical, very dynamic, a lot of movement and breath, it's challenging, it's confrontational. It stimulates. That's an aspect of it. But we also want to bring in to make it a completely holistic experience, you gotta bring in the feminine. Where is the reflection, where is the intention, where is the prayer, where is the relationship to the inner world, not just the external outer world. You bring those together, that, to me, is the journey.