Asana is a Verb: Let Your Yoga Evolve

Within the age of social media, yoga pose images can encourage and/or intimidate. Instagram is chock stuffed with picture-perfect fancy yoga poses. Taking a look at yoga pose images is one strategy to set intentions in your apply. It may be useful to look at how others apply. However images have one main limitation: they’re static depictions of dwelling, respiration types. However yoga just isn’t a static apply. Asana is a verb.

What Does It Imply to Pose?

A part of the rationale we regularly misread asana as a static kind could possibly be a matter of semantics. Most of us use the phrase “pose” to explain asana. The Oxford Dictionary’s first definition of the noun type of “pose” is that this: “a specific approach of standing or sitting, normally adopted for impact or to be able to be photographed, painted, or drawn.” This sounds an terrible lot like what we do after we pose for a potential viewers on social media.

The verb definitions are equally problematic. In keeping with Merriam Webster, the primary two are: “1. : to imagine a posture or perspective normally for creative functions. 2. : to have an effect on an perspective or character normally to deceive or impress. posed as a physician to realize entry to the ward.” Yikes!

Because of this I’ve tried—with restricted success—to vary my behavior of utilizing the phrase “pose.” Outdated habits die laborious, however I do really feel that the phrase “asana” is discovering its approach into my yoga instruction extra typically than it used to. The explanation I really feel that is necessary is that most individuals don’t come to yoga apply with a preconceived thought of what asana means. The phrase is extra malleable, making it simpler for college kids to interpret it in additional versatile methods. Asana is a dwelling, respiration course of. So it’s necessary to not confine it to a static definition.

If Asana Is a Verb, How Do You Strategy Observe?

Listed below are some methods to discover the method of asana:

1. Step one in recognizing asana’s evolving nature is to let go of our ideas of what every pose “ought to” look or really feel like. Meaning creating our “newbie’s thoughts.”
2. When you open to permitting your asana to unfold naturally, as a substitute of attempting to make it match a specific preconceived mildew, you’ll be able to start exploring.
3. Every asana begins with our preliminary intention to apply it. So, set an intention to be current with your complete course of, starting with no matter sensations come up if you resolve to apply a specific asana. Are you anticipating what you would possibly really feel, based mostly on previous expertise? Is there trepidation or nervousness across the pose? If it’s a pose you take pleasure in, are you in a rush to maneuver into it?
4. Then be current with the sensations that accompany establishing your physique to be able to make the form of the asana. Do you begin the method from a specific standing, sitting or mendacity down place? What sensations are current as you put together?
5. Be current with the method of transferring into the asana. Transfer slowly, with the intention to really feel the altering sensations as your physique shifts towards the asana.
6. As soon as your physique has discovered the form of the asana, breathe and chill out. Keep linked to the unfolding course of. The place do you are feeling stretching or stabilizing sensations? How are these sensations transferring and altering?
7. Keep inside your physique, letting the breath information you. Every a part of the breath—inhalation and exhalation—will counsel to your physique to both retract from or deepen into your asana. Loosen up into these strategies, permitting your physique to oscillate, gently and subtly, into and out of the pose. Be current with the method. That is in all probability the simplest strategy to perceive how asana is a verb.
8. What sensations accompany the impulse to come back out of an asana? Keep linked to the method of transferring out of your asana. Then pause for a second in a impartial place to really feel the consequences.

A Few Extra Ideas

• It may be useful to apply a specific pose greater than as soon as. In case you keep current as you apply, as within the above directions, you could really feel utterly totally different sensations the second time round. That may assist unstick us from our preconceived concepts concerning the asana.
• Have enjoyable with it. The easiest way to maintain your apply recent is to method it with curiosity. Every time you apply, say, Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Dealing with Canine Pose), you’re coming to it with a unique physique/thoughts. Regardless of what number of instances you’ve put your physique within the form of the asana, it actually is totally different every time. Staying current with the method can hold your apply recent.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third e-book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and folks sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards in 2010.