You should feel somewhat overwhelmed in the midst of your first Ashtanga Yoga practice. It gets better after many years! Focus on the Breath, Not the Pose —The real magic of the practice happens through the channel of the breath.
Deep breathing with sound is the link that ties the conscious and the subconscious mind together. When you delve into the Ashtanga Yoga method, the poses are merely an opportunity for you to breathe. Watch tutorials from a qualified teacher that you respect to guide you into healthy anatomical and alignment principles.
Learning how to think through the technique of the asana helps you understand how to work. It can change a feeling of helplessness to a feeling of hopefulness. Feel Your Body —The real purpose of yoga is to feel your body. The poses are never meant to be goals in an of themselves. In fact you never really master a pose. Instead, when you practice, the real intention is to bring awareness into every cell of your whole body.
Once the body is literally filled with the infinite light of your own consciousness you will wake up to the truth of who you are. This transcendental body awareness can happen in any pose, so no need to try and do all the advanced poses.
While almost all yogis struggle with the poses, the struggle is meant to be a teacher. Wherever you meet your challenge is where your yoga begins. If you find your edge in the first breath of the practice consider yourself lucky. Instead, the students start to slowly and gradually learn the sequence of postures. And so in a Mysore style class, everyone practices the set sequence of the Ashtanga yoga postures following the rhythm of their own breath.
You will be surprised at how fast you learn the postures if you start attending Mysore style classes! And so if you are a beginner and are not sure if this is the right class for you, ask your local Ashtanga studio or the teacher and follow their advice.
However, if the studio does indeed have Mysore classes, they will most likely advise you to gradually start coming there. And it really can be applied to many aspects of the practice. Even regarding memorizing the sequence. Practice really does make perfect. And in this case, practice will help you learn the Ashtanga postures, as difficult or as daunting as it may seem at first. Ashtanga yoga is generally practiced 6 days a week. And so in essence, this is asking us to be consistent with the practice and make it part of our daily routine.
You may even notice that once you do have a consistent practice, it will become easier to learn the poses. With time you will start noticing that if you practice once in a while, your practice will not really progress, and will have trouble remembering the poses.
If 6 days a week is too much for you, then try to practice at least twice a week but try to be consistent. Ashtanga yoga follows the same sequence of postures. And each sequence begins with the sun salutations. By spending time at first on the foundations of the practice, the correct breathing, and then how to link that to movement, this will help you remember the poses. In Ashtanga yoga, one of the rules is that it is the right side first.
And so we notice this even in the sun salutations. More specifically, in Surya Namaskara B, after the first downward-facing dog, on an inhale we step the right foot forward, and then the left. And then in the seated postures, this may become more obvious. And so in each posture, we bring in the right foot first and then the left. The exception to this rule are two poses: Marichyasana B and D.
And the reason is that in these poses we bring the left foot into lotus, but the focus is on the right leg. One thing that might help you learn the poses is to think of them in groups of postures rather than one big chunk of postures.
And so the Ashtanga yoga primary series can be divided into 4 distinct groups of postures:. When you go to an ashtanga yoga studio, you may notice that some classes are one hour long and others may be up to two hours long.
But is it not a set sequence of poses? So it makes sense to wonder, how long does an ashtanga yoga class take, and in particular, how long does the ashtanga yoga primary series take? Some studios offer a Half Primary class which may last 60 minutes. When practicing alone you can even do Ashtanga short form which can take 11 minutes. And so even though Ashtanga yoga is a set series of postures, you can adapt the length of the practice depending on your energy levels and also how much time you actually have.
Beginners to the practice are generally recommended to go to a Foundation class or a Beginner class. In some studios, the Half Primary series class is what is geared towards beginners. In an effort to make this article as helpful as possible I gave myself the opportunity to geek out. I checked out the available Ashtanga yoga classes on Youtube and made a note of their duration. But not only that. I have also made a note of how long each teacher guides the 4 main parts of an Ashtanga yoga class:.
I have listed the led classes from the shortest to the longest. You may be wondering why there is such a great difference in the duration of led classes. Especially when considering that one class is 79 minutes long just under one and a half hour and the other is an incredible minutes long. And yes, that is a long 2 hour and 2-minute practice!
The question is, at what point does the pattern of primary series slip over some edge and become an anatomical imbalance that is detrimental? In general, I would say that it takes at least a few years for us to approach that edge.
And most people doing primary series six days a week under the guidance of a good teacher would move on from the primary series within three years. Of course, there will always be exceptions. For me, this is where the patterns themselves increase their potential to become harmful. In a way, the practice if it could assumes that you are going to practice daily and move into the intermediate series within a couple of years.
After all, back in the day when these sequences were created, practitioners did dedicate themselves to daily practice. Primary and intermediate series together lay the groundwork for a much more balanced practice than either of them on their own. Our yoga practice, does not happen in isolation, however. The patterns created by repetition of the series interact with our other patterns, activities, etc.
Our yoga practice, in this case the primary series, becomes one of our converging histories. The cumulative result of all of our converging histories can be imbalances in body structures and tissues. It is this cumulative activity that we should look to when we evaluate whether an anatomical imbalance from yoga practice is occurring. There are many intentions that we can work with in the Ashtanga yoga practice.
And ONE of our intentions is likely around physical wellness attributes. Although most people think of primary series as a bunch of forward bends , I personally believe it to be much more nuanced than that. Unfortunately, the other anatomical aspects either get glossed over or avoided to emphasize only the forward bend. This may be the most obvious overdoing of a particular pattern in primary series. Anatomically, primary series emphasizes external hip rotation, anterior pelvic tilt, and an increased length in the back of the body overall.
0コメント