Yoga is a journey; it is not an outward adventure, it is an inward voyage. Just like any trip you would take it is helpful to know where you are headed (at least what direction to start out in); it is even more useful to have a map and a guidebook and it is most supportive to have a guide that is familiar with the area. Here are 9 fundamental building blocks every beginner should know before getting started with the yoga positions. This foundation includes the big picture, the guidebook and I will be your tour guide. The asanas/postures are the maps that you will use to explore the terrain of yourself. Yet it is imperative to walk the journey yourself; I can not carry you and there is no benefit in staying home and just studying the map. These 9 fundamental building blocks chart the journey ahead, what you need to bring, what you can expect and what you need to know before we get started.
Yoga has become so integrated into my sense of Self, health and well being I really can’t separate them anymore. Days that I abstain from practice just don’t seem to go as well, in general, as days that I do; I tend to be more emotional, a little bit more down, the day just seems choppy; it doesn’t have the same grace and flow. When I do practice everything is put in perspective for the day, I am more clear and centered. It takes much bigger tidal wave to knock my socks off. I just tend to feel happier not just emotionally, my body is lighter too. When I go several days with out practicing my body tends to get very cranky and eventually so do I until I take that time for myself.
Yoga has also quickly become one of the most loved practices for health and well being here in the West. With millions of practitioners this is not just a trend. It is a lifestyle, a way of being in the world with no sign of decline in sight. So if you are just playing with the idea of trying it for the first time or a seasoned practitioner that wants a little more inspiration I give you 50 reasons to get on the mat.
The teaching of sthira and sukha goes back through history to one of the earliest written classic texts about the practice of yoga, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. There is a story from Indian mythology that beautifully illustrates these two qualities. It is the story of Ananta, the king of the snakes, the king of the Nagas. It is told that Ananta floats on an ocean, his long body is curled up to form a comfortable couch for the god Vishnu, his thousand heads come up like a protective umbrella over Vishnu on which lies our world. Ananta is firm and steady enough to hold the world yet soft and comfortable enough to be the seat of a god.
The qualities of sthira and sukha are essential to ones yoga practice. Without it there is no asana. Early on in my yoga practice, when I started taking classes, I learned about these qualities. I learned at that time that these words simply meant ease and effort and that each pose should posses each of these two qualities equally. Yet there is a richness and a depth to these concepts that I have just recently begun to unravel and shed some more light on. In turn they have brought a deeper awareness, sensitivity and joy to my practice.
Yoga Positions for Beginners Session 1
When I first started exploring yoga in 1997 I remember being very delighted to just practice some basic yoga positions by myself with a routine I created from a book I found on my mother’s shelf. It was called Savitri’s Way to Perfect Fitness Through Hatha Yoga by Savitri Ahuja. It was a very sweet book from 1979 with beautiful hand sketched drawings of people performing the postures and cute yet curious sayings at the top of each page. It wasn’t until a while later that I actually ended up in a class with my first teacher, Judith Dahn. Classes and personal instruction are incredibly valuable and rewarding. However, I would not change how I got started for the world. I highly value my time starting slowly by myself in my living room. From the very beginning I was tuning into myself and my own inner teacher. I invite you to do the same. I am offering here a simple, short sequence to those of you who are just getting started on your own journey of yoga or seasoned studio goers who want some basic yoga positions to practice at home.
I never really thought about keeping my yoga mat clean until one day, in cobra pose, my nose revealed the truth of the situation at hand. It was at my yoga teacher training in Thailand. We were there for three months and it was very hot! Not to mention we were doing a very vigorous practice and there was much sweating going on daily. Needless to say the mats got stinky very quickly; lucky for us we had a lot of fresh air moving through the space. Over there learning how to care for our yoga mat was pretty straight forward, we just rinsed them outside with cold water every week or so and then hung them to air dry which happened pretty quickly in the warm open air.
The second time I really thought about yoga mat care and cleanliness was while I was teaching at a community college. I realized that about a hundred different students used those mats each week. Thinking about all those feet with questionable levels of sanitation over and over again and the infrequency in which they were washed I began to think it was kind of gross not only sharing foot funk but putting our faces down on those mats for prone positions like cobra, locust and bow. I started encouraging the school to wash them more and students to bring their own mats or at least a hand towel to put down under their faces if they were sensitive to that sort of thing.
