If you’ve come to my classes or taken the Fundamentals Series—heck, if you’ve eavesdropped on conversations when I’m sitting at the front desk (although I’m sure you’re wondering if eavesdrop is the correct word here 😊)—you have heard me say, “Yoga is not a movement practice.” Yoga is an energy management system.
The West has turned yoga into a movement practice similar to CrossFit or HIIT or Step. With the introduction of power vinyasa flows, heated rooms, and other gimmicky things, yoga in the West has lost its secret sauce and just become another form of exercise.
When you stay true to the roots and traditions of yoga; when you focus on the breath, the stillness, the expansiveness, the listening, THAT is when yoga becomes yoga again and all that goodness happens. It’s just happenstance that we enter into these states of being THROUGH the portal of movement. The shapes we make with our bodies are secondary to the shapes we make with our breath, the shapes we make with our mind, the space we create in our soul.
We just finished up the final Fundamentals Series of 2023 earlier this week and the graduates always say to me that yoga is so different than what they thought it was. They leave the series with a better understanding of their physical body in the poses, but the get so much more. They learn that the breath influences the pose, the pose influences the mind, the mind influences the connection to the spirit/soul. It’s all an intertwined web.
If this is new information to you, then I invite you to jump into a Fundamentals Series (they begin again in 2024). If you know this and are wanting to dive deeper, join our Tradition in Practice Training (YTT2024) which will dive deeply into what lies beneath the surface of yoga. THAT’S where all the yumminess is <3
Xx
Jesi