Starting From Where You Are

Elizabeth Advice

When I am out socially and someone introduces me as a yoga teacher, inevitably at least one person will tell me he or she would like to try yoga. “Unfortunately,” the person will continue, “I can’t.” He will explain that he really isn’t flexible, or she will say she tried it one time and couldn’t keep up, or he will add he has a bad back and couldn’t possibly twist himself “like a pretzel.” When I respond that he doesn’t have to twist himself like a pretzel to do yoga, or he doesn’t have to flexible, or that there are classes where she wouldn’t feel as if she always had to “keep up,” my listeners are either skeptical or surprised.

The image of yoga as an athletic physical practice has kept many people away from yoga when they could benefit from an appropriate practice designed to meet their needs. One of the most profound teachings of the great yoga teacher Krishnamacharya is that the individual should not be required to fit him or herself to yoga. Rather yoga should be made to fit the individual’s needs.

To do that you work privately with a teacher who takes into consideration your needs and interests to come up with a practice that fits the time and space you have available. The teacher makes sure the practice fits into the your life even if you only have time for a twenty minute practice. As you do the practice and progress, the practice changes, for one’s needs and goals change. There is no one size fits all yoga practice.

Many people choose to begin yoga by attending a class regularly. While a once a week yoga class cannot replace the personal practice designed for you that you do each day, it does offer the possibility of exploring different practices and perhaps experiencing something that you would like to pursue further, like chanting or meditation. It also provides a sense of community, as people come weekly and see one another and often become friends.

One of the most beautiful things about a yoga practice is that it is empowering. The personal practice requires that we take responsibility for doing it regularly with a positive attitude, and over time, observing its effects. But it is also beautiful because it is up to us to take the teachings into our lives, both on our mat in practice and in how we live and relate to others. Accepting where we are, and starting from that place, with the help of a teacher, is the way to begin.

Ultimately, the question should not be whether our practice enables us to do a complex yoga pose requiring a great deal of strength and agility and stamina. It should be, instead, whether our practice is helping us to have greater happiness in our lives.

Stress Less: Stress-hardy

Elizabeth Advice, Health

“My back hurts.” “I can’t sleep.” “I cry.” “I smoke.” “I can’t focus.” “I grind my teeth.” “I get depressed.” “I freak out at my kids.” “I am tired all the time.” “I feel like I can’t breath.” “My shoulders and neck are tense.” “My stomach hurts.”

These are some of the responses that students in my Exercise and Stress Management class at HACC would give me when I asked them how they felt when they were “stressed.” I am sure we can all identify with some of these symptoms, and probably could add to the list.

When we feel stressed, a whole series of physiological responses are triggered, known as the fight or flight response, or stress response. If this response were triggered because we needed to flee an attacking bear, then the stress hormones would be dissipated. But, for the most part, in modern life, we are not fleeing an immediate threat to our life. Instead we face overwhelming, never-ending lists of responsibilities and obligations, the challenge of finding, keeping, or losing a job, abusive situations, illness, worries about the future, and on and on.

No matter the cause, the HACC students in my Stress Management class had one thing in common: they were suffering – they felt as if they had no space. Whatever they perceived as stress was closing in on them.

Think about it for a minute. When we are on vacation or feeling relaxed, just enjoying ourselves, we feel a sense of spaciousness. We are not holding tension in our body, our breathing feels easy, worries are not roosting in our mind, and we may even experience contentment. This “easiness” is what I mean when I say “spaciousness.”

One of the goals of yoga is to come to a place of spaciousness in our bodies, breath, minds, and emotions. The most common observation my yoga students make at the end of class, is that they feel calm, balanced, peaceful. Some degree of spaciousness has returned to them as a result of the practice they did.

An appropriate yoga practice done regularly and over time can help us create space within ourselves and our lives. Because we have a greater sense of spaciousness we grow to see the stresses in our lives more clearly. That clarity helps us to make better decisions. Our physiological response to the stress we experience is lower. We become more stress-hardy.

What Is Yoga?

Elizabeth Informational

Much emphasis has been given to yoga as a practice of physical postures. While the practice of yoga postures is one of the tools of yoga, classical yoga texts make clear yoga was envisioned as a holistic practice, “engag[ing] all limbs/elements of one’s body.”

Yoga’s holistic model of the human system envisions five interrelated dimensions – the physical body, the breath or energetic body, the intellect, the personality, and emotions. Our yoga practice, if it is to engage all the elements of the body, must touch all dimensions of our system – it is more that just a body focused activity.

Classical yoga texts also describe the purpose of yoga as being the alleviation of something called duhkham, which refers to any kind of pain or suffering, be it physical, mental, emotional, etc. Yoga is to guide us to find a sense of spaciousness or comfort, called sukham. This makes sense as when we suffer, whether it be from fear and anxiety or a herniated disk, the feeling is that of tension, tightness, constriction. When we feel at ease, there is a sense of lightness and openness, of space.

The most important yoga text, the Yoga Sutra makes it clear that is through our work with the mind, that we move from suffering to openness. Our work with postures is important in helping us to function with greater comfort in our daily lives, preparing us for meditation, and in giving us a concrete place to start our practice, and develop greater self-awareness. We miss the profound potential of yoga to transform our lives, however, unless we look at ourselves and our practice holistically, using the various tools of yoga applied appropriately for our age, our condition, and our life situation.