Body Language:
revision the way you experience yourself
No experience necessary. Long term practitioners encouraged.
This is geeky stuff, a love of the human embodied experience, and critical thinking about alignment cues. Arranged from the ground up so you can easily find what you want. Click on the image to pull up the video.
Feet
Samasthitihi:Feet
A 40 minute practice with no props or yoga clothes necessary. Feel what ‘equal standing’ means and learn something about your own body along the way.
Virabhadrasana & Alignment
Build on the principle of samasthithi to explore alignment. Specifically, alignment with what?
KNEES
Happy Knees:Bones and Joints in Movement
Continue our exploration of anatomy, movement, and revisioning asana with a look a neuro-muscular patterning, bones as important aspects of movement, and joints as verbs, not nouns. For a strong, shoulder version of this concept you might look at the Strength and Grace video: join centration.
Spirals in motion
Everything you’ve learned so far has begun to wind and unwind through the spiral nature of your form. All organic beings develop and move in spirals. This form reflects the way the body and organism function: all movement is a spiral, growth, healing, gait. And whenever there is a spiral, there is a balancing re-spiral. Can you position yourself to be effective (spiral one), and can you portion yourself to receive (spiral two)?
Letting go of control mechanisms
We all have them. Somewhere along the line, we learned to how control or influence things. And control tends to feel good. It’s empowering. Specifically, yogis are taught to control the breath.
But any thing that is over used or becomes it’s own habit can sometimes get in the way. It isn’t necessarily helpful to control our breath. Controlling the breath is literally a way to control or override feelings, both emotive and sensation.
It can be deeply powerful to observe what happens in yourself when you let some of your control go. It can be a profound psychological event to watch as your body breathes for you. And it is profound to witness how entrenched your control over breath and sensation goes.
HIPS
Hip movements
This 60 minute video starts with a brief exploration of and naming of hip movements before it goes into a hip sequence that will balance flexibility/range/movement with stability and strength. You may want to do the whole video once or twice through to get the discussion of what the movements are called, and then in future begin at the sequence itself. The sequence starts at 15 minutes.
Anatomically speaking, the ‘hip joint’ is where the femur joins the trunk. Contextually, people often refer to the pelvis. And experientially, movements of the hip are connected to the musculature of the leg, pelvic floor, abdominal and low back muscles. This sequence will help you not only understand the hip joint and how it moves, but apply this understanding to different bodies and different asana.
Have two blocks, a strap, and a blanket or pillow. You might also want a wall or a chair to touch to help you balance while standing on one leg.