Yoga as a life practice- Pause and see.

Yoga can be called a life practice. ".... an ongoing inquiry into how to be completely engaged and intimate with the wild force that runs through everything and is running through us, if we would but pause long enough to notice......Almost any activity can be used as a life practice if it reconnects us with the source of our aliveness...."- painting, singing, playing sport, music, dancing, climbing mountains, gardening, raising children- "All such activities, if practiced mindfully and with passionate devotion, can be called a form of Yoga. The greater purpose of a formal Yoga practice, however, is to apply the acute attentiveness we learn on the mat to all aspects of our everyday life so that this unitive awareness filters through our relationships, our work and our play....:

Very simply we set aside time and a quiet place to engage in enquiries that will remind us of who we really are. " 

( Excerpts from 'Bringing Yoga to Life' by Donna Farhi)

Photograph by J. Giacone ( Marzameme, Sicily)

Sit, breathe, remain quiet, realise inner stillness.

When you find yourself rushing, you can catch yourself and breathe out fully.. You can ask yourself if the sky will fall down, if someone will die, or if the world will stop spinning if you sit down for ten minutes and breathe the air....

As soon as you sit or make your breath smooth and even or remain quiet within a yoga posture, you are already realising the goal of Yoga: inner stillness.

" On this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure." (Khrishna's advice to Arjuna).

(From 'Bringing Yoga To Life by Donna Farhi).

Photograph by J.Giacone

The practice itself is the reward ( more from Donna Fahri)

"..to reflect rather than react, to soften rather than harden and to see clearly how things are now rather than dwell on the past or worry about the future."

"We achieve this in Yoga practice by simple means. Through the practice of postures we release pent- up tensions that have accumulated in our body, and we further refine our physical senses so that we become sensitive, adaptive and resilient. Simultaneously, we reacquaint ourselves with the cyclic nature of our breath and it' s relationship to the sensate wisdom of our body. We learn to inhale completely and open to new experience. We learn to exhale completely and let go of unnecessary tension and the past. And we learn to rest in the pauses in between this arising and dissolving cycle. Like a surfer out on the ocean swell, we start to align ourselves with the ebb and flow of life rather than fight with it. Gradually we begin to recognise that in between the ups and downs and the coming and going, there is a matrix of stillness that is the backdrop of all phenomena."

Photograph by J. Giacone

STANDING FIRM with PADA BANDHA

PADA BANDHA (Sanskrit for 'foot lock'): Spread the toes and press the entire foot on the mat to distribute the weight evenly amongst the 4 corners and 3 arches of the foot.  (The three arches are located from the big toe to the little toe, the big toe to the ankle and the ankle to the little toe, creating a triangle).

The way the feet connect to the ground in combination with the use of the legs determines the entire state of the body. If the foundation is not firm the rest of the structure will be shaky. When Pada Bandha is engaged there is also an uplifting action in the feet: Try this when you are in Uttanasana ( standing forward bend): Looking at your inner ankles, press down with your outer feet and really focus on lifting your inner ankles away from the floor. Keeping that lift in your ankles,  lift your inner knees. Feel the lift that runs all the way up your inner leg. For more intensity take your palms to the outsides of your calves and press in.

"No matter what standing pose you are in, think about constructing it in such a manner that nobody and nothing could knock you over" ( Laura Baumann)

Photograph by J. Giacone

DONNA FARHI SAYS ABOUT YOGA ASANA:

“While a dancer’s or athlete’s internal impulses result in movement that takes him into space, in asana practice our internal impulses are contained inside the dynamic form of the posture. When you witness a yoga practitioner skilled in this dynamic internal dance, you have the sense that the body is in continuous subtle motion. What distinguishes an asana from a stretch or calisthenic exercise is that in asana practice we focus our minds attention completely in the body so that we can move as a unified whole and so we can perceive what the body has to tell us. We don’t do something to the body, we become the body. In the West we rarely do this. We watch TV while we stretch; we read a book while we climb the StairMaster; we think about our problems while we take a walk, all the time living a short distance from the body. So asana practice is a reunion between the usually separated body-mind.”

Mixed media painting by J. Giacone