The benefits of a regular yoga practice can be summed up in one word: balance. If you have tight shoulder muscles or tight hamstrings, the muscles on the backs of the thighs, you will learn how to stretch and lengthen them. If you have weak arms or weak abdominal muscles, you wil l learn how to strengthen them. If you are tired, there are yoga poses, (in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit known as asanas), that will energize you. If your mind is racing, there are yoga poses that will calm you.
Many people are drawn to the practice initially because they perceive some imbalance in their life. Common complaints heard in beginner-level classes include lack of sleep, too much stress, chronic back pain, high blood pressure, arthritis, pain in the joints, sinus problems, and to quote a student in my Gentle Yoga class, “The general stiffness that comes with getting older.”
Classes at Unity Woods Yoga Center are taught in the Iyengar method of Hatha Yoga. From the very first class there is great attention to seemingly simple principles of balance and physical alignment. For example, the first standing pose I teach is called Mountain Pose. I ask students to observe whether they are balanced evenly on both feet, whether they are balanced evenly on the balls and heels of the foot, whether they are balanced evenly on the inner and outer foot. The base of the pose has to be balanced before the rest of the body can balance. From the base we bring awareness to the ankles, the shins, the kneecaps and up through to the crown of the head.
If this sounds trivial and tedious, I can can only say what yogapractitioners said to me before I began studying Yoga, “You must experience it for yourself.” Something powerful happens in that effort to balance on your two feet: the mind focuses, the endless laundry list of things to do recedes. Concentration on the here and now comes to the forefront of awareness. The breath steadies, and the mind quiets down. You begin to forget about the cares and woes that so burdened you before class started. Physical poise brings mental poise.
In the effort to balance the feet, yoga students pay great attention to the skeletal structure of the body, and thus learn to align bone by bone with the force of gravity and the laws of nature. Like the mighty Atlas of Greek mythology, we learn how to let go of unecessary burdens (“Oh, those hunching shoulders, I can drop them, hooray!”) and direct our attention to what reallly matters, the journey towards balance.
As body and mind, self and other, family and community, planet and universe are all inter-connected (yoga means union, after all, ) our individual journey towards balance extends both inward to our tissues and cells and outward to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. As the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone, so the individual is connected to the planet. At this time of crisis in the health of our planet, we need every tool available to help us see our inter-connectedness, and to address the personal, political and planetery imbalances that are so prevalant. Yoga is an ancient practice that has been passed down from teacher to student through thousands of years and countless of generations. It is a system that refines our awareness of the imbalances within us and around us, and shows us how to even the scales so that our lives, the lives of others, and the world at large can move together towards greater harmony and balance.