Sensational Yoga Poses

When I first started doing yoga I learned and then practiced the Ashtanga yoga primary series of yoga poses.

It's a set series of yoga poses that I learned by memorizing little bits at a time.

Two things you can do in any yoga pose are creating space and creating stability.

Creating space or length makes you yoga pose look and feel big (and can improve both feel and control).

Stability can be viewed as an important subset of control. It can be one of the first things that you create when using control, and it can lead to easier control of other parts of the body.

Ironically (or not ironically) creating bigness in a yoga pose could be thought of as one way of creating stability since creating space tends to add tension to connective tissue which in results in not only a better feel for your body but stability.

While you are at it, for efficient strength, work at feeling and controlling your muscles.

Create a stable foundation.

Feel and control the muscles you are trying to stretch (and the muscles that oppose those muscles).

Although you are trying to relax the muscle you are stretching the goal isn't to relax completely. You still need to stabilize or anchor one end of the muscle being stretched.

One advantage of meridian stretching is that it can leave you feeling refreshed.

Bar focusing on the actual passage of breath through your nostrils, throat or mouth, most breath control exercises ask you focus on feeling the sensations generated by your respiratory muscles.

And so one way to think of muscle control is that it is like a breathing exercise, particularly if you practice activating and relaxing muscles slowly and smoothly.

It's via muscle control that you can develop proprioception (a fancy word for "feeling your body".)

With respect to the posture, movement, muscle control and proprioception, tensegrity is the state where you've optimized tension throughout the body so that you can sense and respond simultaneously.

You could think of it as being tuned, like a guitar or violin.

If you view the body as a system of relationships, then balance is about feeling and controlling your relationship with the earth.

As you get better at feeling and controlling this relationship you can apply the same ideas to feeling and controlling the relationships within your body at least at the musculoskeletal level.

And that's where the anatomy and biomechanics section comes in.

The study of anatomy and biomechanics can be used to help guide how you explore your own body.

If you are going to try and fix any problems of pain yourself, I'd suggest that part of that process includes learning to feel and control your body. The feeling/sensing part is how you try to diagnose what is causing the problem. The controlling part is what you do to fix the problem.

Learning to feel and control your body is a very long process. And you may find yourself going in circles, till you figure out what you need to do in order to go deeper. But if you deal with problems in other areas, the same process applies. In either case, the better you understand what you are dealing with, the easier it is to fix problems, (or redefine problems so that they are fixable.)

If posture (or a lack of good posture) is the problem, the same thing applies. Practice feeling your body and controlling it so that you can then find good posture with minimum effort.

Depending on how you practice yoga, it can lead you to a better understanding of what it means to be more conscious.

(It could simply be used to feel good and there's nothing wrong with that).

But the better you understand consciousness, the easier it can be to apply what you learn in yoga to other aspects of your life.

I'll suggest here that thinking, and ego, aren't bad things.

They are handy tools to have.

Thinking (and ego) are how we create limits, or definitions. Limits are tools that we can use to make learning more effective. The trick is learning to get rid of limits when they no longer serve.

Being present is a state of consciousness where we aren't thinking, but we are aware. It's the state of mind where we become fully immersed in the present moment so that time seems to stop.

You could think of being present as the equivalent of expanding your consciousness into the space of your immediate environment while when thinking your consciousness is expanded across time in "imaginary space".

How does this relate to yoga?

The more you focus on feeling your body and controlling it, the more present you become, and the less you think. And that's one reason for the focus on sensation, particularly tension and pressure. These sensations give you something to pay attention to in the present moment.

Thinking, or analyzing is also important because this is how you look back on your experience of your body from another point of view.

Both points of view help you to better understand your body.