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Finding Support for Your Practice

Yoga is solitary by nature. Being able to share your experience with others will help sustain you over time. After a recent talk on yoga philosophy at my studio, one of the students commented that it was nice to simply be in a group where these topics are discussed and “normalized.”

Find a yoga class that suits you. Shop around. Classes vary enor­mously in energy, pacing, intensity and focus. Both the style and the teacher should feel right for you. The teacher is both a role model and a “product” of the practice. Trust your intuition; if it doesn’t feel right, keep looking.

In selecting a class, consider the following questions:

• How big is the class? Is there personal contact and correction?
• Are there adaptations for your particular needs?
• Are the time, location, and price of the class appropriate? If not, is the class so good you want to go anyhow?
• Can you make up missed classes?
• Do you feel safe in the area, especially if the classes are at night?

If you can’t find a class, try to find a friend to practice with occa­sionally, someone you can talk to about your practice or others involved in similar kinds of activities. Read books on yoga or spiritual practice, or start a journal.

One of the reasons I decided to teach was to create a context to support my practice. I was teaching Iyengar yoga, which had not been taught in Toronto before, so I had to look outside the yoga community for resources. Over the years, I have been involved in the martial arts, various forms of bodywork and psychotherapy. I have traveled to the United States, Europe, and India for yoga classes. These have all nourished and enriched my practice.

There is always the risk of dabbling in so many different tech­niques that you never penetrate deeply in any of them. Once you have found an approach that is right, wait until you are established in it before you branch out. Ultimately, you are the only one who can decide what combination of activities and practices is realistic and right for you.

How to Structure and Balance Your Practice

While it is important to start with poses that you enjoy and derive immediate benefit from, you also need to consider the overall balance of your practice. Make a list of the poses you enjoy and practice them regularly. See what you need to add to create a more rounded practice. A balanced practice includes all of the major types of movement—upright, forward, backwards, sideways, twisting, and inverted.

Shape your practice like a bell curve: start gently, peak in the middle, and cool down at the end.

• Start your practice with easy warm-up poses.

  Begin your practice with poses that center you and prepare your body for more intense postures that follow. Take longer to warm up when you are unusually tense, recovering from an illness, when there has been a break in your practice, or when you are affected by external factors like allergies or the weather.

• Build up to the core poses of your practice that day.
• Follow intense postures with counterbalancing poses.
• End with quiet relaxation poses.

  These include Deep Relaxation, Little Boat and Child’s Pose, long forward bends, or breathing.

Consider both the risks and the benefits of the poses. Counter­balancing postures offers us a way to protect ourselves physically and emotionally. For example, if you do backbends incorrectly, you might compress your lower back. Forward bends stretch the lower back. They are also cooling, introverted, and passive, in contrast to the backbends which are opening, energizing, and extroverted.

Keep these basic guidelines in mind as you practice:

• Try to do a breathing practice every day.

  I can’t emphasize enough how valuable a breathing practice is.

• Practice forward bends after backbends.
• Do sitting twists after forward bends.

  The spine is already lengthened, and there is less likelihood to be compression in the twist.

• Shoulderstand follows Headstand.

  Shoulderstand is a more basic pose than Headstand, but it is also a more intense stretch on the neck. It releases compression in the neck and upper back that may be caused by the Headstand.

• After a long series of forward bends or Crow Pose variations, you may want to do some gentle pelvic tilts or Cobra preparation to stabilize your spine if it feels overstretched.

For your practice to deepen, you need regular, longer practices (at least 45 minutes to an hour). You should include an extended breathing practice, preceded and/or followed by a long relaxation at least once a week. As your breath deepens, its movement will permeate through your postures, opening, deepening, and altering them profoundly. Take time to let this happen.

As your practice develops, you may want to spend more time on a particular type of pose or movement. In that case, balance your practice over a longer period of time, perhaps a week or ten days. For example, you might spend one day doing backbends with only one short forward bend afterwards. Another day could be devoted to forward bends, etc. You should still end your practice with at least one counterbalancing pose.

As your body changes, you may find that you need to go “back to square one” periodically as you integrate this “new body” into the postures. This sometimes means that you can no longer do poses that you were able to do before, which is disconcerting and frustrating. For example, people with very stiff upper backs can often do Headstand easily because they are building on a solid foundation. As their upper backs become freer and more flexible, the pose may lose stability and collapse for a while. When that happens they need to go back to re-establishing the foundation in their arms, and learn to do the pose with extension and lightness instead of rigidity.

Look at the pattern of your practice over a few weeks or months and see which poses you focus on and which you avoid. It can be quite helpful to keep a journal of your practice to see which areas you are drawn to, and to record any insights that you may have during your practice. You will probably find that you go through phases where you focus on a particular movement or type of pose for an extended period of time. Follow your body and its needs. At the same time, be aware of maintaining an overall balance in your practice. If there is a pose or type of pose that you consistently avoid, try doing it briefly at the beginning of your practice and then go on to something else. I find this helps to minimize the guilt and the feeling of a huge block that must be overcome.

The rhythm of your practice will vary. There will be times when you want a strong, active dynamic practice; others when you are slow and quiet. Your practice is an opportunity to re-connect with, honor, and respect your own biorhythms.

Sometimes we need to be very gentle and accepting and at other times we need to challenge ourselves to go deeper and further. If you have a lot of drive, you may need to learn to temper it somewhat. I learned that through a series of minor injuries that forced me to slow down. If you are naturally slow and passive, you may need to give yourself a bit of a push occasionally.

When I was convalescing from surgery, a friend was adamant that I should rest and not push myself. At the same time, a Chinese doctor gave me a Chi Kung walking meditation for cancer and told me to walk for an hour a day—even if I was tired and my knee or shoulder hurt. At the time, I thought he was out of his mind. But walking helped me to rebuild my energy.

It seemed to me that they were both right. I needed lots of R and R, and ways to re-energize. Your practice may alternate between high energy phases and times of very gentle practice, or you may find a steady rhythm that suits you. The rhythm and structure of your practice is constantly changing and evolving, as your practice matures and your life changes. Follow these changes and go with them, to make your practice truly your own.