January Theme of the Month Classes Posted by Yoga Herts on Sunday 31 December 2023

There are often many reasons why people start yoga. Many come to move and stretch their bodies in all different ways to keep mobile and to prevent stiffness and tightness. Some of us may be dealing with stress and yoga helps to calm the mind, relax, and release tension in the body.

Our busy, fast paced lifestyles can leave us living a lot in our heads and yoga can be that counterbalance that lets us experience doing things slower, being still and being more present.

We don’t always come to yoga thinking that our self-perception will change but often it does. Yoga builds flexibility in the body but also the mind. Practicing yoga helps to expand the body and the mind which in turns expands our self-awareness.

By taking what we discover on the yoga mat we may even look at our life choices with a fresh outlook. With a new perspective this can lead us to new directions, or even turning our attention inwards to find more gratitude towards ourselves and others.

Yoga For Self Exploration and Discovering Your True Self

Week 1 - Reflect and Release - Yoga is a wonderful practice to reflect on what’s happening in the present moment without judgement. From the moment we start our practice we take a short moment of refection to check in with how we feel from our day and how that may reflect in our mind, body and breath. We have space to let go a bit of tension we may have been holding on to and have a chance to reflect on what is important to us and what we can release to make room for this.

Week 2 - Beginners Mind - I always like to think that every time we come to yoga it can be a new experience. Even though we may do some poses that are the same as the week before, our bodies may feel different and our mind space as well. It’s a good theme to work with approaching poses with a beginner’s mind but is not always easy. In our practice we might label poses as good or bad depending on what we think our likes and dislikes in are or label them as easy or hard or go into auto pilot. But if we chose to do them with beginner’s mind, we may find a spaciousness we didn’t know existed. If we leave space for change, we open ourselves to new possibilities and potential.

Week 3 - Be Curious - Each time we come to the yoga practice it is an opportunity to let go of our current perceptions of how and who we are. Allowing ourselves to be curious is allowing ourselves to find what is possible. Teaching yoga has given me a completely new perspective in my own practice and my own body. Just by exploring different variations in poses, or placing the hand somewhere different, or finding another way to adapt the pose, or using a prop like a belt or a block we can be curious about our own bodies, the ways that we can move and how this can also open up to the possibilities on the mind.

Week 4 - Peel back the Layers - Peeling the layers back to connect to our true self is like peeling the layers of the onion. The more you peel away, the more you realise there is lots that you don’t know. We work with the physical aspect of the body through poses and use that as a tool to turn our attention inwards realising there’s a lot more going on than just the physical body. One of my favourite styles of yoga is yin yoga where you hold poses for anything say between 2-5 minutes. I love the feeling of softening the body and muscles and going deeper through the body to the connective tissue’s tendons, ligaments and fascia. I can feel this dropping into deeper layers of the body. What’s special about yin yoga is that the longer you hold the pose the deeper you move into the present moment and the mind as it’s like each pose is a meditation. Yoga is a way of working towards the truth of who you are.

Week 5 - Enjoy the Journey - Yoga is this journey to self-discovery. It’s a powerful reminder to take each class one step at a time, pose by pose, breath by breath and to stay as present as you can so you don’t miss the journey getting there. It’s about the whole practice and not getting attached to a particular shape or pose. It’s being present with the start, the middle and the end and feeling the practice with every part of your being. We take our focusing into what we do have right now and what we can do rather than what we haven’t got and what we can’t do.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.

This Months Music

Here's the usual selection of music that Vicky has been listening to this month.