Curvy Yoga®: Love Yourself & Your Body a Little More Each Day by Anna Guest-Jelley

Author:Anna Guest-Jelley [Guest-Jelley, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub

PRACTICES

Challenge What You Know on the Yoga Mat (the Barometer)

One of the biggest ways I recognized the impact my yoga practice was having on my body and my life was by noticing how differently I felt both in and about my body over time.

So when I started teaching yoga, I wanted a way to offer a similar experience to students—helping them to notice what changed in their body and came into their awareness—within the context of one sixty- to ninety-minute class. And that’s when I came up with the Barometer. (I’m surely not the only yoga teacher who does something similar; this is just what I call it.)

The idea is that you choose one pose or action (like lifting the arms overhead) to return to throughout a practice/class. This gives you the opportunity to both develop awareness of your body and see the benefits of the work you’re doing in a very concrete way. I don’t do this every class/practice, but I find it’s nice to play with every few weeks.

What I love about the Barometer is that it gives you the opportunity to challenge what you know about poses you might be used to doing. By giving you a prolonged experience with the pose, you may discover all kinds of things about it, especially how best to make it work for your body. The Barometer is all about letting your internal experience of a pose guide you, rather than trying to put your body into a certain shape.

Here’s an example of how it works (you could do this with any pose/action you’d like, though it needs to be one you can do an easeful version of with no warm-up, so keep it simple):

Barometer pose: Down Dog with a chair (see the appendix for a description).

Before you do any warm-up, do the Barometer pose. This gives you a sense of your body as you’re starting the practice. Take a few deep breaths and then focus your attention on one or two body parts (for example, shoulders and hips). Ask yourself: What differences do I notice side to side in my shoulders? And hips? Where do I feel free? Less free? When you’re done with those inquiries, make a mental note, because you’ll be returning to this later.

From here, continue into your warm-up, concentrating particularly on your focus areas (in this case, shoulders and hips).

After the warm-up, come back to the Barometer, noticing any differences in your hips, shoulders, and body as a whole. You can ask the same questions as above, noting what differences, if any, you experience. As you go along, be alert to the following and ask yourself: Did you find the most freedom in your body after the hip work or the shoulder work? Or was it a combo of both? This is a good way for you to learn more about your body as well as the pose you chose as your Barometer.

Next continue into some standing poses, maybe concentrating on lengthening the spine and freeing the shoulders.

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