justmymatblog.com

I would like to thank our Guest Yoga Blogger Rockne for his addition to our blog:

The night before practice I start to mentally devise my morning’s yoga routine. Going to bed by 9 gives me until 9:30 or so to come up with a routine. Then I sleep and am up to practice at 5:00.

I will adjust the theme of my routine in my mind depending on the day and what I felt going on in my body (and even in my mind). For example - if my mind was agitated during the day at various times and my posture would tense up I would first become conscious of this process of tension being generated and then immediately go to my breath and relax everywhere. Thanks to training I can relax both mind and body with the breath. I reflect later at night about this occurrence and it’s easy for me to come up with a theme for my routine. In this example my theme, in my next mornings practice, would embody surrender and awareness, strength and serenity. To feel all of these theme qualities gives me a successful and full filling practice. And I find I get the most releases. It is helpful to write these themes down in a notebook the night before a practice. Its even helpful to create affirmations that reinforce aspects of a theme.

I will also adjust the postures and posture order in my routine depending on how I experienced my body during the day. So during this reflection I remember where I felt any tension, stress, pain, discomfort, weakness, or anything else. I also try to remember when the feeling started and what was my attitude at the time. I then place postures into a particular order based on the feelings in my body and opinions in my mind from the day before. For example - If I felt an imbalance or a weakness somewhere in my body while walking I notice my attitude towards that imbalance or weakness. Then I will decide that I need to work on strengthening this area or whatever. In my routine I will hold postures longer to work on this imbalance or I will insert postures to work on the imbalance or I will do a combination of the two.

You can visit his blog by clicking here

Filed under: We are Yoga on December 13th, 2007