Blog – Page 21 – Lonnie DeSorcy’s YogInsight:

Being a Yoga Innovator: Building Your Own Yoga Flow

Yoga Flow: A Fun Way to Practice Your Own Yoga

Developing your own yoga flows can be a fun, active, and creative way to bring yourself to your yoga mat every day. But before you do, you may want to know a little about the semantics, benefits, pitfalls, and guiding principles for working with yoga in flow.

What is a Yoga Flow?

Yoga poses strung together in certain ways are called flows, or, in Sanskrit, vinyasa (from Wikipedia, accessed July 17 2013, “nyasa” meaning “to place” and “vi” meaning “in a special way”). I’ve always thought of vinyasas as poses joined together by the breath, but this is an oversimplification. I like Maty Ezraty’s definition in a Yoga Journal forum for yoga teachers:

Vinyasa means a gradual progression or a step-by-step approach that systematically and appropriately takes a student from one point and safely lands them at the next point. It is sometimes described as the “breathing system,” or the union of breath and movement that make up the steps.

Key words in Maty Ezraty’s definition are “step-by-step”, “systematically”, “appropriately”, and “safely”.

I’d like to propose a simple methodology for those of you who have not spent much time flowing, and for others of you who may be looking for a fresh approach. Continue reading

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Summer 2013 News

In this issue:

Black Strap Proceeds Donated to Flood Relief
Blog on Yoga for the Inner Critic Posted
Cancelled this Week: LFY® Chakra Clearing Meditation
Early-Bird Pricing for Weekly Fall Classes Expires July 19th

Black Strap Workshop Proceeds Donated to Flood Relief

Proceeds from the Black Strap mini-workshops held during the last week of June have been donated to the Siksika Nation Disaster Relief Fund. Thank you, yogis, for supporting this compelling cause while relieving back tension, improving shoulder and hip mobility, and improving posture! I hope you are enjoying your new and improved instruction “manuals.” I will be working on the few remaining pieces this summer.

Blog on Yoga for the Inner Critic Posted

You can read it here.

This Weeks’s LFY® Chakra Clearing Meditation Workshop Cancelled Due to Insufficient Registration

Perhaps due to vacation, Stampede, or my not sufficiently communicating the benefits of LFY Chakra Clearing, these two workshops did not attract enough registrants. Watch for future opportunities to learn this remarkable mind-clearing protocol!

Fall 2013 Weekly Class Registration is Underway – Early Bird Pricing Expires July 19!

Classes will be offered Monday evenings, Tuesday midday, and Wednesday evenings, all at our intimate little log cabin nestled above the ravines in Shaganappi Community. For the details, see here.

Permanent link to this article: https://yoginsight.com/summer-2013-news/

What Does Yoga Have to Do with the Inner Critic?

On Tuesday, July 2nd, we practiced some yoga for the Inner Critic.

Yoga for the Inner Critic? How on Earth does yoga have anything to do with that?

Well, yoga is all about developing presence; a state in which one is totally present, in the “now.” As a matter of fact, the second line of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is often translated as “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness,’ or the quieting of all that busy self-talk. One of my teachers, Nischala Joy Devi, says it a little differently: “Yoga is the uniting of consciousness in the heart,” where all is guided by and held in love. Regardless of the translation you choose, both describe a state of presence.

When the Inner Critic is in control, consciousness is NOT united in the heart. An interior battle ensues. Sometimes the Inner Critic succeeds in diminishing some creative force in us, other times the Inner Critic is beaten down, silenced, without ever having been heard. Neither result is yoga. Yoga seeks to unite all the parts we embody, to integrate.

Ann Weiser Cornell in The Radical Acceptance of Everything, says it like this:

Presence Is the Opposite of Criticizing

The environment in which an inner criticizing process can begin to transform is Presence. “Presence” is what Barbara McGavin and I call the ability or state of being with any inner experience, with interested curiosity and without judgment. Presence is in many ways the opposite of the inner criticizing process. In Presence, we are able to turn toward whatever we feel, whatever is going on in us, with gentleness, with trust in its underlying life-forward direction. In Presence, we are not trying to change what we find, but only to hear it, so that it can find its own change if it needs to.

So, what would constitute yoga for the Inner Critic? In our mini-workshop, inspired by Amy Weintraub’s LifeForce Yoga (R), we used breath, imagery, intention, posture, communication with our Critics in the form of writing, drawing, and moving and yoga nidra (a special form of guided relaxation).

When using yoga to deal with the Inner Critic,the specific tools employed are not as important as is an approach that embodies awareness and compassion.

Permanent link to this article: https://yoginsight.com/what-does-yoga-have-to-do-with-the-inner-critic/