Hello curious person
I took a slow walk back to the basics throughout November. My monthly themes have given me space to focus, to unpack and to experience the depth of yoga. I’m often busy teaching more than practising so I must look for different way to experience the practice of yoga when time is limited. ‘Move with the breath’ was a truly enriching theme that become the baseline of every single class I taught throughout the month. Sometimes my themes evolve over time, this one definitely didn’t. It held its ground and commanded the space throughout the month. It was almost sad to leave it behind as December rolled in.
The breath is a major part of our yoga practice. It always has been, and it always will be. However, I’m learning that what I might have offered a couple of years ago doesn’t work for everyone. I’m learning that telling people to take a deep breath isn’t always the answer. I’m learning that the inclusion of the breath might make people quite anxious when they’re constantly bypassing their own natural rhythms to ‘keep up’ with the teacher.
I started to step away from the ‘deep breath’ language and began to replace this with prompts like take a full breath or become aware of the breath. Why? Because it gives people the autonomy to do as they please. Some people love to channel their inner Darth Vader with big, audible breaths throughout a class, but others might prefer to let the breath simply happen without too much attention. Ultimately, bigger isn’t always better.
This was something that came up quite a lot in my most recent teacher training (SATYA 1) that I attended in September (I’ll reference the blog post about that at the bottom of this page). Within our practices we focused on allowing the breath to be spontaneous rather than controlled. I loved how that felt, particularly as an asthmatic. Sometimes we need to step back and stop blocking the natural flow. Just let it be.
The natural breath can feel expansive when you give it some time. This is something that I learnt about movement too throughout this training. The quiet, natural breath or the small, sliding motion through the body starts to feel quite big in the body. You can start to notice just how vast the natural breath is. Just how much this moves the body. It’s about taking that moment to listen within and sometimes a Darth Vader impression gets in the way of that as we manufacture the expansion of the torso instead of letting it happen.
After typing part of this, I’ve decided that a slow walk back to the basics feels like I’m minimising the richness of this topic. Let me re-phrase, a slow walk back to the foundations of the practice where we returned to letting the breath lead the movement, finding that upward motion with the inhale and that downward motion with the exhale.
I’m sure you’ve already guessed that sun salutations showed up quite often to explore that body-breath connection. However, one big modification happened to the ‘normal’ approach to this sequence. Instead of ‘inhale, action; exhale, action’, I made the change to ‘on your next inhale, do this; on your next exhale, do that’. I want people to purposely follow the rhythm of their own breath without getting caught up with the flow of the class. The outcome, over the weeks we practised together, was that people embraced their own speed and really did begin to sync with their own breath. There was a space of 3-5 breaths for each pose within the sequence so that no one felt they had to interrupt their own practice to maintain the pace of the class. This can be such a difficult part of the practice. It’s so tough in a shared space to honour your own inner rhythm when we are mostly programmed to rush and to keep up.
When was the last time you listened to your own breath? When was the last time you followed your breath without cutting it short or forcing it to extend?
I’d love to talk about December and what it has to bring but the reality is that I’m typing this on the 12th December and we’ll soon be shutting down for Christmas. Both of my weekly classes are getting a new name in January so keep your eyes peeled for that.
See you on the mat soon
Sam
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