(This is an opening talk I prepared for teaching an Ashtanga yoga class, primary series.)

The practice of yoga is the practice of learning to love yourself. The practice will, in all likelihood, make you more flexible, more grounded, stronger, more stable, more deep of breath. But it doesn’t matter how flexible you are or how strong. Yoga is not a competitive sport. Yoga is an opportunity to get to know yourself, to dance with yourself, to breathe yourself to fuller awareness. Occasionally you will have to wrestle with yourself as well, but be gentle. It’s all right to stretch your limits, to strive, but don’t force yourself. A bit of muscle burn is okay, but if you’re feeling numbness or tingling or stinging pain, let up a little. And use your breathing as a guide. Usually if you can keep your breath going deeply and evenly, you’re fine. If you can’t, ease up until you can. Take each pose as a new opportunity to learn to love yourself. And trust your body to tell you what’s okay and what’s not. Remember that at any point in the practice you can rest in balasana (child’s pose), but try to keep your breath deep and long even while resting, all the way through to savasana.

Astanga is a traditional practice. The three places we put our attention in this tradition are the breath, the asana or pose, and the drishti or gaze. The breath is the foundation, and in order to keep our focus on it, we do what’s called ujjayi breathing, which is to say we make a noise in the throat as we inhale and exhale through the nose. By focusing on the breath and the drishti as we assume various poses we can keep our attention on our practice rather than letting it wander. In this way, our asana practice itself prepares us for meditation. Of course, if you are a beginner, you will have to figure out what to do and how to do it, but once you become familiar with the practice, you can more and more go into a focused, meditative state while doing the astanga. Then, if you notice your thoughts are on something other than your practice, you simply observe that your mind has wandered, finish the thought if you like, and return your attention to your breath. That is the essence of the practice: We focus on the breath, the asana and the drishti. (I want to mention here that the drishti is a directional suggestion. You don’t have to literally cross your eyes looking up to your third eye or down to the tip of your nose, although you can do that if it’s comfortable.) Attending to the drishti is just another way of focusing your attention on your practice, of staying on your own mat, so to speak.

An unusual thing we do to make many asanas easier is we develop a sense of energetic lifting in one or more of the three places we call bandhas. When we engage mulhabandha, there is a sense of energetic lifting at the root chakra, as if we are sipping up energy through the anus. Engaging uddiyanabandha creates a sense of energetic lifting in the solar plexus. And engaging jalandharabandha creates a sense of energetic lifting up the back of the neck and through the crown of your head. This third bandha, not often mentioned, is usually referred to as chin lock, but I think this gives the wrong idea, because it is not about energy going down through the chin, but rather energy lifting up your spine, causing your head to float up like a helium balloon and, incidentally, causing the chin to drop. Engaging the bandhas is less about contracting muscles than it is about having a sense of lifting on a subtle plane. Nevertheless, engaging the bandhas can make a significant difference in being able to do certain poses.

Now, bearing in mind that practice is an opportunity to get to know ourselves better, to love ourselves better just as we are, let's begin.