Yoga Practice is for whom? I am a beginner, recently started practising in a Yoga Studio. I am neither flexible nor strong.
Can I start Yoga Practice?
I know Yoga is for everyone and every Indian Yoga Teacher says this. But in the studios wherein I practice, it’s not the same.
It’s competitive and the Yoga Teacher wants the students to be super-flexible. But I am not. Often I feel I am not capable, at least not ready to practice with others in a Yoga studio. When can I start my Yoga Practice?
You have always been practising Yoga. You can increase the quality of your practice if you would like to do so. Since you are born you started practising Yoga.
Every day is filled with Yoga practice. Leslie Kaminoff, one of the wise Yoga Anatomy Teachers puts this concept on the first day of your Yoga practice.
The First Day of your Yoga Practice
In Utero, oxygen is supplied through the umbilical cord wherein the mother does the breathing.
There is no air and very little amount of blood is in the lungs as they are non-functional. The respiratory system is reversed as the oxygen-rich blood flows through the veins whereas oxygen-depleted blood flows throw the arteries.
Being born is nothing but the death of the connection of life with the umbilical cord – the lifeline that sustained you for nine months to start a new life.
Read: Benefits of Pranayama
The First Breath
When you are out in the world, you need certain actions for the first time in your life.
You had no idea of the challenges that you were supposed to face in the very first second of your life. You had no idea of breathing as it was taken care of by the mother.
The very first inhalation was so significant that it inflates the lungs to cause the essential changes in the circulatory system.
The first breath causes blood to surge into the lungs, the right and left sides of the heart to separate into two pumps, and the specialized vessels of fetal circulation to shut down and seal off.
That first inhalation is the most forceful one you will ever take because it needs to overcome the initial surface tension of your previously collapsed and amniotic-fluid-filled lung tissue.
The force required is three to four times greater than that of a normal inhalation.
The First Asana
Another first-time experience at the moment of birth is the weight of your body. Inside the womb, you’re in a weightless, fluid-filled environment.
Then, suddenly, your entire universe expands as you are free and out of the secured space of nine months. As the parts of the body, you need to coordinate these movements with gravity.
As a part of the survival factor, you need to find nourishment, which involves the complex action of breathing, sucking, and swallowing.
All of the muscles involved in this intricate act of survival also create your first postural skill—supporting the weight of the head.
This is the beginning of finding the coordination between mobility and stability. The very first second you are born you will have to face the most difficult challenges of life.
Thereafter, you will continue to find the coordination, balance between the breath and gravity, tuning the physical movements according to the breathing so that the physical actions would be easier to perform.
Yoga on the mat is nothing but the same. It’s body-breath coordination training to the mind. When you start training the mind, you are bringing awareness. You are instilling the concept of coordination mindfully.
To expand the physical body during the inhalation and to shrink it while exhalation and so on.
Once the whole practice of body-breath coordination becomes natural, it brings a lot of changes in the mental patterns, in the intellectual domain, and even in the root of your existence. This is where yoga becomes a lifestyle.
Yoga Practice has started right in the beginning when you are born.
Whether you want to bring the quality into the existing Yoga practice or not is a choice that you can make. And you need awareness and awareness only to do so.
