Have you cried in savasana? I feel like there is something so freeing and safe about savasansa… but it also feels a bit weird sobbing laying down in a silent room. I’ll never forget my last yoga class with Ally Hamilton at Bryan Kest Power Yoga before I moved east in July 2009. I sobbed.

I’ve been practicing yoga for about 10 years now. Sounds like a long time but it really is just a blink of an eye in this thing called life (and so on). Pantanjali talks a lot about Sthira and Sukha in the sutras (authoritative text on yoga and a series of threads of wisdom offering guidelines to live a meaningful and purposeful life). Sthira and Sukha translates to steadiness and ease. This push and pull… energy and calm. Sthira can also mean steadfast, courageous, and strong. Sukha can mean gentle, easy, and delightful.  Sutra 2.46 translates to “posture (asana) [should be] stable (sthira) and comfortable (sukha).” 

There are so many ways we can practice yoga and so many variations of asana. Asana is just one of the eight limbs of yoga and even though it’s the most popular in the western world, it’s the third on the list after yama and niyama. We’ll get to those another day! Did a quick google search and found a list with 14 styles of yoga and Sri Dharma Mittra photographed himself doing 1350 asana postures. My point is there are a lot of ways you can practice yoga.

The practice of pranayama helps reduce waste matter in the body by directing the agni, the fire of life.  Pranayama consists of two parts: prana and ayama. Ayama means stretch or extend and prana is “that which is indefinitely everywhere” or energy and is something the flows continuously inside of us—vitality. If there is every a time where there isn’t enough room for prana it means it’s being forced out by the rubbish, so pranayama removes that junk to create space for prana to flow.