John's Letter Archives
SPRING 2006
NAMASTE,
"What should I do in my home practice?"
I hear this question from my students as often perhaps as any question I am asked. It makes me happy since it tells me the student has a home practice or at least a desire to get one started.
For beginners, the answer to the question about what to practice is right there in the Unity Woods Yoga Center mission statement on the cover of your newsletter or on the website. Practice what you learn in class. Use the sequence(s) you’ve been given. Apply the points you’ve been taught. For those who follow this advice, classes have a very different flavor. Not only are you learning new poses in your classes, you are also picking up subtleties and refinements for those already in your repertoire. In your practice, you build up a framework to which to apply new teachings and insights, and as a result you can learn much more quickly and deeply.
For more experienced students, the answer is a little more complicated. One of the challenges of yoga - and causes of consternation upon realizing it - is that instead of getting easier as you go along, yoga gets harder. Students look at an accomplished practitioner and say, “ I can’t wait until Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) gets easy like that.” Fuggedaboudit! If you’re being true to the practice, it (Trikonasana, practice as a whole) continues to be a challenge no matter how experienced you are. And this is true of putting your practice together, too. With the expanded possibilities and choices the experienced practitioner has at hand, knowing where to go in any given practice can be quite confusing and even a bit daunting. In this case, one piece of advice that is appropriate for the beginner is also applicable to the experienced pupil: Practice what you learn in class.
A competent and experienced teacher constructs classes with a clear purpose in mind. The poses are chosen and sequenced to accomplish that purpose. Like a well-written play, each class should have, generally speaking, some preparatory material (exposition, if you will), build to the point of the class (climax), and then wrap everything up (denouement). In addition to having a purpose to each class I teach, I generally have a theme of some sort that I weave throughout a session. Because of that, classes in the early part of a session are preparatory with respect to the subsequent classes. If you practice what you are taught in class - same sequence, same points as best you can - then the upcoming classes will make more sense to you - in your brain and in your body. And because the classes are organized consciously and intentionally, by practicing a class sequence several times during the week between classes, you may develop some insight into why the class was presented as it was. These insights can help to guide you in developing your own sequences and thus, teach you new ways to structure your practice.
Ultimately, your practice is guided by three main factors: your knowledge, your capability, and your intention. Knowledge may come from a variety of sources. As I’ve been saying, classes are a primary source of knowledge for most people. Workshops, reading, talking with others, and the information that grows out of your own practice are important as well, the latter gaining in significance the longer you practice.
Your capabilities also dictate to some degree what will comprise your practice. Your limitations as well as your skills will guide you, allowing you to work on some things and making it impossible to do others. Of course, your capabilities change as a result of a number of factors, most of which are affected by your practice (or lack of it). Progress in your practice will expand your capabilities on many levels.
I’d like to spend a little more time on the third factor: intention (sankalpa). Ultimately, your intention, e.g., why you are practicing, will direct your practice perhaps more than any thing else. For example, if you practice yoga to help alleviate the pain and limitations of a bad back, your practice may be quite different from someone who is practicing to develop a more tranquil mind. Not that they won’t overlap in many ways, but with your initial premise, your intention, being different, it is more likely that your practice will take a different path, at least for a while.
What are you looking for in your yoga practice? If you consider the question seriously, you will likely find that your answer is multi-leveled and complex. This is particularly true the more experienced you are. For instance, you may be practicing yoga to find peace and equanimity in your life – which implies its absence at the moment. So why is it missing? After some self-inquiry, you may realize that all the stress you feel is disturbing any sense of evenness or calmness. How then are you going to reduce that stress? As you contemplate the question, you may recall that the restorative class you took toward the end of the previous session made you feel very relaxed and peaceful. Or that that really strenuous standing pose class last week wiped all those disturbing worries right out of your head for awhile. So now you have a couple of plans for your practice that will give you symptomatic relief.
After awhile, though, you may notice that even though you have found an effective way of temporarily dealing with the symptoms of the stress you were feeling, of calming yourself down and relaxing, an underlying uneasiness still oozes up into your awareness with disquieting persistence. So you study your yoga books or ask your teacher and you find out that working with your breath (pranayama) can be very helpful in soothing the nervous system and quieting the mind. Now you have another clue as to how to move in a consistent way toward your intention of peacefulness, even though you may still need from time to time to look for symptomatic relief in your practice. After a few years, perhaps you have become quiet enough in your practice that you see that it isn’t all the stuff going on around you that adds stress to your life and disturbs your peace; rather, it is a lack of clarity about your own relationship to yourself and confusion regarding a sense of your proper place in the world around you. Now your practice is no longer about peace and equanimity, but about understanding the nature of existence and your awareness of self.
This hypothetical progression may or may not be directly relevant to you. The point is that as you go along in your practice and in your life, your intentions with regard to your practice will change. People come to yoga for all sorts of reasons – physical reasons, emotional reasons, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual reasons. In order for your yoga practice to work for you, you need to be clear about what you want. Understanding and establishing your intentions is an important step in forming the foundation for your response to the important and persistent question, "What should I practice in my home practice?"
PS - I hope you can come to the March 26 Discussion Group on "Practice". We’ll have more time then to look in much greater depth at all the issues revolving around practice and how they relate to you personally.
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