Freeing Ourselves from the Muck!
Students often ask at the beginning of class about how much tighter their body feels now from how they felt at the end of class the week before. I ask questions; when did it start? Is it painful or just feel tight? Often the key question is what did you do since our last class? In the spring it’s often moving yards of mulch, or in winter shoveling snow, for me this past weekend it was moving 2 yards of dirt/muck for a landscaping project, feeling sore in the morning before doing my practice is sugar coating how my body felt.
Moving muck or other physical activity is one of the fastest, but not the only, ways to tighten your spine. First we are often doing an activity that is outside our normal routine. While I love to garden, I am happy to say moving yards of dirt in one weekend is not something I do regularly.
Shifting muck around my yard physically tightened my spine, but afterwards I can do my yoga practice and literally shift the tensions (internal muck) from my body and my mind. As I spread dirt around my yard feeling muscles tighten I knew I could easily go and release my spinal muscles from tailbone to top with an easy Svaroopa® Yoga practice and get the relief I was looking for. It is one of the reasons a daily practice is so important.
We all have to do things that tighten our bodies up, whether it’s moving muck or raking leaves or shoveling snow or lifting a child or grandchild, playing a sport, skiing, the list goes on and on. Modern yogis don’t live in a cave and do yoga poses all day. We are out in the world-which by its very nature will tighten up our bodies and our minds (have you watched the news lately?).
What’s a yogi to do? How do we keep up and maybe even get ahead of the game? The first step is to do some yoga at home not just once a week at class. When I teach students a daily practice it typically can be done in 20 minutes. That is not a huge time commitment. How many of us have “lost” 20 minutes on social media sites or playing a game on our phones.
The muck that is the tension in our bodies might show up as a chronic illness or pain or anxiety and many other ways. So much can be relieved by doing even something as simple as a 20 minute breathing practice. A student Maria has been dealing with a medical issue which causes her platelet count to be too high. She began practicing Ujjayi Pranayama 20 minutes a day and at her last check up her count was within the normal range. Through her daily breathing practice she was able to jump start her body’s ability to heal itself. She shifted some muck out of the way with Svaroopa® Yoga’s primary daily practice: Ujjayi Pranayama.
The real question is what muck do you want to free yourself from? Is it chronic pain? Anxiety? Chronic Illness? Yoga is not medicine, it is not a cure, it is another tool in your tool box to free you from the muck that is carried in our bodies, keeping us from living our lives the way we truly want to be. Maybe all it takes is 20 minutes of your day to find that freedom, imagine that!
