Yoga: Pain Free Practice Progress 

Your yoga practice should never result in joint pain. Muscle soreness, on the other hand, is normal and quite possibly a good thing.

The poison is the cure. The way you do the yoga postures becomes increasingly more important than which postures you practice. In other words, it’s all about the journey, not the destination.

If you find that poses that used to make you feel good are now irritating, you may be practicing improper alignment for your body’s needs.

Every body is different. No matter how excellent your yoga teacher is, he or she is teaching alignment to 80% of the population. Sometimes the directions are exactly opposite to what would be most beneficial to you. Unfortunately, there’s no real way of knowing this while you’re in class, unless you get pain in the moment. Often times, the pain can surface hours or days after the initial irritation.

Tip #1 for a Pain Free Practice:

 

Accelerate your listening. Slow down and listen very closely to the sensations in your body.  What and where do you feel sensation? Is it a good sensation, or does it make you feel unsafe or nervous?  How do you proceed when you feel this way?

Our minds are powerful tools for driving us towards our goals, and mostly this is a good thing. However, the problem lies within the fact that we live in a mind-over-matter world. We are continually rewarded for the mind overruling the body into submission, regardless of whether or not this is good for the body.

Yoga takes a very different approach. It says that the innate, intrinsic wisdom of the body is more powerful than any logical reasoning you could ever try to subject it to.  In other words, your body is a mute resource that you have probably failed to listen to for many years simply because you don’t know the language, and you were never taught to listen to it.

Then let me know here how your practice is going!

Love and brilliance,

Laurel