Most of us have a tendency to work too hard in yoga at least some of the time in an effort to try to force improvement in our practice. However, over-efforting is counterproductive because it increases the likelihood of injury and thwarts our enjoyment of the present moment, which in turn impedes our ability to practice awareness with serenity. In addition, too much power in our practice makes it difficult to explore the refinements of the poses, to notice and adjust minor alignment imbalances, and to find expressiveness, spaciousness, and freedom in each pose.
So how do you go about striking that balance between power and refinement? The answer is through the breath.

Think of your body as an orchestra, and your breath as the conductor. Each musician—each body part—knows how to play their part, but to create a coordinated, immersive, transformative whole, the individual parts need to be coordinated, synchronized, orchestrated. The breath does this, but it does a whole lot more. Just like a conductor sets the tone of the music, the breath sets the tone of your practice. There are some fundamental rules of good breathing: the breath should always be smooth, steady, and free of strain. But there is also quite a bit of room for individual expression in the breath, and creatively varying the breath is how we can shift the balance between power and refinement in each pose, and at every stage of each pose. We do this by varying both the depth of the breath and its pulsation:
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• If you are feeling your energy levels drop in the middle of a practice, you can generate more energy, more power, by deepening your breath, by breathing more vigorously (for example, by engaging Ujjayi breath). On the other hand, when you are deep in a pose hovering at your edge, you breathe more delicately to temper your power, to gently probe into those hard to access parts of yourself that help you open fully into a pose.

• Similarly we can vary how we transform the pulsation of our breath into movement to bring a pose alive. Generally, we tend to activate and increase energy flow on inhales, and relax, release, soften, and refine energy on exhales. However, sometimes it can be more effective to reverse this pulsation, or even to engage on both inhales and exhales, or release on both. There are no firm rules here. What matters is that we train our awareness to know what is right in each moment.

To be sure, plenty of yoga poses require raw power to be possible at all, but if we fail to work on refining our poses, if we fail to work on opening ourselves completely to each pose, we are merely working out, not practicing yoga, and we deny ourselves some of the greatest benefits of the practice.
(The principles underlying this week’s theme come from Erich Schiffmann’s excellent book Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness.)

Originally posted on Gernot's website

A typical asana class winds down with forward bends and twists, because both types of poses are cooling. In other words, both categories of poses tend to support the down-regulation of the autonomic nervous system that helps ease the mind and body into the full relaxation of savasana. However, if you approach forward bending postures with the goal-oriented attitude of “gotta touch my toes no matter what”, you are unlikely to derive the benefits that forward bends were designed to bestow upon you. But if you can get away from your default “work hard, play harder” attitude while doing forward bends, you may find yourself finally understanding the power of surrender, the power of NOT doing.

Of course, full surrender in any pose other than a full relaxation pose is not desirable either, because it can collapse the chest to the point of inhibiting the breath and promoting depression, and it can concentrate the force of the pose in the weakest link of the chain that is your body, and thus can increase the risk of injury. (In forward bends, by the way, that weakest link is generally the lower back, which tends to bend too far. The upper back tends to bend too far, too. This is much less likely to cause injury, but is the cause of the chest collapse with its associated negative effects.) The realization that full surrender is not the solution once again takes us back to the universal theme that yoga is about creating a greater balance between opposites.
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When you understand that something you are doing is extreme and unhelpful, the tendency is strong to embrace its opposite as the obvious solution to the problem. But the opposite is usually just as problematic, while the real solution generally lies in finding a place of balance between the opposites. The problem with the true solution of creating balance is that it is very difficult (and not at ALL ego-gratifying) to find a place of balance. Nothing extreme happens at the place of balance to tell you that you have arrived. There are no world records to be set at the place of balance, no championships won, no competitors (or former selves) bested. The only thing you may find there is better health, greater serenity, and greater joy.

In my experience, one of the pairs of opposites that most people have the hardest time finding balance between are effort and surrender, because our go get ’em culture so strongly reinforces and rewards extreme efforts, even in the world of yoga. This week we will use forward bends quite deliberately to learn how to balance effort with surrender to create a greater sense of balance in body and mind, learning to let go where we grip too tightly, but at the same time learning to create some effort in places where we never do; in short, making our practice smarter than our habits by moderating the patterns of effort and weakness in our bodies to create a greater sense of balance.

​Originally posted on Gernot's website