Six mornings a week, I wake around 5am. I turn on the kettle, scrape my tongue, brush my teeth, use the neti pot, drink a quart of warm water and go to my yoga mat. Some mornings, maybe even half the mornings, I don’t want to get up. This feeling is particularly exacerbated by the cooler weather that we are now encountering that Fall has officially begun! I want to snuggle down under my stack of yoga blankets and stay in bed. But, that’s the thing about some habits – if you practice them long enough, you start to recognize how your life flows when you do & don’t practice.
But, I have learned that like the meditation that I do following my yoga and abhyanga (self-massage of the whole body with warm-oil), yoga makes my day better and my interactions with those around me more smooth. Starting the day with yoga also makes my body feel better and the connection between my body and mind more astute.
Tuesday morning I focused on my shoulders and my legs in standing poses so that I could do one-legged variations in handstand, headstand and shoulderstand. Then I did a supported backbend and ended with pranayama (breath practices). As I prepared for the pranayama, I tuned into my energy. My wearable technology wristband had woken me at 450am (I have it set to wake me up within a 40 minute range around 5am, depending on when I enter a lighter sleep pattern), so I was trying to ‘find’ a reason for having a cup of coffee, i.e. was I fatigued enough to really need caffeine, which I generally avoid.
As I lay there, it became clear to me that I did not – the energy that I had shifted in me (energy is never created or destroyed – it can only be transformed) – was sustainable and peaceful with a deep level of sustainability. As I have learned to tune into my energy in a more subtle way, through my practices of yoga and meditation, I noticed the buzz of energy that my body had, like a naturalistic and more sustainable caffeine high (without the associated jitters that I get!) when I practice yoga. Unlike the caffeine, sugar or white carb high, I knew that I had established a baseline of good energy within myself for the day.
If this all sounds too subtle for you, don’t worry. It took me a while to get here and I don’t always allow myself those moments to dial into my needs and my subtle energy. So, when I don’t find it, I remember this quotation from the late, great BKS Iyengar:
“You have to create love and affection for your body, for what it can do for you. Love must be incarnated in the smallest pore of the skin, the smallest cell of the body, to make them intelligent so they can collaborate with all the other ones, in the big republic of the body. This love must radiate from you to others. Practitioners of the asanas alone often forget that yoga is for cultivating the head and heart,” BKS Iyengar, Light on Life, p59
This motivates me to treat my body well – to exercise, eat well, sleep well & be kind in my interactions so that I radiate love from myself to others.
Here’s my 1-minute intro to Pranayama:
http://vimeo.com/96587970
Here’s my 10 minute morning yoga routine for adults:
http://vimeo.com/82471965
Here’s my kids yoga routine:
http://vimeo.com/87771532
Peace
©Tamsin Astor-Jack, Yoga Brained LLC