Week one of our Essentials program starts at the base, our foundation. We will encourage you to "build your house on a rock". Nothing holds up without structure or foundation and here we define the essential techniques of a Power Yoga class, known as the "Pillars of Power Yoga". They are breath, bandhas, drishti, heat and movement. During this week you will learn how to build and sustain a healthy practice with all the right tools under your belt!
Week two of the Essentials program sees us taking what we learned in week one into movement. Flow does not mean fast and furious, it simply means to move seamlessly in an uninterrupted stream for a period of time. By doing this you'll enter a state the athletes know as "the zone", a state of presence and clarity, or open-eyed meditation. Through linking your movements with your breath you will awaken to your inner rhythm and learn to flow effortlessly through your practice.
Week three of the Essentials program is about learning where everything needs to be to help you connect to your bones. It's about "stacking your joints", which means to align your joints one above the other, allowing the right muscles to engage at the right time. This means that your joints are not being strained and your muscles are doing the work to hold your body in place. You'll create healthy anatomical alignment throughout your whole body, vastly improving your strength and stability - two important factors in the overall safety and effectiveness of your practice.
Week four is about cultivating an inner presence that will help you place your body in a balanced relationship with gravity, allowing you to become centered and grounded. Balance is a learned skill - and it comes from slowing down our busy minds so that we are less distracted by what is going on around us. When our inner state is calm, this is reflected in our outer state; and likewise if our inner state is chaotic we'll usually see this reflected in our outer state and in our yoga practice! By creating stillness on the inside, you'll be well on your way to balancing in one-legged yoga poses with perfect poise!
During week five we focus on some of the important standing poses in the series, and experience being connected to the earth through our legs and feet. This will give you a sense of being truly grounded in your physical body, and will allow you to build lower body strength.
During week six we work from the grounded place we established in week five and move into backward bending. Backward bending offers us the ability to reverse our habitual tendencies to hunch our shoulders and round our spines; postural habits that compress our organs and block our energy. Healthy backward bending will help you to "lighten up", open your heart and expand into new territories of movement and empowerment.
During week seven of the Essentials program, we replace our feet with our hands, head and shoulders as the foundation, as we literally turn our worlds upside down. Playing with gravity in inversions will give you a different viewing point and perspective on life, and you will gain a new level of confidence and inner strength. Inversions rejuvenate tired bodies and minds, and are an important (yet sometimes intimidating) addition to your yoga practice. Connecting to your core by consciously activating your abdominal muscles will improve your inversions and your posture, heal your back and give ease and stability to all physical movements.
A well-rounded yoga practice includes dynamic movement balanced with stillness and softness. Week eight is about incorporating more restorative movements that allow us to completely let go and surrender, moving from yang to yin; activity to receptivity; doing to being. When the work is done and you've put in your best effort, there comes a time to step back and let go. The act of surrendering actually begins in our minds; translating to an awakened awareness and clarity that dissolves barriers between ourselves and others, leading to the state of Yoga, or union.