The Art of Vinyasa: Awakening Body and Mind through the Practice of Ashtanga Yoga

This approach to practice requires a willingness to invite

For all backbends the underlying pattern is that as we inhale and consider the pose, we then ground fully on the exhalation to set the apānic pattern solidly in the pelvic floor as the base of the pose.

But especially when you are off-kilter, you must practice carefully and with a sense of surrender, of not knowing, and of starting over again and again. When approached in this way, the practice will often smooth out imbalances, especially if you practice “all day every day.”

The internal forms can be revealed through visualization, but it is also important to study them by establishing an embodied context for them.

But where subtle anatomy is most useful is in shedding light on levels of alignment and form that govern obscure aspects of the practice, such as Mūlabandha, and whole-body patterns that connect us from top to bottom. By practicing āsana with some of these patterns in the nervous system, the poses are enhanced, and perhaps more important, the affe

Apāna gives a visceral sense of impermanence and interconnectedness to forms projected into the sense fields opened by the inhaling prāṇa pattern. When we ignore this grounding, stabilizing aspect of apāna in backbends, a sense of an asymmetrical, manic “hyperprāṇa” arises in which it is difficult to focus the mind, and an underlying sense of a

We construct and embody the internal forms by imagining that we have a central channel, the suṣumṇā nāḍī.

Prāṇa (with a capital P) refers to the internal breath as a whole.

This mantra is sometimes referred to as the swan mantra because haṁsa means “swan” in Sanskrit, and if you try to superimpose SĀ-HAṀ on the breath, you’ll notice that after a few rounds it starts to sound like HAṀ-SA.