Sublime

quotes the verses from the Gītā where Kṛṣṇa says: “Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you give away, whatever austerity you perform, do it as an offering to me”

Backbends are the epitome of the prāṇa family, expressing a sense of extension and expansion up and out.

In this restorative approach, the arm is in fact being guided by the facilitator back towards the spine. Her hands are drawing towards each other, not pulling on the arm to stretch to the foot. (It is extremely difficult to show visually such subtleties of adjustment.) The result of this is that Alex can remain relaxed and fold forward incrementall

When people are speaking during the meeting, he listens quietly as he breathes in, closing his fingers into a gentle fist, and as he breathes out, opening his fingers and fist. This is how he stays mindful of his breathing; he has seen our Teacher doing this and he has brought this practice into his daily life.

Fluid and creative energies reside in the belly, the second chakra, which is understood as feminine because of pregnancy and birth. For this, I often teach crawling positions and processes, including one I call the lazy lizard, encouraging primordial connectivity of belly, navel, and earth.

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