How’s Your Asana Alignment?
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where your body is at when you practice yoga. You are mostly upside down, trying to connect breath, find balance and quiet your mind as your bunions throw you off balance, and that old rotator cuff injury begins to niggle.
Your tight hip flexor is not the villain, it’s trying to get your attention.
I help my clients to reconnect with their bodies on a neural and energetic level. What I mean by that is that when your body is in balance, the energy within you will flow and this will create a better connection with yourself and everything that you come into contact with.
1:1 Asana Realignment Clinic
Somewhere in the last 20 years, many yoga Asana practices have become aligned with intense fitness programmes. We have yoga celebrities at one end offering bootcamp yoga, and at the other, they caution us not to do anything unsafe, and it seems to me that every day on Instagram, someone takes off his/their shirt to show us another good breathing technique. (Maybe I need to change my hashtags)
Now to be clear, I’m not knocking them. Anything that gets people breathing and moving is fine in my books. Where I’m coming from is that when the body is in alignment it can find structural integrity all by itself, which means that you can move deeper into your practice with little effort and those ‘Instagram worthy’ postures will be something just to play around with.
If you have ever been into a class with me then you’ll know that I often refer to our physical body as being a the conduit between the earth and the ether elements. In short, you are the circuit, or the circuit breaker that enables energy to flow between the cosmos and earth.
The way you breathe, move and act feeds into this ultimate energy system. The goal is to create universal harmony. The game is not to get caught up in the ever unfolding drama of life so that we connect with our higher self (Atman). The state of the world will quickly tell you that as a species we aren’t doing great on that front, but on an individual basis, we are making greater ripples.
When you understand the mechanisms behind your muscle tightness and biomechanical imbalances it’s much easier to help your body to release them.
In my 1:1 sessions, I support you to go deeper into your self as a way of understanding and moving through stress, connecting mind with movement so that we raise greater awareness of what happens to the neurobiology of our bodies when stress response is trigged. Stephen Porges of The Polyvegal Theory fame, coined a wonderful word to describe this, he called it Neuroception which is an automatic mechanism that enables the body to respond to threat.
If your body feels strong and aligned you’ll naturally want to move and explore more.
When people book into my clinic for a Neuromuscular Realignment Assessment I help them to identify their true muscle imbalances, and we work through specific asana to help them reconnect. It’s a fun process and I love watching the reactions as we work out what was restricting them. I don’t say this lightly but its a privilege to do this work.
Book Your 90 Min Neuro Alignment Clinic
Be strong, stretchy and centred.
Shanti & Chianti Folks x