Day 13: Yoga Perspective

One of the many positive take-aways from my 30 days of yoga is listening to a multitude of teaching perspectives. We all have a teacher whose approach to yoga just seems to gel with ours. We choose the same classes each week and attend as regularIy as we desire. But I realize now that if […]

One of the many positive take-aways from my 30 days of yoga is listening to a multitude of teaching perspectives. We all have a teacher whose approach to yoga just seems to gel with ours. We choose the same classes each week and attend as regularIy as we desire. But I realize now that if you return to the same teacher again and again, you learn their rhythms and flows so well that there is a danger of tuning them out, and by extension, tuning out your body’s messages. And, of course, yoga is about doing the same poses over and over again and hopefully learning something new about how your body works every time, but like any repetitive movement, we each tend to do it the way our body tells us to. Every teacher works hard to elaborate on each pose and to string them together in new ways. Today’s teacher had an entirely new and creative approach to cueing each pose, of tuning your awareness to the weaker, underused muscles that generally hide behind the big boys. And I’m talking about body parts I hadn’t considered engaging for one reason or another, but once I did, I became really dialed in to something new. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you make a point of trying out a new yoga class, and particularly a class that you’ve avoided for one reason or another. Your body will be happy if you let it hear a new perspective.