I went for a long walk up Kinder Scout Yesterday from Edale, a walk I’ve not done in over 20 years, which is a shame because it is such a lovely walk and although not as spectacularly pretty as the Lake district, the Peak district is just as lovely in a different way and it is right on our doorstep. We really are very blessed!

I also got to thinking just how blessed I was to find my yoga practice all those years ago whilst partying in Goa! It has really served me well over the years and increased my lung capacity for sure and kept me really fit, fitter than I’d imagined to be honest. I’ve not done a hill walk since July when I was last in the lakes, so hiking up a massive hill should have had someone my age out of breath and exhausted, but it didn’t!

Its just like the running that I took up in January, I originally thought that It would kill me at first, but I’ve managed to run consistently long-ish distances from the very start.

As my yoga practice has matured, my breath has slowed down, and I figured that I needed the running for cardio exercise, but although it does give me that extra cardio, I actually think that the Ashtanga system keeps you at a generally top level of fitness, especially when practiced six days a week.

It is a big commitment though and I’ll admit, when I first started my practice I was living on the beach in Goa with nothing else to do with my days. So starting a full on Hardcore  (it is though, isn’t it ?) yoga practice was easily managed when all you have to do for the rest of the day is laze around on the beach to recover. Rolf also knew that the hippies in Goa at the time wouldn’t be up for doing anything before 9am, so he did his practice first at home and our classes didn’t start til 9:30am. Plus, we were just off the beach in a shaded palm grove with a lovely view of the sea so it was cool enough to cope with. Perfect really!

So, back in the real world, I understand that keeping up a regular daily practice is difficult, especially when you have to go to work, or you have a house to run and kids to look after, or all three! Its exhausting! Add in a full primary series (or more), plus getting up for a six am start into that mix and it’s going to tell sooner or later.

This is why I’m not super strict with people. It is essentially your practice, and yes there are those series that you are supposed to follow but its fine to just do a half primary one day, or half primary half second, or the other half of primary etc, alternating the days  …. If you do chop and change your practice around, make sure that you aren’t constantly favouring certain postures over others because you like/dislike them, or you’d rather skip the hard ones in favour of the fancy ones and you’ll be fine.

If your practice is leaving you exhausted then you need to have a rethink. Go for quality of practice over quantity. Work up to where you feel ok and leave the rest for the following day, or pare it back until you have built up the stamina to do the whole series, with quality of breath and bandha. It doesn’t matter how long you take to get there; you have the rest of your life to add postures.

The Ashtanga sequences are set out in a really intelligent way. They are designed to open the body slowly and steadily for the next posture. We always start with the Surya Namascars, these small sequences of postures I feel, not only warm you up, but also can act as a gauge to how your body is feeling on any different day, I always know when I’m under the weather because Surya Namascar B is exhausting, so I usually don’t go much further on those days.

The standing postures are designed to open your hips and your shoulders, but they only work if we find the foundation and work from there. If you look at them they include lunges to work all of the hip muscles, and arms at strange angles behind your back to open your shoulders. There’s also a couple of twists thrown in there for good measure. Intermediate series begins at the end of the standing postures and involves a lot of postures that need seriously open hips so we need to be working the standing postures properly so that we can be open enough to start this series from there. We need to be feeling the postures in the legs and pressing the feet (and hands) into the floor for the foundation. Obviously you'll have had a firm grounding in Primary Series to build up bandha and strength before you attempt intermediate, or you'll become unstuck!

Therefore, it is important to follow the sequences properly and not rush through them. No matter how fast you make yourself “progress” through these series, Your body will only open when its ready. If you force it beyond its comfortable range of motion you’re just going to hurt yourself. And then you’re back at square one again, or you give up and blame the yoga for your injury. There’s nothing wrong with this yoga, injuries are caused by how it is approached.  

This is the beauty of the practice. The primary series takes you quite quickly up to some very fancy ‘peak’ postures in the middle and it would be easy to grow your ego and get caught up in how advanced you are. But each one of those postures is followed by a harder and more advanced posture which you can get stuck on for a long time (especially if you go to Mysore in India where you’ll be stopped forever until you can do the posture). This is great for keeping the ego in check, and is actually very humbling.

As you move through the series you realise that as the postures become harder, you are constantly thrown back to being a total beginner again. As you go through your life and your practice, you will find that you lose postures and pick them up again, or you just lose some postures altogether, or you have to relearn postures in order to use correct technique instead of just your natural flexibility (if you are naturally flexible of course). This all adds to the longevity of your practice. Three of my teachers are in their sixties and still practicing advanced series daily. I think that you just have to keep persevering. Chipping away at those postures bit by bit, over and over until you get better at them and learn the lesson they are trying to teach you.

Some people will never get beyond Primary series, and that is perfectly fine because the Primary series has so much to teach us and over time you will find that how you approach it changes and you go deeper into the postures. I really struggle to get my leg to stay behind my head. Over the years I've been practicing this posture, I'll go a bit further with it and then tweak my back and then I'm back to the start again. So I'm under no illusion that I'll be doing the advanced series any time soon because there are so many leg behind head postures in those series and my body won't go there at the moment. So I've let it go and am happy with my primary and intermediate practice. It's enough for me. There's no point in trying to get your body into a posture that it doesn't like, it just hurts and I don't like pain !!! 

So as I said at the start, I’m very blessed to have found this practice because it has served me so well over the past 23 years. I’m also very blessed to have worked with some of the best Ashtanga teachers in the world. They have taught me all I know about how to teach this practice to others. Their example says it all.

I believe that I stumbled across a wonderful gift on my way to the beach that day, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving! I was a complete beginner, never having done more than one or two classes of yoga in my life before, but I opened my mind and kept going. I was given my practice in the traditional way, one posture at a time, so there was never that much to remember or work on at any time. Over the course of those few months in Goa I built up my practice and took it home with me. The following season I went back and continued to practice with Rolf, slowly improving my practice as I went along. And I have built on that practice over the years and just kept practicing every day, taking Saturdays and moon days as rest days, as I was originally taught. It has become part of my daily morning routine, like cleaning my teeth and I cant imagine my life without it.

I feel incredibly blessed to have this practice in my life. 

You can also have a gift that keeps on giving. I am running a daily weekday early morning practice which is online at the moment because of the current situation, but it works incredibly well online as I can see so much more. Please do get in touch to find out how to join us .