When practicing yoga a student should sit on a blanket. Sitting well is the key to developing a practice that is both introspective and physically connected.
When you use a blanket, or blankets, to sit upon, you are able to open your chest and receive breath in your lungs more easily and fully. Receiving the breath is the most important component of yoga. Doing a pose without regard to the breath is not yoga, but just exercise. The breath has the power to open the body from the inside. It also has the power to still the mind which is the definition of yoga.
When we sit on a blanket we are able to set up the beginning of our practice session well to have good beginnings and understand the value of starting something in a regal way. We place ourselves and our open chest elegantly, not haphazardly or with a shut down sense of physicallity. When our chest is easily lifted, our mood is easily lifted and it's easy to then have elevated thoughts. Sitting beautifully = thinking beautifully.
When we sit on a blanket, we have an enhanced relationship to the earth, we have room to reach down to the earth from our pelvis and release our hips more completely. When our sacrum is lifted pressure and constriction around the abdomen is eased and the heat from the region is lessened. Our chests can lift off of the abdomen too creating more ventillation of the hot abdominal region.
Students that can sit easily without a blanket should still use one for all of the aforementioned reasons and also because we want to be able to develop deeper and different relationships to things that we are familiar with. And we all are very familiar with the position of sitting.
The value of sitting well has not been hard to teach to students in the places I have taught. However, it has been difficult to teach in the state of New Jersey where the relationships as well as the air are mostly bad, and the egos big. haha. Please, New Jerseyans, sit up on a blanket at the beginning of class.
2 comments:
I have gone into the yoga studio overnight and thrown out every last blanket. I have done so becase here in New Jersey we tend to do things a little bit different (as you have noticed). We do everything with tight hips and constriction to the abdomen (it should explain alot). So I say to every New Jersian, go practice yoga in the raw, under a tree outside. And if you must sit on something, make it a piece of the earth like a tree root, not a floofy purple blanket.
namaste :)
i did notice many blankets missing--hahaha
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