Asana: Roadmap to Freedom

Welcome to Asana, Roadmaps to Freedom. It's great to have you here. I wanted to take a few minutes to talk a little bit about the philosophy behind this mode of practice, and we'll take a little time at the end to have an experiential walkthrough to some of these processes and feelings and understandings, so you can really understand how we'll be using these poses to take ourselves closer and closer to the freedom we're looking for. First of all, I'd like to explain a little bit how from the Asana we can come up with the idea of roadmaps towards freedom. And what we're doing in these Asana is using a lot of support. For example, we'll be using the wall, we'll be using blankets, we'll be using blocks and things of that nature to help give the body a sense of feedback, a sense of its awareness in space, so that when we use our body, when we use our body against these props, that we begin to understand different levels of openings in the body, and we can trace, like roadmaps, further and further and further in. Whereas before we might flow in and out of a pose, or even just hold a pose statically in open space, without the use of these props, we might not know to go a deeper distance into the body. And with continued practice and experience in feeling like this, we can start to work in open joints in different ways that we never knew were possible.

So this, in effect, helps us to move better in our daily life. It helps us to combat stress from sitting all day long, from traveling, from working around the house, out in the yard, activities and sports that we do. We want to be able to unlock the body back to its full potential as often as possible. And that's what these roadmaps through the Asana are going to do. To take it a step further, as our awareness grows in these poses, a wonderful thing starts to blossom open. Not only are we able to feel the movements of the limbs and the body and the deeper spaces physically, we start to open up a stillness inside.

And this is the moving meditation of Asana practice, that we can then further in pranayama practice and formal meditation. But I want to communicate this experience as we begin to truly open up the body to its full potential in these poses. And the word I like to use is unlock, that it's almost sort of a miraculous stillness that comes, this peace out of the thinking mind that is sometimes our greatest nemesis. And I'd like to take you closer and closer and closer to that stillness inside you. From that stillness, as we travel further, further down our roadmaps, we come to an intimate experience of ourselves emotionally and mentally.

And as these roadmaps take us there, we start to begin to, we understand our, excuse me, our emotionality in a deeper level. We have a greater interaction with it. We start to feel the sadness that might be coming through our body that we may have pushed away a little bit. Or if there's an anger that's in our body that we need to feel and look at, we can have that open space for it to have an expression. From that experience of the emotionality, there's an opportunity for change to occur.

There's an opportunity for that energy to run its course that it may not have had an open field to do. And this is where real healing can occur. So taking ourselves from a very tangible physical experience in these asanas, learning to open up and become freer in our physical body, we then come into the mental and emotional and start to have a deeper experience of healing there. That's the whole process of asana, roadmaps to freedom. I'd like to take you on a little experiential journey with this so you can start to have a direct experience of what I'm talking about, at least to the physical body, and we'll start to get further and further as we practice through the seasons together.

So why don't we take a moment to come into a wall and we'll take a kneeling lunge, excuse me, just a classic lunge position here. And I'll take my right foot to the wall with the heel pressing up and the toes about four or five inches forward. So there's an angle at the foot. I'll take the hands to surround the forward foot. The first thing I'd like us both to do is allow the leg to be not active, dropping, fading towards the floor.

With the foot against the wall and this leg hanging down, I want you to feel the experience in your torso. The word that I would give it is a heaviness, a downwardness in that torso. So let's see what happens if we just start to push from your right hip, a direct line through the leg, through your heel, and start to lift that leg up. Let's start to trace that lift all the way up, the knee joint, the thigh bone, and to here. Let's do that together.

Let the leg drop again and then extend that energy from your hip to your heel. And by energy, I just mean reach. All the way there until you start to feel that by pushing the heel, all of a sudden the leg lifts. And what we're looking to do is get that lifting feeling, not just at the knee, not just at the thigh, but at the hip and all the way into the abdominal area. Okay? Holding there, let's keep that steady lift and action of the leg.

Okay? From there, focus and feel what happens when we start to drop the leg. Feel the abdomen when we start to drop the leg, how it sort of begins to fall into the floor. And there's sort of closure of the body and energy that's just fading, fading, fading, fading, and I feel sleepy. Okay?

Now, let's take that a little bit further. I'm going to switch legs just so you can see the front side of the twist. And we'll do the same beginning. Start with the leg a little slack and feel all the way through to your abdomen. And then we'll extend through the leg all the way to the heel to start to get that knee to lift, the thigh to lift, the hip to lift, and the abdomen.

And then we'll go for a twist through this lunge. Let's leave the left hand down, keep the energy of that back leg, and start to turn into the twist. Now, we've got the energy of the back leg through the heel, the lift of the leg. So now let's see what happens. Keep your inner attention on the twisting and lift of the spine.

And then slowly start to pull the energy out of your leg. And you'll find the torso untwists itself. Now I'm fighting against my body. Here, I begin to lift all the way into the abdomen and the body unlocks. It spirals open.

And so that's what I'm aiming at in these poses. If you haven't had a lot of experience in feeling deeply into the body like this, then it might not be readily obvious to you these various things I'm talking about with a little bit of practice. It will come. I'd like to show you another pose with these effects. We're going to use a block just for a little extra help, and that's triangle pose.

Excuse me, side angle pose. And as I'll be teaching quite a bit using the wall for a little bit of extra support for the back foot, we'll work a little with that now. Let's take the right foot up against the wall and the left foot forward for side angle pose. Leg and foot pointing straight ahead. We'll bend the knee and take the hand down to the brick.

For now, this hand can just rest at the hip. At this point, let's let the inner edge of the foot, the big toe side of the foot, very commonly we'll see this where the arches collapse. So I'm going to do that fairly obviously with you now. The arch collapses, you'll see the knee fall, the hip is going to roll in, the torso rolls down, all of that from the foot. But I'm looking for space and quietness in the body, openness.

So what I'll do is I'll cut the outer edge of the foot, that's the pinky edge of the foot, flat down, and you'll see right away the arch of the foot comes up. With the arch going up, the thigh begins to spiral out. The hip begins to roll up. The sacrum and tailbone come forward. That rolls the chest open, and you can see a whole different expression of the pose.

Let me do the first way and show you the arm. This is the full expression of the pose. Let me do the first way the foot collapsed. I drop the foot, there goes the knee, there goes the hip, but now I'm going to try to do the arm from that pose. And I'm not playing around with my shoulder, that's just the expression here based on where my chest is.

Here we go, unlocking. I push the outer edge of the foot down, you feel the shin and the knee begin to roll up. The thigh rolls up, the hip rolls up, the chest rolls up, and all of a sudden the body unlocks again. And that quiet stillness begins to emerge in my body and mind. And this is what I'm aiming to teach in these poses through our seasons together.

My hope is that in sharing these ideas with you, that you'll become to have a deeper understanding of not only your physicality and capacity for amazing motion, but also amazing emotion, the whole spectrum. I don't believe it's always about just being happy, it's about having healthy abilities to have sadness, to have anger, to have doubt, you know, to go through it all, but to find a wonderful center from which to interact with all of these things. I'm really looking forward to seeing you in these seasons and sessions. Namaste.