#Hatha yoga class sequence how to#
#Hatha yoga class sequence full#

More advanced yoga devotees have the buy-in and experience needed to permit their yoga instructor to step things up a little to move on to more elaborate poses – poses that beginners would not be able to do. Focusing on the breath is a little-understood concept at that point and there may not even be a mind-body connection.

#Hatha yoga class sequence how to#

In beginner yoga classes, much of the new students’ focus is on their teacher: how to move just so, where to put one’s hand and so on. The easiest example to think of would be a beginners yoga class versus an advanced yoga session: if you’re just starting practising yoga, you need to understand how to ‘move from your core’ before graduating to more demanding poses. That doesn’t mean that every hatha workout must be forceful with the wealth of poses to choose from, you could design a workout for virtually any purpose. Hatha fundamentally refers to yoga postures, meaning that your favourite type of yoga – be it Ashtanga, Iyengar, vinyasa and power yogas are all hatha.īy definition, hatha yoga is meant to be physical the word hatha itself means ‘force’, ‘effort’ or ‘willfulness’. So the order of asanas is not by choice, it is according to the way the human system is structured.As though you didn’t already know it, hatha yoga is a very popular, very common form of yoga in the western hemisphere. This preparation creates a certain integrity in the system. One can distinctly see this – if you do proper classical yoga, whatever situations you face, they will not leave you scattered. But if you have activated your system in a certain way, whatever situation occurs in your life, you will be able to take it without causing too much disturbance to your system.

Life situations can be such that there is no choice about how to act and no system to it – you may have to jump into action whichever way it comes. Sudden activation of a certain part will lead to disjointedness. We need to activate it from one end to the other. The order of the asanas is not according to my or your preference, it is the way the human system is made. You may win the lottery, you may get married to the best man or woman in the world, you may pray 24 hours of the day – no matter what you do, you will live a disjointed life. Somehow, you may manage to live long, but no matter what enters your life, you will not be complete. Disjointed energy means living a broken life. There are many disjointed bodies everywhere. Your energy functions in such a way that if you activate one aspect of your energy without activating another aspect of it, your system will become disjointed. In Hata Yoga, this organ comfort is always considered. Let’s say you have one or one-and-a-half kilogram of food in your stomach and you lie down for a few hours, depending upon how you are lying, this weight could cause serious damage.

#Hatha yoga class sequence full#

If the stomach is full and you lie down, it presses on other organs. In India, they always told you that you must eat before or just after sunset, and leave at least four hours before you go to bed, because the food should have left the stomach by then.

This is why they say you should never lie down right after food. If you lean back, one organ will press on the other. In a moving vehicle, you must always sit straight, so that your organs have greater comfort. If you sit in a recliner, especially in a moving vehicle, your organs will suffer enormously. The vital organs in the trunk are not firmly fixed with clamps and bolts or flanges but hang in connective tissue like in nets. If you sit in a recliner, only your muscles are relaxed, but there is a lot of stress on the skeletal system, and above all, on your organs. If you sit up straight, this will not happen. You may have noticed that if you travel for some time sitting reclined in a plane or a car, by the time you reach your destination, you will be exhausted. If you sit in a reclining chair, your muscles will be comfortable, but your joints will be strained. In your system, there is something called skeletal comfort, muscular comfort, organ comfort, and energy comfort. Sadhguru: The order is not something that you or I invented – it arises from the observation of how not only the physical body but the whole human system functions. Questioner: What is the importance of the sequence in which we are doing the asanas? Can we change the order?