Step 3- Activate- Strength and Will
Mastery is the ability to transform intention into reality, live deliberately, and create your life on purpose, but even more importantly, mastery is fulfilling your intentions with ease. In the practice of yoga, mastery occurs when years of effort and discipline reach a point of ease.
Book: 10,000 Hours: You Become What You Practice by Phyllis Lane.
Purposes: Energy, strength, will, mastery
Practices: Strengthening the will through discipline, using polarities to create power, using movement to generate energy, strengthening the core, balancing will and surrender.
Actions: Lengthening side bodies, combining matter and movement to generate energy, guiding your chi 氣 toward desired results. Overcoming inertia through practice, practice, practice.
Yoga practice: Balance, warriors, torso toners, twists, plank
Radiance - Openness ($13.00/ 48 mins)
To increase fluidity and function of each shoulder muscle down to your back, try opening up the shoulders with this series of strengthening and lengthening exercises. These exercises can improve posture, stimulate blood flow, and provide a great energy boost.
Video available for 180 days
Stability and Balance ($13.00/ 58 mins)
To further enhance your body's balance and stability, try exercises that strengthen the muscles responsible for keeping you upright, including your legs and core, as well as toning the glutes. This series of exercises can improve your body awareness, increase muscular strength, and enhance mental clarity.
Video available for 180 days
Cultivating Fire in the body
Activating your energy means that you are igniting the prana (breath, considered as a life-giving force) in your body and distributing it wherever you want it to go - guided by your will. This awakens the will as a director within you. To generate energy in your practice is to find just the right combination of resistance and freedom, containment and release, holding on and letting go. This is the art of yoga. Its goal is mastery: mastery of yourself and your life. All it takes is consciousness, effort, and many, many, many years of practice.
Having a strong internal fire or drive gives you the spark to do anything in your life. In yoga internal fire is called tapas. The fire generated through practice, discipline, austerities, concentration, focused activity, and personal will. Once generated, tapas become a spiritual fire that burns personal limitation and blockages.
To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.
Chogyum Trungpa
Power and Mastery
In the practice of yoga, mastery occurs when years of effort and discipline reach a point of ease. In the Yoga Sutras Patanjali states: “Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached.” In yoga terminology this is a combination of abhyasa, or effort, and vairagya, detachment. We practice with focused determination yet release any attachment to a goal.
Becoming excellent at something requires intense effort and discipline day after day. It takes a strong will to carry you through the months and years of effort to reach the place where something becomes effortless. Will overcomes the inertia of what is, so you can move toward what you want it to be.
Will also requires intention, which originates in consciousness. You set an intention to meditate or to hold a pose for a certain amount of time, or to simply get to class on time, but it takes energy to fulfill that intention. When your will can successfully harness your energy into your intention, you have true power.
Practice Warrior I,II,III with yoga blocks can build your strength over time through pracitce.
Guidelines:
Move slowly and deliberately, seeking steadiness and balance at each stage. If you fall out of the pose, you can always take a break and then come back in when you feel ready.
Extend from the back toes to the front fingertips in one energized line.
Practice:
Begin in Standing Mountain Pose. Take a step back with your right foot, placing it about two feet behind your left foot. Bring your weight onto your left leg and find your core stability. Place your hands on the blocks or your hips, making sure your hips are level toward the front of your mat.
Extend out through your back leg as your hinges your whole torso forward, lifting your right leg parallel to the floor from the center of your core. Keep both of your hands on your hips or the blocks for support, then slowly bring both of your arms forward next to your ears when you feel more stable. Hold on for as long as you feel stable.
To move out of the pose, bring both feet back down on the ground, and take a break before you move to another side to gain muscle strength
Downward Facing Dog + Hip Opening
Benefits:
Energize the pose by pressing both hands and feet more firmly onto the floor, as if you were trying to lengthen your mat from top to bottom, distributing your weight evenly among the four corners of this pose: your two hands and two feet. Notice how this rooting action energizes the body.
Legs: Hug your muscles in toward the bones, lifting your kneecaps. Press the front of your thighs toward the back.
Arms: Simultaneously outwardly rotate your upper arms, opening the shoulders and chest. Soften the heart as you extend from the heart to your wrists and from the heart to your pelvis. Experiment with bending and straightening your knees, rising up on your toes and lowering your heels, and bending and straightening your arms to experience different dynamics in the pose.
Practice:
Begin in Table Top Pose (hands and knees on the ground), place your palms firmly on the mat, fingers spread wide, index finger parallel to each other, wrist creases parallel to the fron of the mat.
Engage your legs by tucking your toes into the mat and pushing your feet and hands into the floor. Firm up your shoulder blades, drawing them downward. Feel this engagement with the ground before you lift your hips. From that engagement, lift your hip until your body forms a triangle, with the floor as your foundation.
Warm up by alternately bending and straightening your knees a few times as you wiggle your way into the poses, breathe and sense your inner space opens up as you move.
With feet hip-width apart, press your heels down toward the ground. Don’t worry if your heels don’t touch: it may take years of practice to get your heels all the way down. Every person’s inner structure is unique. If you feel stable for you, bring your right leg back and open your hip while your entire body remain engaged.
