Step 4- Soften - Love and Integration
Softening opens the gateway to the heart. That could mean softening your body or your breath, but it also points to softening your judgments or your stance toward another person or situation. Softening allows things to join, to match their edges with ours together. It invites openness, connection, and reception.
Purposes: Love, compassion, dissolution of ego and separateness, acceptance
Practices: Opening the chest, expanding the breath, surrendering the ego, generosity, forgiveness, empathy, radiating from the heart.
Actions: Lifting the sternum, shoulders back, reaching back
Yoga practice: Any poses that open chest, shoulder, breathe and backbends
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
Love is a natural state of being
Even though love is the universal force of connection and healing, we simultaneously fear it and long for it, and this creates blockage in the heart. Opening the heart breaks through the bondage of that conflict into light, radiant joy, tender compassion, and a deep intimacy with your own interior.
“Your task is not to see for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”. - Rumi
Opening the heart involves taking down those defenses to experience the love that is the natural state of our being. Unfortunately, defenses get hardwired into the body and become permanent body armor. This rigidifies the upper back, chest, and shoulder. It constricts the breath and can even shorten the connective tissue in the front of the body, drawing the shoulders forward and collapsing the chest. Then it becomes more difficult to breathe and to align your posture, and the heart feels depleted.
Barefoot in natural surroundings brings you in contact with the earth. This transfers the earth’s electrons into your body, inducing therapeutic effects. These include reduced inflammation, stress, pain, and improved mood and sleep.
Pranayama- The Vital Breath
In yoga terminology, breath practices are called pranayama. Prana represents the basic energy of life- the first unit, and yama means to rein in, such as connecting a chariot to its horses. This control gives tremendous power in yoga; pranayama is the control, or mastery, of the breath. Pranayama practices are highly potent and bring about direct changes in consciousness. No yoga practice is completely without the inclusion of pranayama.
Through their exploration of yoga and breath, the ancient yogis discovered that prana occurred through various vayus, or winds. These reflect the flow of prana through the body, especially as directed by breath.
Yoga postures and pranayama work with various vayus (the wind, or energy) to distribute prana throughout the whole system. Some postures, such as Knees to Chest pose) stimulate a specific vayu.
Here are some general guidelines: when in doubt, follow the path of the breathing current from bottom to top. Start with centering and grounding, take your time to feel the direction and the quality of your breath. Sit quietly for at least 5-7 mins, and observe how you feel afterwards.
Coordinating the Breath
The main thing to remember is that breath is energy. Taking in more breath is charging; it increases your sensitivity, vitality, and aliveness. Letting your breath out is discharging; it facilitates letting go, relaxation, and helps dissolve pain and tension. Lengthen your inhalations or exhalations according to where you want to go. If you want more energy, focus on bringing in more oxygen, if you want to release, leg go, relax, or soften, go to sleep, then allow longer exhalations.
In general, rising up to a stand, raising your arms overhead, opening the front of the body, or back-bending are best assisted with an inhalation, as it allows you to expand. Forward folds, twists, and anything that makes the body pull into itself are best done on an exhalation, as it enables letting go. Bioenergetic grounding is an exception. Here, you exhale as you push into the ground and inhale as you bend your knees, drawing up from the earth.
In addition, breathing into the belly stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is calming and regulating. Breathing into the chest stimulates the sympathetic nervous system and is more energizing. Ideally, we wish to distribute prana (the wind, or energy) evenly throughout our body so we are able to relax when we need.
Balasana: Child’s Pose
This is one of the most grounding poses you can do. If you feel tired during practice and need to rest, or if you feel too much going on and feel a bit overwhelming, simply allow yourself to return to this simple pose that resembles the time before birth when you were held safely in the womb.
Practice:
Come down on the ground, turning your knees outward, separate your knees wide as you rest your forehead, chest and belly down between your inner thighs. Let go of holding of any kind, then simply breathe and relax in here.
You can choose to extend your arms, or bring them alongside the body, or fold your hands to make a pillow under your forehead.
If it is difficult for you if any part of the body is in pain or uncomfortable, then you may use a pillow or a blanket behind your knees, or under your forehead, or substitute with Knees to Chest on your back instead.
Settle in deeply, slowing your breath, imagine the simplicity of being a baby, where all you need to do is simply feel and be.
Standing Yoga Mudra
The nice thing about this pose is that you can do it anytime, anywhere. It is a simple counter stretch to the rounded spine that comes from hunching over a computer after a period of time. It opens the chest, shoulder, and throat, and brings blood to the brain.
Practice: (Use a strap if you have difficulty joining your hands behind your back, that is okay!)
Begin in Standing Mountain Pose by pressing down through your feet equally from both sides, then interlace your fingers behind your back. Draw your elbows toward each other, straightening your arms, while simultaneously rolling your shoulders toward the back of your body.
Inhale and lift the heart, expanding the chest, tilt your head back slightly, being careful not to compress your neck or inhibit your breathing.
As you exhale, bow forward at the hips, keeping your hands clasped behind you and your legs straight, or slightly bend your knees, allow the natural weight of the arms to pry open the upper back.
If this posture feels comfortable for you, fold fully forwardd and allow your hands to move away from your spine behind you., then release both of your arms down toward the ground for Standing Forward Fold.
