In June of 2010, I closed Brian Reeder, RYT, LLC. yoga office in Lexington, KY. At the end of my lease year, a clientele had not manifested, so I let the lease run out and followed my bliss back to my garden in the mountains. I questioned why things had worked out that way. I knew there had to be some reason. There always is, even when we don't see it.
Over the last year, I have come to realize that my yoga practice manifested so that I could garden and work (physically) in the manner I enjoy. Yoga reformed my body, bringing it into a greater state of homeostasis that allows me to function in a healthier manner by working out the kinks and imbalances that cause pain and imbalance, and allows me to maintain an active lifestyle. While I thought I would be teaching yoga in a class setting, I now see that yoga has integrated into my life in a more subtle way.
The really amazing thing about yoga practice is that it has become so integral to my day-to-day life. I still do routines, setting aside various amounts of time so many days a week to actually practice, but what seems much more pervasive is that I am in kinesthetic awareness (body alignment awareness) when I am not doing a yoga routine. In all my activities, both passive and active, I am am aware of the flow of my breath, the tension of the muscles over my adrenal glands, the alignment of my hips and shoulders and a host of other subtle points. This gets carried over into everything I do. From sitting in a chair to weeding or planting in the garden, to carrying buckets of water or bending over to pick clover and field-greens, those activities are all done with a kinesthetic sense of body mechanics and integrate yogic principles. I am constantly looking for ways to not stress my joints and connective tissue and to not throw off my body alignment, especially the hips. I seek ways to integrate yogic poses into all of my activities and I find a great many of them translate very well.
So for a while I will simply be talking about how I integrate my yogic practice into my daily activities on this blog. Since I am not teaching yoga at this time in a public setting, I can write here about yoga and hopefully help others to begin to make a more holistic and organic approach to yoga in their own lives.
I will be reposting the informational pages I had made for my old website, brianreederryt.com. For this blog post, I will reprint the last article I wrote for that website called Yoga For Normal People. I think it has more bearing now than ever. In the last year, I have started to see how yoga can be incorporated into any lifestyle on a daily basis. I think there is a real need for kinesthetically-based yoga practice as a physical maintenance tool for better health and peace of mind. Enjoy the article!
Brian Reeder
Yoga For Normal People
There is the common misconception that to do yoga, one must be flexible, active, healthy and interested in obscure philosophies. This is not the case. In fact, yoga is most valuable for those who do not meet any of the criterion. In order to promote this fact, I am creating Yoga For Normal People to expressly point out the fact that yoga is for everybody.
While yoga evolved within a religious/spiritual framework (Ancient Indian Hinduism), the practice of meditation, breathwork and the postures of yoga are not religious or spiritual practices, in and of themselves. My goal is to divorce these practices from their Hindu roots expressly to study the postures, meditation and breathwork from a scientific perspective. By doing this, I am working to create a practice of yoga that is accessible to all people.
Many people within the yoga community whom I have discussed this with range from offended to lacking comprehension and ask why I wish to re-invent the wheel. The answer is very simple. Many people could benefit from, but would never try it because of the quasi-mystical, new age, Hindu veneer that yoga is stigmatized by. Now, before we go any further, I must state categorically that if you want your yoga practice to be spiritual, laced with archaic philosophies and opaque Hindu concepts, I have no desire what-so-ever to change anything about your practice. Go for it! I strongly support and encourage EVERY type of yogic practice, and the freedom of the individual to practice anything they choose. With that said, I do strongly feel that yoga is in many ways held back by these aspects, and it is my goal to look at yogic practice with a more detached eye in order to understand, from a modern western scientific perspective, exactly what these practices are doing to the body.
I feel that through understanding yoga in light of modern knowledge we can come to an understanding of the practices of yoga as a tool in health maintenance. Yoga as a practice has survived for millennia and has proven to have value to millions of human beings. Like so many technologies in the past, this one has been cloaked in mythology, "spirituality" and religion, because it was first understood, practiced and taught by shamans, and later by priests. So too was writing, mathematics, architecture, art, and theater, but we have successfully de-mystified those practices and use them to their fullest potential in our everyday lives. To me, I see yoga as an aspect of human potentiality, with no deities or spirituality of any kind required. Thus, if this practice is an aspect of human potentiality, we can begin to strip off the layers of mythology and get down to the real meat of the matter.
So what are we really talking about when we discuss yoga as a tool for maintenance of our bodies and our health? There are three practices from the yoga tradition which are of direct benefit to the body and to health-maintenance: asana (postures/poses/movements), pranayama (breathwork) and meditation. Let us then take a minute to look at each of these practices in a bit more detail.
Asanas are much like stretching and calisthenics. However, there is a much broader range of movements than in typical calisthenics. Beyond stretching, which is a hallmark of yoga asana there is also balance and strengthening, as yoga uses the weight of the body for strength increase. A well-balanced asana practice can incorporate all three aspects, with segments designed to increase flexibility, balance and strength, or can be designed to focus solely on any one of these three areas or any combination that you may need to work with. Finally, yoga asanas can be a valuable therapeutic tool, and yogic practices can be designed to work with a large number of injuries, physical limitations and illnesses, helping to restore the body to health and homeostasis. Asana alone is a nice form of exercise, but when combined with breathwork, becomes something more than regular exercise techniques.
For most beginners, asana practice is the natural doorway to yogic practice. Asana can offer the average person increased flexibility, strength and balance, and a yoga program can be designed for anyone, regardless of their activity level. Whether you run marathons or sit at a desk all day or even sit on the couch all day and haven't gotten much exercise in years, a yoga program of asanas can be developed to begin to bring you to greater health and well being. It is important to look at asana practice as routine maintenance of your vehicle: the body.
To dispel some of the myths around yoga asana, you should be advised that you do not need to sit in lotus position, do head-stands or hand-stands, run through a fast vinyasa flow or do anything you are not capable of doing. In fact, you may never reach a time when you can do those poses, and then again you might and that all depends on your body, its limitations and state of health and your desire and focus. I do not judge anyone who is only using yoga asana as a moderate, low-impact form of body maintenance for health and wellness. In my way of teaching, there is no particular goal. I am not seeking to make you into anything. All I seek is to teach you tools to improve your health, maintain yourself and perhaps help you to patiently meet the goals you have for yourself. I am not seeking to turn you into "super yogi", unless that is your goal, and even then, I may council you to be patient and set shorter, more realistic goals. My goal is to teach you in a gentle manner, starting where you are. Thus, my way of teaching yoga asana is applicable to everyone and is Yoga For Normal People.
Pranayama is not only central to yoga, but is a central part of living a healthy life. While we all breathe all the time, most of us simply do not know how to breathe fully. The average person breathes in short, shallow "rabbit-breaths", only filling the upper lungs partially with each inhale, and not fully emptying the air from the lungs with the exhale. While this will keep you alive, it is not utilizing breath in the full manner in which you are designed to breathe. When your breath is full, it is deep. That is to say, we breathe all the way into the lower lungs, filling them fully. Conversely, each exhale is then long and slow and fully expels all the air from the lungs. Why is this important, you may ask?
The importance of the full, deep inhale and exhale is that it is utilizing the entire area of the lungs, fully oxygenates the body and with each exhale, pushes out the maximum level of toxins (carbon dioxide). This brings greater vitality to the body, greater clarity to the mind and by utilizing the entire lung capacity, keeps the lungs from becoming weak through lack of use and thus more prone to disease. In order to accomplish this full, deep breathe, we learn to expand our abdomen on each inhale and to pull our belly-button toward our spine on each exhale and through this process, we develop the core muscles of our body. As these muscles develop, we gain more core strength and the ability to breathe deeper and more fully with less effort.
Everyone needs to learn to breathe deeply and fully and everyone can learn to do this. Beyond the health benefits of full breaths, when this practice of full breathing is combined with the asanas (poses), that is when the practice becomes yoga. Poses and movements without a full, deep breath are just calisthenics. It is when the full breath is combined with the poses that you are actually doing yoga. Not only do those full breaths enhance the lungs and the body, but the full, deep breath increases the development of the core muscles of the body, which is a major focus in strengthening the body through yogic practice. When practicing the poses, it is as though the breath is actually precipitating and causing each movement. By combining the breath and the poses, yoga goes beyond other types of exercise to create many beneficial effects that other exercise systems simply do not offer. Breathwork is for everyone! Even if you can't perform any of the poses, you can learn to work with your breath to achieve a variety of beneficial effects and to enhance your health and wellness.
Meditation is the final leg of the triad of essential practices in Yoga For Normal People. With the poses, we are working with the physical body. With breathwork, we are working with the most essential function of our lives: breathing. With meditation, we are working with our minds, which not only creates our moods, but also our perception of the world around us.
There are many forms of meditation, and each focuses on different aspects of our mind. The common denominator of them all though is that we are working with our mind, learning to use it more fully and to manipulate our moods and perception through mental discipline and expansion. Some will say that meditation has metaphysical applications as well, and they may well be correct, but I would choose to say that meditation is working with the quantum aspects of our perceptual functions.
For the beginner to yoga, the most basic aspect of meditation is learning to be focused while doing the poses and to integrate that focus through the combination of the poses with breathing. In this way, one does not need to have a dedicated sitting meditation practice, though that may come later as a result of the mental gains (meditation) that one makes in their practice of poses and breathing. So, to begin with for normal people, we simply learn to be present as we practice the poses, not thinking about this or that from the rest of our day (or our lives), and to be aware of and keep the breath flowing while we are consciously practicing the poses. In this way, the triad is complete, and the poses, breath and mental focus come together to make Yoga.
With Yoga For Normal People, I am seeking to make yoga accessible to you, to everyone, to regular, average, normal people. By focusing on the physical aspect of the poses, in conjunction with training the mind to be aware of our physical self in the poses and our breathing while performing the poses, we develop the best of what yoga has to offer. This requires no changes in belief or any other aspects of your life that you value and do not wish to change. I am not teaching a belief system or philosophy. I teach a system of body maintenance that is a tool for heath, well-being and care of the one thing you really have in this world: your physical vehicle, the body.
The really amazing thing about yoga practice is that it has become so integral to my day-to-day life. I still do routines, setting aside various amounts of time so many days a week to actually practice, but what seems much more pervasive is that I am in kinesthetic awareness (body alignment awareness) when I am not doing a yoga routine. In all my activities, both passive and active, I am am aware of the flow of my breath, the tension of the muscles over my adrenal glands, the alignment of my hips and shoulders and a host of other subtle points. This gets carried over into everything I do. From sitting in a chair to weeding or planting in the garden, to carrying buckets of water or bending over to pick clover and field-greens, those activities are all done with a kinesthetic sense of body mechanics and integrate yogic principles. I am constantly looking for ways to not stress my joints and connective tissue and to not throw off my body alignment, especially the hips. I seek ways to integrate yogic poses into all of my activities and I find a great many of them translate very well.
So for a while I will simply be talking about how I integrate my yogic practice into my daily activities on this blog. Since I am not teaching yoga at this time in a public setting, I can write here about yoga and hopefully help others to begin to make a more holistic and organic approach to yoga in their own lives.
I will be reposting the informational pages I had made for my old website, brianreederryt.com. For this blog post, I will reprint the last article I wrote for that website called Yoga For Normal People. I think it has more bearing now than ever. In the last year, I have started to see how yoga can be incorporated into any lifestyle on a daily basis. I think there is a real need for kinesthetically-based yoga practice as a physical maintenance tool for better health and peace of mind. Enjoy the article!
Brian Reeder
Yoga For Normal People
There is the common misconception that to do yoga, one must be flexible, active, healthy and interested in obscure philosophies. This is not the case. In fact, yoga is most valuable for those who do not meet any of the criterion. In order to promote this fact, I am creating Yoga For Normal People to expressly point out the fact that yoga is for everybody.
While yoga evolved within a religious/spiritual framework (Ancient Indian Hinduism), the practice of meditation, breathwork and the postures of yoga are not religious or spiritual practices, in and of themselves. My goal is to divorce these practices from their Hindu roots expressly to study the postures, meditation and breathwork from a scientific perspective. By doing this, I am working to create a practice of yoga that is accessible to all people.
Many people within the yoga community whom I have discussed this with range from offended to lacking comprehension and ask why I wish to re-invent the wheel. The answer is very simple. Many people could benefit from, but would never try it because of the quasi-mystical, new age, Hindu veneer that yoga is stigmatized by. Now, before we go any further, I must state categorically that if you want your yoga practice to be spiritual, laced with archaic philosophies and opaque Hindu concepts, I have no desire what-so-ever to change anything about your practice. Go for it! I strongly support and encourage EVERY type of yogic practice, and the freedom of the individual to practice anything they choose. With that said, I do strongly feel that yoga is in many ways held back by these aspects, and it is my goal to look at yogic practice with a more detached eye in order to understand, from a modern western scientific perspective, exactly what these practices are doing to the body.
I feel that through understanding yoga in light of modern knowledge we can come to an understanding of the practices of yoga as a tool in health maintenance. Yoga as a practice has survived for millennia and has proven to have value to millions of human beings. Like so many technologies in the past, this one has been cloaked in mythology, "spirituality" and religion, because it was first understood, practiced and taught by shamans, and later by priests. So too was writing, mathematics, architecture, art, and theater, but we have successfully de-mystified those practices and use them to their fullest potential in our everyday lives. To me, I see yoga as an aspect of human potentiality, with no deities or spirituality of any kind required. Thus, if this practice is an aspect of human potentiality, we can begin to strip off the layers of mythology and get down to the real meat of the matter.
So what are we really talking about when we discuss yoga as a tool for maintenance of our bodies and our health? There are three practices from the yoga tradition which are of direct benefit to the body and to health-maintenance: asana (postures/poses/movements), pranayama (breathwork) and meditation. Let us then take a minute to look at each of these practices in a bit more detail.
Asanas are much like stretching and calisthenics. However, there is a much broader range of movements than in typical calisthenics. Beyond stretching, which is a hallmark of yoga asana there is also balance and strengthening, as yoga uses the weight of the body for strength increase. A well-balanced asana practice can incorporate all three aspects, with segments designed to increase flexibility, balance and strength, or can be designed to focus solely on any one of these three areas or any combination that you may need to work with. Finally, yoga asanas can be a valuable therapeutic tool, and yogic practices can be designed to work with a large number of injuries, physical limitations and illnesses, helping to restore the body to health and homeostasis. Asana alone is a nice form of exercise, but when combined with breathwork, becomes something more than regular exercise techniques.
For most beginners, asana practice is the natural doorway to yogic practice. Asana can offer the average person increased flexibility, strength and balance, and a yoga program can be designed for anyone, regardless of their activity level. Whether you run marathons or sit at a desk all day or even sit on the couch all day and haven't gotten much exercise in years, a yoga program of asanas can be developed to begin to bring you to greater health and well being. It is important to look at asana practice as routine maintenance of your vehicle: the body.
To dispel some of the myths around yoga asana, you should be advised that you do not need to sit in lotus position, do head-stands or hand-stands, run through a fast vinyasa flow or do anything you are not capable of doing. In fact, you may never reach a time when you can do those poses, and then again you might and that all depends on your body, its limitations and state of health and your desire and focus. I do not judge anyone who is only using yoga asana as a moderate, low-impact form of body maintenance for health and wellness. In my way of teaching, there is no particular goal. I am not seeking to make you into anything. All I seek is to teach you tools to improve your health, maintain yourself and perhaps help you to patiently meet the goals you have for yourself. I am not seeking to turn you into "super yogi", unless that is your goal, and even then, I may council you to be patient and set shorter, more realistic goals. My goal is to teach you in a gentle manner, starting where you are. Thus, my way of teaching yoga asana is applicable to everyone and is Yoga For Normal People.
Pranayama is not only central to yoga, but is a central part of living a healthy life. While we all breathe all the time, most of us simply do not know how to breathe fully. The average person breathes in short, shallow "rabbit-breaths", only filling the upper lungs partially with each inhale, and not fully emptying the air from the lungs with the exhale. While this will keep you alive, it is not utilizing breath in the full manner in which you are designed to breathe. When your breath is full, it is deep. That is to say, we breathe all the way into the lower lungs, filling them fully. Conversely, each exhale is then long and slow and fully expels all the air from the lungs. Why is this important, you may ask?
The importance of the full, deep inhale and exhale is that it is utilizing the entire area of the lungs, fully oxygenates the body and with each exhale, pushes out the maximum level of toxins (carbon dioxide). This brings greater vitality to the body, greater clarity to the mind and by utilizing the entire lung capacity, keeps the lungs from becoming weak through lack of use and thus more prone to disease. In order to accomplish this full, deep breathe, we learn to expand our abdomen on each inhale and to pull our belly-button toward our spine on each exhale and through this process, we develop the core muscles of our body. As these muscles develop, we gain more core strength and the ability to breathe deeper and more fully with less effort.
Everyone needs to learn to breathe deeply and fully and everyone can learn to do this. Beyond the health benefits of full breaths, when this practice of full breathing is combined with the asanas (poses), that is when the practice becomes yoga. Poses and movements without a full, deep breath are just calisthenics. It is when the full breath is combined with the poses that you are actually doing yoga. Not only do those full breaths enhance the lungs and the body, but the full, deep breath increases the development of the core muscles of the body, which is a major focus in strengthening the body through yogic practice. When practicing the poses, it is as though the breath is actually precipitating and causing each movement. By combining the breath and the poses, yoga goes beyond other types of exercise to create many beneficial effects that other exercise systems simply do not offer. Breathwork is for everyone! Even if you can't perform any of the poses, you can learn to work with your breath to achieve a variety of beneficial effects and to enhance your health and wellness.
Meditation is the final leg of the triad of essential practices in Yoga For Normal People. With the poses, we are working with the physical body. With breathwork, we are working with the most essential function of our lives: breathing. With meditation, we are working with our minds, which not only creates our moods, but also our perception of the world around us.
There are many forms of meditation, and each focuses on different aspects of our mind. The common denominator of them all though is that we are working with our mind, learning to use it more fully and to manipulate our moods and perception through mental discipline and expansion. Some will say that meditation has metaphysical applications as well, and they may well be correct, but I would choose to say that meditation is working with the quantum aspects of our perceptual functions.
For the beginner to yoga, the most basic aspect of meditation is learning to be focused while doing the poses and to integrate that focus through the combination of the poses with breathing. In this way, one does not need to have a dedicated sitting meditation practice, though that may come later as a result of the mental gains (meditation) that one makes in their practice of poses and breathing. So, to begin with for normal people, we simply learn to be present as we practice the poses, not thinking about this or that from the rest of our day (or our lives), and to be aware of and keep the breath flowing while we are consciously practicing the poses. In this way, the triad is complete, and the poses, breath and mental focus come together to make Yoga.
With Yoga For Normal People, I am seeking to make yoga accessible to you, to everyone, to regular, average, normal people. By focusing on the physical aspect of the poses, in conjunction with training the mind to be aware of our physical self in the poses and our breathing while performing the poses, we develop the best of what yoga has to offer. This requires no changes in belief or any other aspects of your life that you value and do not wish to change. I am not teaching a belief system or philosophy. I teach a system of body maintenance that is a tool for heath, well-being and care of the one thing you really have in this world: your physical vehicle, the body.
