Anusara Yoga or Alignment Based Yoga
Time to time I have to explain what do I teach. Anusara Yoga is still not very well known here in Austria, although it is well known in Germany and the USA.
What I teach is a class based in Anusara Yoga plus a few functional movement ideas that I had been learning in the last 6 years,that spice our classes, bringing a better understanding to how our bodies work.
I get moved by the Biomechanics behind Anusara, that beautiful way to make your body to work as it was designed to do. So I will give you a few instructions to make you feel more at ease, and you will probably hear me saying “if you feel pain, let me know” because if you are in pain, we can find a way for you to do the pose without pain or maybe just skip it, depending on your body.
You will probably also hear me say “It depends” cause one cue that works for one person, might not work for you, so in my classes we try together to find what suits you better.
It might be that in my classes we do not “do” a big number of poses, but we will repeat one or two poses for a better understanding or to try a new technique. I do show you the form and the different techniques in a few poses, but you will not see me performing all the poses in front of you, because my attention is on you, not on myself. I want to see you feel each pose as a new experience, making it different. Each action and muscular activation feel different.
I want to focus awareness in ways that effectively spotlights further detail and open up your awareness and connection with your own body in a very unique way. Making Yoga the path to become more conscious, more present, and more skillful on more levels of our being.
As such, I’m going to prepare my sequence to serve those goals. Each pose in the sequence is there for specific reasons, and as you had probably notice I can not teach the same class twice, because I do teach depending of whom come to class. As a practitioner and a teacher, I am very mindful that I do not reduce the range of what I do or teach, so I do practice Backbends, even though those poses are the ones that I do not enjoy as much. And I do change the cues, and I do teach different techniques or different patterns each time.
Plus, I do not like automatics sentences in my verbal cues, each thing I say needs to be meant, each word needs to be conscious, each word needs to be absorbed. That is one of the main reasons I like to teach my small classes (10 people tops) so I get to know you and get to know what works better for you. I do not teach on pilot mode, and sometimes I might stop the whole class because I might feel someone is not following what I am saying, and that’s why a simply Utkatasana pose becomes “Public Toilet” pose, because Utkatasana might look more familiar to you if I call it the way you bend when you go to a public toilet 😉
I will also use and teach you to use different props, including the wall. To help you to find the right place where you can experience the magic growing inside, making you many times recognize the amazing and wonderful work our brain does to keep our bodies moving. And as you might know from taking an Anusara class, and experiencing the wonderful philosophy behind, we can recognizing the power of rooting into the dark to raise up gloriously, or as I often describe it, learning how to surf the waves of life, learning how to root ourselves and enjoy the ride of this roller coaster that our lives are!
To find more about Anusara Yoga, please click here