The Freedom of Limits

I have been teaching a half-hour yoga class at work for about 4 months.  It's a non-traditional class, as yoga goes, because we have it in a conference room, in our work clothes, with no mats or traditional props.  As a result, the class doesn't involve many traditional yoga poses - no downward facing dogs, no triangle poses, no cobras or planks, no seated twists or arm balances.

The limits imposed by the format have forced me to go deeper into the nuances of movement from a narrower range of positions.  I have stolen every standing pose variation from every yoga class I've taken, and made up a few myself.  The challenge of keeping the class fresh within the limits I have accepted for it has been a motivation for creativity and a catalyst for deeper exploration, as I wring more value out of the most basic of positions and movements.

The class has also given me the chance to develop, in my own way, some of the things that I've enjoyed the most from my teachers.  One of these is the way that Francesca Cervero, in her Aligned Vinyasa classes, teaches a sequence of movements connected to the breath and then takes the class through it repeatedly, increasing the intensity at just the right pace as we internalize the movements.

This morning, after getting up and feeding the cats, I felt like moving a bit, and came up with a simple flow that opened the shoulders.  Three breaths in all, with garudasana (eagle) arms in the center of the sequence.  I built today's class around that, with the idea of using Francesca's approach.

From the beginning of the class, we established a cadence of breathing - in for 3 counts and out for 3, that I carried throughout.  Then, after some preliminaries, I had them do eagle arms - which most were familiar with - to get that established in their bodies since it was the heart of the simple sequence.

I demoed the sequence before talking them through it slowly, pausing in a couple of places for an additional cycle of breath before moving on.  Next we moved through it with no pauses, moving with each inhale and exhale.

At that point I had the sense that they had it - (and one of the nice things about the format is that the class is arrayed around the walls of a conference room, so we can all see each other) - so I told them that we were going to move through the flow again, keeping the cadence of movement and breathing, without any cueing from me.

We moved through the sequence together in silence, moving and breathing together, and it was so beautiful that as we finished I said "Let's do it one more time," and so we did, and it was even more sublime.

While sometimes I wish I could fall back on more of the traditional asana repertoire, this experience confirms for me that simplicity can be an asset, and that limitations can be the foundation of freedom.