The Art of Vinyasa: Awakening Body and Mind through the Practice of Ashtanga Yoga

Imagining our own structure as an overlay to clear images of anatomy, while focusing on feelings and sensations as they arise, provides an embodied, broad-spectrum experience of the subtle body.

The “work” we must do is to practice with dedication, consistency, and an open mind.

exhale. It sounds almost as if you were whispering the word ah with your lips closed. As we know, whispering can be intimate. When you’re close to someone, you don’t shout, and the ujjāyī breath has that same intimate quality, as if you were whispering to your beloved.

Through the integration of Prāṇa and citta, intelligent movement effortlessly manifests within this maze of conditions that arise, and we are slowly freed from preconditioned patterns that keep us both mentally and physically entangled.

But especially when you are off-kilter, you must practice carefully and with a sense of surrender, of not knowing, and of starting over again and again. When approached in this way, the practice will often smooth out imbalances, especially if you practice “all day every day.”

Feeling the pouring of the apāna into the prāṇa and the prāṇa into the apāna is contemplative, subtle, and wonderful. This is prāṇāyāma practice; the whole thing is right there.

When the mind is dominated by extreme mental or emotional imbalance, or if there are subtle levels of physical tension and resistance within the body, it is virtually impossible to truly surrender to the entirety of what is occurring and to fully examine (and possibly embrace) an opposing perspective.

Clarity or conscious awareness is the fallout—the residue—from practicing yoga in this way, as an art rather than as a means of attaining this thing or that.

Prāṇa links what you’re thinking and perceiving into its background. As embodied beings, all that we experience is processed through Prāṇa (breath) and citta (mind).