Yoga wonders

Since I started teaching, I try to share my knowledge in a way that would allow participants, after each session with me, to stay calm and confident that they can practice simple asanas at home and with no help. Yoga begins to work in our lives when we make it an easily accessible, everyday practice. Really, even 10-15 minutes of yoga practice a day and twice as much of meditation can do wonders. I know from experience.

• Goodbye, backache.
• Goodbye, insomnia.
• Goodbye, chronic fatigue.
• Hello, better sleep.
• Hello, better sex.
• Hello, energy to work and play.
• Hello, nicer figure.
• Hello, peace in the face of stress.
• Hello, patience for people and events.
• Hello, better relationships with people.
• Hello, smile.

 

The yogis, who taught me in Asia, emphasize at every turn that whenever it gets difficult, it is necessary to lighten the face up. Exactly at that moment. Girls and women who travel with me and meet my masters during yoga classes, start their adventure very serious, sometimes even tense. After two sessions their faces relax, after three – joyful sparks appear in their eyes. During the practice you can hear the word "smile!" dozens of times. Participants who had the opportunity to practice in Poland before, noticed that it was new to them. It turns out that while they get more and more advanced in yogic contortions, they feel like beginners when it comes to experiencing the joy of practice, and joy in general. Deep breathing with a smile on their faces, while their bodies undergo physical strain, turns out for many of them to be the key to a completely new door inside their inner world. Behind them is a space where happiness is our personal decision: it’s hard, but I am smiling because I want to! It may happen that a simple discovery of this basic yoga technique brings out deep emotions or even tears.

 

 

Many people think that yoga is difficult and requires extreme flexibility of the body. Nothing more wrong. Physical exercise is just one of its components. Not the most important. Most important is our spirit and positive attitude. Right after that – the breath that keeps us here and now – still no one is planning to breathe, nor refers to it! So when you hear that damn and so difficult to comprehend by the Western Man sentence "be here and now" – that’s exactly what it is. Inhale–exhale. Here–now. That’s why it’s the breath that we focus on during meditation and relaxation. Give yourself 2-3 minutes a day for deep breathing in silence, with relaxed muscles, with a smile on your face, without picking up any of the swirling thoughts in your head – and here you are practicing yoga already! The breath makes us deliver valuable energy and oxygen to our bodies, the smile "pulls" your entire mood up. Westerners are not particularly humble, so in such occasions they tend to say: "But it's so hard for me right now! Why should I be grinning?" or "Why should I be happy as a clam at high water?". Just because. Just like that. When you give up your prejudices and for one moment you focus only on breathing and smiling – your blood pressure will drop and your mind may get filled with wiser thoughts, less triggered by emotions. Me and all my teachers put together guarantee you that. And they are wise old yogis. They know what they’re saying.

 

When I talk about my yoga adventure in Poland, many people ask me what kind of yoga I practice. The same questions are asked by the participants of my workshops. I also was asking my masters that question at the beginning of my path. And they could not marvel at the fact that we, white people from the West, have such big need for labels and directions. "Yoga is yoga!". There are thousands, perhaps even millions, of asanas, body positions that can be practiced. It’s impossible to practice them all in one lifetime. The most charismatic and inventive teachers have created their own schools and developed perfection within them. You can sign up for any course and wrap your legs around your waist, but if you don’t put smile, fun and goodness for your body into this – it will be only exercising. It's like with love. We all know very well what’s the difference between sex for sport and sex with mutual affection. It’s simply incomparable. Yoga is an act of love for oneself. It also gives us independence as it keeps the body and the mind in good shape. Moreover, it builds the sense of power in the body. And when there is power – the world is your oyster.

 

Yoga, if we don’t limit it to asanas only, is a spiritual and ethicalmoral practice. Its main rules are so-called Yamas, regulating our relations with our surroundings:

• Ahiṃsā (nonviolence),
• Satya (truthfulness),
• Asteya (non-stealing),
• Brahmacharya (chastity),
• Aparigraha (non-avarice, non-possessiveness),

 

and Niyamas, relating to our relationship with ourselves, with our reactions and emotions:

• Śauca (purity),
• Santoṣa (contentment),
• Tapas (austerity),
• Svādhyāya (study of self),
• Īśvarapraṇidhāna (attunement to the supreme consciousness).

 

 

• I am a meditating agnostic who loves to sing mantras and meditate. In yoga I see inclusive, full of openness and tolerance, path of development.
• I do not have the qualifications to teach pregnant women, children, and seniors.