Hi! It's beetee here. Thanks for reading my Yoga Quick Dive #1!
Yoga Quick Dive is a series of weekly newsletters that should take no more than 5 minutes of your reading time. Let's keep things simple. Use these 5 minutes to dive quickly into 3 things: Body, Mind and Life.
This week's quick dive: Tadasana Mountain Pose, the meaning of Hatha and a simple trick to make people talk.
Yoga Pose of the Week - Tadasana Mountain Pose
Tadasana is by far the most foundational pose in yoga. It carries the full neutral body from top to toes - most importantly, neutral hips and neutral spine.
Tadasana is the home-base pose you'd come back to after standing movements, to realign your joints and soft tissues and to easily reconnect with your breath. During my yoga teacher training, my teacher spent an entire afternoon dissecting its physical, energetic and subtle structures.
Main benefit? Opportunity to rest and feel aware! Also, tadasana is the reference point for you to learn to improve your posture.
How to flow? Any flow could easily incorporate this pose. Use tadasana as the starting point and finish line for your sun salutation flows.
The picture to the right is a page from the book The Science of Yoga by Ann Swanson, if you like to have more anatomical details on the pose.
The Mind section will introduce to you a variety of yoga philosophical concepts, as well as breathing and meditation themes.
What is the meaning of Hatha?
You always go to that yoga class called Hatha Yoga. But what is Hatha? What does it mean?
Ha means Sun, the heating, rising, expanding, active energy. Tha means Moon, the cooling, descending, shrinking, passive energy. Together, Hatha means the yoga through which the energies are united and balanced.
Hatha Yoga is the most traditional type of yoga you can find, where we hold each pose for 5 to 8 breaths. According to traditional Indian yogic philosophy, the purpose of Hatha yoga is to bring about a balanced flow of prana in ida and pingala nadis, the two opposite forces flowing within each of us. For them to be balanced, the body must be purified by the shatkarmas, asanas, pranayamas, mudras and bandhas. I know, you are lost reading all these terms! The loosely equivalent modern word is detox, if you will ;) I will write about them in subsequence Yoga Quick Dive editions, so stay tuned!
Anything above the Earth and below the Sun is Life. Hopefully something useful to you, or at least something that will bring a smile to your face 😊
How to get people to talk?
Do you remember last time you finished a great presentation and received a funeral silence from the audience? No questions, thanks. Hmmm. Was I boring? Confusing? Or maybe I explained everything so well that there are no questions needed. Can't be!
A high school math teacher in Louisiana (US), Andrea Sasser, has figured it out. She says: "Ask me two questions." This literally means, we are not getting out of here until two questions are voiced!! Andrea learnt this trick herself from a math camp and tweeted about it. She went viral overnight with more than 54,000 retweets. Plus, one question could very possibly leads to another, and a third, and a fourth, and so on. Let me know if you try this and how it goes for you!
Thanks for reading! But don't leave just yet!
Ask me TWO questions or leave me TWO comments below. I'd love to hear from you.
Until then, take a deep breath and keep your worries away!
Love,
beetee
Yoga Quick Dive is a series of weekly newsletters that should take no more than 5 minutes of your reading time. Let's deep dive quickly into 3 topics: Body, Mind and Life.
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