Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

injury. Don’t confuse stretching with warming up. A warm-up is one of the basic stages of any standard physical workout, yet many yoga students do not include it. Exactly what it sounds like, a warm-up is an activity to get the body warm and soft, with increased circulation. Move carefully into postures while you are cold. Avoid going to your normal maximum until the body complies easily. Slowly increase your movements as the muscles become warm and pliable. I generally do not recommend resting between poses either, except in instances where a short rest is needed after an intense pose or in specific cases such as hypertension, illness, or old age. Many poses may be used to warm up, but Sun Salutations or a series of standing positions are often the best. Ease into them, staying well short of your maximum edges or going only to your minimum edge—where you firstfeel stiffness or resistance. With each successive repetition, with each breath, you will slowly and effortlessly move deeper and more fully into the posture. Finally, make sure you stay warm during the practice until you begin the cool-down phase. You will have more energy, increased benefits, and greater enjoyment.
    Physically generated heat can also purify and detoxify our bodies. The skin is the largest organ of elimination. When we get hot during practice, the increased circulation filters more blood through our organs and the increased heat also allows detoxifying through sweating. These conditions allow a sort of burning, washing, and breathing out of toxins. This detoxification occurs whether or not we physically sweat, but there is a unique type of high and feeling of release of tension after a workout in which we break a sweat. Some students hold onto the erroneous concept that we should not work hard or sweat in yoga. They might confuse working the body with straining it. “Never strain,” they say. This is true, but strain means to overexert or go beyond your limits. Pain, shaking, or too much “efforting” evidences straining. Don’t confuse the principle of not straining with not working. We can work very hard and still not strain.
    Some believe that sweating or working hard may be appropriate for gymnastics or calisthenics but not for yoga. This is a foolish notion. Conversely, some teachers assert that you must work hard, sweat, and generate lots of internal heat in every session or you are not practicing properly. “No pain, no gain,” they may say. This approach, while energizing and invigorating, can also lead to imbalances. Practitioners who work with too much heat can develop a strained look about them. They sometimes have bags or circles under their eyes or look gaunt from the stress of too much heat. Nature does not behave in this single-minded way. Everything in nature moves in cycles, always balancing itself—inner to outer to inner, heating to cooling and then to heating, winter into spring, and on into summer into fall. The extremes of sweating all the time or of never working hard enough to sweat both miss thesubtlety of learning to work with the balance of hot and cold in the organism. Either principle, hot or cold, can be overemphasized and brought out of balance. Each of the various ways to practice yoga has its appropriate place and time.
    Once on a trip deep into the Himalayas, I finally caught up with a renowned magical yogi I had heard about for years. He had enormous charisma and seemed to have the power to know people from the inside. He was staying at a temple, and being a fire yogi, he sat by the sacred fire surrounded by many exotic
sadhus
, or renunciate wanderers. They would sing and chant beautiful ancient texts together for hours a day, making wonderful music and creating an extraordinary sight. I sat for a day and a half just observing the scene, and he never once looked at or seemed to notice me in the crowd. Finally, I decided I was ready to go up and meet him. At that exact moment he swung around in his chair, looked right at me, smiled mischievously, and waved me toward him. I went up, said “Namaste,” and we exchanged some greetings. He asked me what I did in America. I hesitated, anticipating his response in the midst of this extraordinary gathering of fakirs and yogis. But I stuck my neck out and said I was a yoga teacher. He gave me another bizarre look and said, “Okay, go give a yoga class to those men over there!” He pointed to a circle of the glorious and frightening men. They were