Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

body and your conscious awareness from all parts of the body. This total withdrawal happens naturally in sleep, of course, but in Savasana it is a cultivated ability that, once learned, permits you to recharge and renew your energetic and physical bodies in a very short period of time.
Mental Energy
    Understanding the dance of energy includes becoming sensitive and aware of how certain patterns of thought, feeling, and mental energy can lift you up or pull you down, lowering your life force into weakness, lethargy, and even illness. By seeing downward tendencies when they rise in predominance in yourself, you can learn to generate the inner positive thought force to transform them into upward moving energy. This transformation must be in balance, allowing natural rhythms of relaxation, passivity, and inactivity to flow through their normal cycles in daily life. One simple measure of upward or downward moving psychological energy is the smile and frown. Smiles, of course, raise our energy and vibration. We could all learn to use the benefits of smiling more often.

Aligning and Adjusting Asanas from Within and Without
    Learning how to align postures properly for your particular body, age, and stage of development is another example of learning to balance internal and external information systems. By external information, I refer to the way asanas are shown in books, by teachers, in photographs, and in classes. These are not always just idealized postures but often represent what a particular school, lineage, or teacher feels is the correct way to do specific asanas. Of course, there are differing,sometimes opposing, opinions among various lineages and schools. Internal information refers to the immediate feedback of information and effects that a pose gives you during your own practice. Both external and internal information should play important roles in guiding your practice.
    As we have discussed, Hatha yoga developed from inspiration, experimentation, watching animals, and the discovery of structural, archetypal movements inherent in the body. All these sources have formed a body of information and tradition that we now draw from in our study of yoga. Whether or not one puts great faith in tradition, we have seen that there is no one yoga approach and that opinions differ about even the most basic alignments of particular asanas. How, then, is one to find one’s way?
    An essential part of learning how to find the right asanas, practices, and alignments is learning to listen to the effects—hear the feedback from your body, and develop your awareness of how the postures affect you in the moment and over time. This development of internal awareness and attunement is balanced and enhanced by external knowledge and information. Some people try to delineate which postures are appropriate for different body types, constitutions, times of year, for males, females, certain age groups, and so on. While this information may be useful, theoretically, and possibly accurate, it must be balanced by developing the ability to respond internally to your actual practice with all your capacities and all your senses. Using both internal and external information systems, you can circumvent practicing solely by technique and belief and, instead, learn and develop from your own direct experience and perception. The internal and external offer two differing vantage points that balance and guide each other. Sometimes holding a posture in a particular form can feel good, but a book or teacher might show you that you are not holding the pose in a beneficial way. You may have become accustomed to an improperly aligned position and it began to feel good. External feedback from another person, oreven a mirror, can help improve your pose and correct your inner guidance system. Similarly, holding a beneficial alignment sometimes doesn’t feel as good as the incorrect alignment until the body is brought into balance. Either internal or external information is sometimes incorrect, but using and developing awareness of how both perspectives balance each other will guide your practice.
    A posture I use to exemplify this is the Extended Warrior pose,
Parsvakonasana
. You will be able to follow the theory given here even if you are not familiar with this posture. The Extended Warrior is the standing pose done in a single plane with the back leg kept straight, the front shin at a right angle to the floor, and torso extended out over the front leg,