Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

Extend your arms out to the side and raise them slowly over your head while resisting with opposing muscles in the arms and side body—this is an isotonic movement flow. Graceful flowing movement often requires working with internally created resistance. Isotonic pressure generates different levels of intensity with your own internal muscular resistance. Work with and against your own muscular forces to build strength, intensity, and core stability.
    When you begin using and experimenting with levers and internal forces, your body will communicate with you and guide you from within. Everyone has experienced this to some degree. When you feel tightnessor blocked energy, you often instinctively start moving opposing muscles to gain leverage, responding to inner signals until the block or pinch is released. I’m sure you can remember a time when your neck or shoulders were tight or locked, and you instinctively tightened your neck and dropped your head and shoulders while creating an internal resistance to work against to create opening. Or you clasped your hands together and pushed and pulled to create a needed effect guided from within until you released the energy and tension. Learning to feel and manipulate internal nerves, joints, and musculoskeletal dynamic tensions and relationships is not something that can easily be taught, but realizing that this is possible will direct your attention and makes it more easily achieved. You are already doing this to some extent and you can expand and build upon this process in your yoga practice. You can become proficient at internal skeletal and nerve adjustment and self-healing.
    You can also learn to use levers by experimenting with different pressures and resistances in postures. In different asanas try pressing, lifting, extending, tensing, and relaxing different body parts in different combinations. For example, come only halfway into your usual seated Forward Fold. Then try pressing the legs and back of the knees into the floor, using that press to help lift the chest. Grab your ankles with the hands and push with the feet while pulling with the hands to further open the spine. At the same time you can create more internal leverage and opening by dropping the chin and lifting the back of the head and neck. Taken together, all of these should feel good and create a lengthening and release of tightness along the spinal column. Try this right now, get the feel for this process, and connect with your internal guidance system. There are literally hundreds of ways to use levers and internal resistances. As you progress, learning to manipulate your muscles and joints with internal leverages and torques is essential to gaining deeper levels of efficacy in yoga practice. Once again, your own body will teach you many ways to use these internal dynamics when you simply begin to watch and experiment.

The Nature of Balance
    There is an ancient, often quoted, definition of yoga:
Samatvam yoga uchyate
, or “Yoga is balance.” Many students of yoga seek to find physical, mental, and spiritual harmony and balance in their lives. But it is important to see that balance is not a static place to reach; it is a constantly moving equilibrium of relationships. This insight not only applies to asana practice but to all areas of life. Our own personal balance will not be found in systematized or formulated modes of living and being, but in developing a sensitive awareness that responds and adjusts to the shifting moment. We can learn and experience the dynamic nature of balance in any balancing posture. Try a pose such as the Tree, in which you balance on one foot. No matter how still and statue-like you become, you will notice that you are continually adjusting and reacting in the moment. We must sensitively listen, feel, and respond. Harmony, in the same way, implies attuning, listening within and without, mutual interaction, and working in concert with oneself and others.
    Instead of seeking to attain balance, we are better directed to learn the art of balancing. Balancing involves correcting errors and then in turn correcting any overcorrection of error. When you start moving or falling too far in one direction, in asana or in life, exert a bit to the other pole. Refining this ability, you become more stable, and the movements and adjustments become more subtle. To an external observer you may appear to be still or “in balance,” but from the inside you see there is continual