Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

adjustment within this stability. This is another form of movement in stillness and stillness in movement. Maintaining balance and equilibrium is one of the precious goals in yoga. Our busy, modern lives cause many of us to seek to reestablish wholeness through exercise, right eating, and inner work. It is all too easy to overfill our days with constant input and activity—all too rarely taking the time to find balance present in the world around us. Both ancient and modern wisdom point out that nature is a dynamic state of balance. Where canwe better learn about balance and harmony than from close communion and connection with nature? Sometimes it takes going into the balance of nature to find the nature of balance.

Advancing in Yoga
    The insights and principles outlined here are offered to assist you in refining your ability to see and listen inwardly and outwardly, on deeper and subtler levels, as you progress in your yogic journey. This awareness is more important than merely attaining more and more exotic postures. Think of your yoga practice as learning, gathering, and developing the tools for a lifetime practice of self-therapy, self-healing, and keeping your body in balance—remembering that balance is not a fixed place at which you arrive, but a constant adjustment process to the circumstances of each moment.
    Advancing in yoga is more related to refining than to attaining. If you want to know if you are advancing in yoga, ask yourself these questions: Am I gaining greater understanding of my body? Am I learning how to heal myself? Am I learning subtler and different ways of using the poses and how each asana affects the body to produce different results? Am I gaining an understanding of the energy fields in the body and how these energies flow? Am I beginning to get some control of my own autonomic nervous system and some of the unconscious processes of the body? Am I less rigid in my beliefs and less fixed in particular systems and structures? Am I alive and awake in my practice, constantly questioning and willing to vacate my position—figuratively and actually? Am I questioning, not only of others but of myself? Is my mind becoming more open, compassionate, more peaceful? Growing in these perceptions and capacities provides the necessary ingredients for the evolutionary process of alchemical transformation into radiant health, high consciousness, and wisdom.



Y oga incorporates a marvelous body of knowledge, practices, and techniques. For any individual, some of these practices can be incredibly effective, others must be undertaken with great care, and still others should perhaps be cast aside. A particular asana or movement that benefits one person greatly may or may not be as suited for another. The task in practicing yoga is to learn various forms and modes of the practice and then apply them effectively and sensitively for ourselves in order to keep our psychophysical-spiritual organism operating at the best levels for our particular body type, the activities we engage in, and the lifestyle we love. That relationship between the individual and lifestyle changes and evolves through the different cycles, phases, and stages of life, through the different seasons of the year, and even through the activities of each day. We need to relearn to dance life’s dance with wholeness, wellness, clarity, insight, and love—growing our practice so that it adds more dimensions and levels of attunement, awareness, and understanding to life. One of the meanings of being
multidimensional
is learning to see and understand the appropriate uses of the many different dimensions of all things.

Flow Yoga
    Flow yoga, also called
Vinyasa Flow
, has become one of the most popular forms of Hatha practice in the world today, so it is important to examine some of the meanings and implications of flow. When we think of
flow
, the first thing that comes to mind is the flowing quality of water. Most people tend to think of flow in terms of adjusting and being pliable and flexible with circumstances and to the moment, like water adjusting as it goes down a steep canyon. But less immediately obvious is the fact that water needs something to flow through or upon. You cannot have the flow of liquid without the firm, supportive structure through which it flows. The interaction between the hardness of structure and the fluidity of liquid creates flow. Inherent in flow, and the lessons we may glean from it, are also the lessons of