Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

emphasize these qualities until they guide your practice.
    Intuitive Flow is more
feeling
guided than it is
thinking
guided—it does not use a lot of logic. For example, the poses and movements may not follow the usual principles of alignment and may not necessarily be balanced on each side. When you truly follow the body’s inner guidance system, you cannot really predict how the movements will flow. They may not repeat on the other side of the body or they may be completely different by the time the flow gets to that side. That means that you cannot really do this form incorrectly. You create and move with the flow that the body’s inner guidance system gives to your practice. The common design principle that form follows function can be useful here. The form of the posture is secondary to the functionality you want tocreate with the asana. Your focus is on the feelings and effects of the pose instead of the form and alignment of the pose. This form of practice has led to the discovery or birth of many poses.
    To practice Intuitive Flow, start with inner quiet, emptiness, and inner attunement. Then let the needs and messages of the body unfold your practice. Usually this form is done slowly, with closed eyes, but even here, let the flow decide. You can get the process going by moving slowly, feeling any tight areas, and then letting the yawn-or stretch-like feeling arise and then guide the movements. Develop what I call a
healing feeling
, then focus on it, and follow where it leads. With practice, your ability to accomplish this will improve, and the practice will get better and more effective as you refine the process. Intermediate students who have a good feel for the asanas and who are in touch with inner energy flows will have the best results with this yoga form. It comes quite naturally. I use this form regularly and have taught it to many students who quickly find great value and wonderful results in healing, balance, and well-being.
    One morning after an Intuitive Flow session, I took some notes that can be used as an example to understand the technique and help develop this type of practice. Here is what one morning flow was like for me: I started sitting cross-legged on the floor and noticed tightness in my back and shoulders. I clasped my hands and stretched them overhead. After holding the extension for awhile, energy began to flow through my arms and shoulders, but my back was still tight. I slowly leaned and curved my body to the left, held it, and then leaned to the right. Then I began to feel my body beginning to round and twist to one side and my arms followed until I was sitting in a somewhat rounded twist that released all the tension in my back. In a normal practice or class I would correct the alignment of this pose, but in this moment it was the perfect movement to get a release. Holding the position for awhile, I began to tune into some of the subtleties of the twist and the internal levers I was using. I pressed my knee into the ground, rounded myspine into the twist to increase the leverage along with the feeling of well-being and tension release. I continued to experiment with adjusting the pose to increase the energy flow and feeling of release, and ultimately discovered a new variation of the sitting twist in the process. After twisting, my legs seemed to want to extend into a long forward bend. I went into a Forward Fold and held it dynamically, but soon realized the “long” part of the urge was in my mind because my body seemed to want to move. I sat up and did a sitting twist with legs extended. This led to a Lunge pose and then into forward splits on one side. I ended up doing a sequence of movements on the left, followed by a similar but differing process on the right. So far I had been practicing about twenty minutes and I felt energized with a release of all the tensions I had started with. The process continued for another half hour and included some dynamic movements and long holding of certain positions.
    Intuitive Flow incorporates and uses, but is also free from, tradition. If you are limited by a specific idea or definition of yoga, or a certain manner of practice and posture, creative discovery and new possibility are limited. Intuitive Flow is about listening your way into the practice instead of thinking your way in.

Structural Integrity and Structural Archetypes
    Developing an understanding of the concept of
structural integrity
will help guide your practice and