Blog

Yoga for beginner –

Yoga is not just asana or breathing practice. It is to live life being more conscious and aware. Asana and pranayama helps to relax our body and calm our mind. Through the practice of meditation, we trying to find the inner peace. This brings more joy and peacefulness in our life. So, we can start practice with gentle warm up, followed by asana, relaxation, breathing technique and meditation.

Common Mistakes Beginners Make in Asana and How to Avoid Them –

Asana is not a form of physical exercise. Neither is it just stretching. Patanjali yoga sutra defines asana as a practice of stillness and joyfulness. When we practice yoga postures, we should also practice consciousness and joyfulness. Only then we can get the actual benefit of asana.

Here are some of the guidelines for the beginner which can be followed in order to avoid mistakes during the practice of asana –

1. Breathe awareness– While practicing asana practitioner should be aware of breathing. Each movement of practice should be synchronized with breathing. Generally, when you expand the chest or open the front body, you should inhale, and when you contract or fold and bend you should exhale.
2. Warm up and relaxation – It is good to first warm up the body before practicing asana. This helps to perform asana with more ease. It also prepares body and prevents any injuries. Asana should be followed by relaxation to have deeper benefit.
3. Counter pose – While practicing asana it is important to do the counter pose to keep balance in practice. With back bending practices, forward bend also should be practiced. When we practice on the right side, we should also practice on the left side.
4. Sequence of practice – In Hatha Yoga text, it is recommended to practice shatkarma, the internal cleansing technique, to cleanse our body first. Then asana should be practice followed by pranayama and meditation. The whole sequence might take 2 hours of time. When there is less time availability, we can also keep it short to 20 min or so on.
5. Alignment – If you are a beginner, it is always good to have a proper guidance of experienced teacher. The teacher will help you to do the proper alignment during the practice. Just by practicing with the support of online videos and materials, there could be chances of doing practice in a wrong way.
6. Uses of props – Props like yoga brick, belt helps to do postures more correctly. So, we can use different types of props at the beginning.
7. Starting with basic postures – Only after mastering in basic yoga posture, one should go for advance postures. As it is a spiritual practice, one should have patience and continuity in practice to achieve success in practice.
8. Time of practice – It is good to practice yoga at the Brahmamuhurta that is the time early morning before or around the sunrise time, or at the evening during the sunset time.
9. Place for practice – Yoga can be practice in an open place or a well-ventilated room also. Be it outdoor or indoor, we should not practice in a windy or cold or extremely hot temperature. We should make sure that the place is safe and suitable for practicing yoga.
10. Empty stomach – Always practice yoga in an empty stomach. At least two to four hours of gap should be there between the meal and practice time. So, it is best to practice early morning, after clearing the bowel.
11. Limitation– For therapeutic health, we should also observe the benefit and limitation of asana in order to avoid complications and benefit more.
12. Consistency – We start yoga with great enthusiasm. The difficult thing is to keep that up every time. Due to time and circumstances, we tend to skip yoga and it becomes irregular. Regularity is important to for achieving success in anything. Either it be six days a week or two days, consistency is important in yoga practice also.

Note – The important factor while practicing yoga is a proper guidance. Otherwise we might get confused and lost sometime during the practices. Today, we can find a lot of information online about yoga and practices. But the proper guidance can give you the direction to the right path. So, it is good to start yoga by learning with an experienced and well knowledge teacher.