Is there a mirror in the Yoga classroom you often go to? Maybe in some yoga classes, you will hear the teacher say, “look at you in the mirror, are you doing right!” “Go home and practice asana in front of the mirror.” I believe that in ancient times, guru people must have no mirror when practicing yoga in the cave.
But I don’t know when the mirror and yoga mat have become the standard configuration of the Yoga classroom.
But do we really need to look in the mirror when we practice? What would you like to see in the mirror? The answer of most students is to observe whether their posture is correct.
At present, 99% of yoga classes are teaching asana, but asana is only the process of yoga, not the result of yoga.
Pursuing the perfection of asana appearance will only cause students’ anxiety and anxiety.
Are you doing asana with your “body” or with your “eyes”? Although nowadays, when we talk about the word “Yoga”, we often refer to yoga asana (asana in the eight parts of yoga), asana is not the goal and focus of yoga practice at all, but just a tool and path.
The sage Patanjali’s Classic Yoga Sutra has never mentioned that the asana should be perfect.
The only point is “comfortable and stable” (Yoga Sutra jiesong 2.46 “shirasukhamasanam”).
If you look at the mirror and do the pose, it means that you are doing the pose with “eyes”, not with “body”, not with conscious concentration and awareness.
When we blindly pay attention to our projection in the mirror, we can’t do the practice of expressing our hearts and awareness in our ideals.
The most powerful part of yoga asana practice is not the appearance Association of asana, but the subtle energy flowing in the body.
If an practitioner looks at his posture with his eyes and judges whether he is doing well with his brain, it will become that his brain is doing intellectual homework, not his body is practicing.
At the moment, all you care about is “am I doing right?” your brain is thinking about all kinds of sequences and details, your eyes are busy looking for them, and your body is just following them like a sleepwalk, but your energy has already dispersed and I don’t know where it is.
Mirrors can actually create a visual competitive atmosphere.
Hillarygibson once said on yogajournal: for me, yoga has become a place to shield all competitive consciousness.
I use yoga practice to strengthen my body and calm my heart.
I give myself a short time to forget the ultimate goals I have been pursuing.
For an hour, my current action was not to achieve my goal.
But when I walked into the studio around the mirror, I immediately felt a sense of physical and mental limitations, and I could no longer have the ideal of free practice.
As we said above, yoga is not a performance, a competition, and there is no need to grade and compare.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, you will automatically apply a perfect standard form to score yourself, whether this standard is the teaching of a master of a certain school or conforms to the sequence principle of modern anatomy.
When facing a mirror wall, you may inevitably look at the mirror.
You are comparing and competing with yourself.
These visual stimuli will make you lose your true judgment.
In fact, everyone is unique and unique in anatomy, and everyone is a wonderful flower.
There are no two identical bodies.
Everyone is a special version of the creator, with strengths and weaknesses different from others, and joints and structures different from anyone.
Based on this, the perfect asana standard is often not suitable for the vast majority of practitioners, because most practitioners in yoga classrooms lack sufficient muscle strength and joint flexibility, and their bone structure and muscle system have great restrictions on the asana practice of the body.
The perfection of asana appearance does not mean the perfection of yoga practice.
The real yoga asana practice is the effort of the practitioner to relax on his own body level ability, just like what Patanjali said about comfort and stability.
This perfection is reflected in relaxed and deep breathing, and the coordination of breathing and movement leads the free flow of body energy, so that your brain can calm into a state of meditation and concentration- Recommendation – Yoga stop breathing meditation reading life yoga..
