How to start Yoga practice

Here we get into an all time relevant question which is how to start yoga practice. Getting started with yoga might seem simple – unroll your mat and follow along with poses from a book, videos, or a teacher. However, practicing yoga consistently requires mental preparation and specific steps before diving into the poses.

It is thus essential to prepare yourself mentally to adopt yoga in your life.

With the resurgence of yoga in India, there’s a growing interest in delving deeply into this timeless science. The true essence of yoga involves the sequential practice of specific body postures that benefit both the body and mind, leading you to connect with your true self. This journey towards ‘enlightenment’ includes gaining absolute clarity about life and adopting a mission-oriented existence, resulting in a happy life.

However, the common understanding of yoga often simplifies it as a practice that brings one closer to a meditative stage, connecting to a higher power and fostering happiness. Yet, this common understanding is considered quite superficial.

Steps on how to start yoga practice:

1. Time to Practice Yoga: Choose either morning or evening hours for your yoga practice.
2. Place to Practice Yoga: Ensure the practice space is clean, airy, and well-ventilated.
3. Days to Practice Yoga: Make yoga a non-negotiable part of your everyday life.
4. Discipline for Yoga: Practice yoga with strict discipline to learn correct techniques and achieve overall wellness.
5. Observances and Self-Restraint in Yoga: Follow Yama and Niyama, the first two stages of yoga, to assimilate yoga into your life.
6. Faith in Yoga: Approach yoga with 100% faith, while recognizing its ancient roots and the knowledge acquired from nature.
7. Samatava Tatva in Yoga: Aim for perfection in yoga asanas, focusing on Samatava Tatva, which involves balancing the right and left sides of the body.
8. Outlook Transformation with Regular Yoga Practice: Develop discipline in lifestyle choices like cleanliness, punctuality, nutrition, and sleep through regular yoga practice.
9. Mental Strength through Yoga: Yoga is more than physical exercises; it builds mental strength to face challenges and maintain positive behavior.
10. Positive Perception and Strength through Yoga: Understand why and how to start yoga to develop strong personality traits, achieve a composed state of mind, and perceive the world positively.
11. Mental Resilience through Yoga: Yoga, beyond its physical aspects, contributes to mental strength, a positive outlook, and the ability to navigate life’s challenges with resilience.

Must-dos for a Yoga Session:

1. Before starting, empty the bladder and bowels.
2. Take a bath before starting your yoga sessions. It opens up the body pores and brings readiness.
3. Also, take bath after the yoga session, as it freshens your mind.
4. Eat light and don’t be empty-stomach for the yoga class. A gap of a minimum one hour between your light meal and yoga is ideal.
5. Practice yoga on an even floor and on a yoga mat. Don’t practice yoga on a bare floor and an uneven surface.
6. If you feel any uneasiness in any part of your body while doing yoga asanas, stop that asana immediately.
7. While practicing yoga asanas, breathing should be done through the nostrils only. Do not breathe through the mouth while practicing asanas. Correct breathing is something the yoga teacher or guru is likely to guide on.
8. At the end, mandatorily do shavasana because it removes the fatigue from the body.
9. Yoga asana and pranayama are concomitants. Pranayama includes lots of technical to-dos. Hence, it should ideally be performed only under a trained instructor.
10. Always follow the right method of yoga asanas. The right technique and method of yoga asanas take the student towards oneness of mind, body and soul — the highest stage of self-realization.
11. Knowledge on starting yoga and the sequence of asanas is critical. This includes warm-up, inversions, forward bend, backward bend, twists, balance etc. It is based on the student’s physical capability as well.

We teach yoga holistically, with the correct techniques of yoga asanas, balance of mind and body, and pranayama.

Author – Rishi Singh
Date Published: 23rd June 2021
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