References
- Baron Baptiste, Journey into Power and 40 Days to Personal Revolution. Baron is our teacher. Journey into Power is one of the top selling yoga books in the last 10 years. In these books, Baron gives us the essential of Yoga. www.baronbaptiste.com
- A Course in Miracles, a spiritual text written in our time and in our language. www.acim.org
- Beryl Bender Birch, Power Yoga, is a great book, especially for athletes. www.power-yoga.com
- Bryan Kest, another well-known Power Yoga instructor. poweryoga.com
- The Bhagavad Gita, a powerful story of a warrior who, on the verge of a devastating battle, asks for God's advice. We love this sacred story because is offers clear and easy to understand explanations of Yogic principleswww.bhagavad-gita.org
- Swami Prabhavanda, How to Know God/The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, the ancient sutras on yoga. oaks.nvg.org/sa1ra2.html
- B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga and Light on Pranayama. Iyengar is one the greats and his detail on postures and breathing (pranayama) is clear. www.buzzle.com
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now and Silence Speaks, clear access to presence. www.eckharttolle.com
8 Axioms of Power Yoga
You have to be hot to stretch.
Without heat, any attempt to stretch or realign the body is a complete waste of time. You have to be warm while stretching. This is accomplished by doing strength work concurrently and continuously along with the stretch.
Strength, not gravity, develops flexibility.
Power Yoga is about STRENGTH. Flexibility comes as a result of the strength work. Without the strength work, the heat is not there and, consequently, the stretch work is not effective, safe, or even possible.
Sports do not get us into shape. In fact, sports get us out of shape.
Sports develop tight muscles and create imbalance because of repetitive training and uneven use of muscle groups, or the uneven use of one side of the body. This intense shortening or disproportionate strengthening results in mind-boggling muscular and structural imbalance. The harder you train, the tighter your body will become, and this is true of nearly any sport.
All injury in sports is caused by structural and muscular imbalance.
Although chronic injury in most cases comes on slowly as the body goes further and further out of alignment, eventually the imbalance breaks through as debilitating pain. We must then either do something to address the imbalance, or face stopping our training. We were too focused on our training to notice the slow, incremental decrease in our range of motion and agility which has come about from our imbalances caused by training.
Muscular imbalance and structural irregularities do not fix themselves.
This is what you use the Power Yoga workout for, among other things. No one sport perfectly balances and complements any other in strict biomechanical terms. Some sports complement one another well, like cross-country skiing and distance running; others not so well, like basketball and distance running. Some sports have a good direct muscular crossover effect, like Rollerblading and cycling, or climbing and kayaking. Others have very little muscular crossover effect, like cycling and running. Only a program designed to specifically open, realign, and build power and flexibility will work effectively as an antidote to the negative effects of exercise and keep us on the road.
Even iron will bend if you heat it up.
In many of us who've been active exercisers for years, our muscle and connective tissue are starting to feel like the iron in our cars. The only way to get rid of the dent (unless you just want to hammer it out cold - and some of you actually try that method!) is to heat up our frame and remold it. Surgery might correct a structural imbalance, but it does not restore the tissue to the pre-injured elastic, supple state. Drugs may get rid of pain, spasm, or inflammation, but not the cause of same. The "memory" of the injury will stay there forever until we do some body work to heat, correct, and re-align.
Stopping training does not correct an imbalance.
It may give the injury time to heal, but as soon as we begin to train again, the injury will come back; the misaligned moving parts resume rubbing against each other - causing friction, or what we feel as pain - as soon as we start training again. The parts are still in the same biomechanical relationship to one another. Even though we may have rested and healed the injury, we did nothing to heal the misalignment. You have to take the "dent" out to stop the rubbing. You have to get in there and knead it around like bread dough and work out the trauma. You have to take the tissue in every direction, both in a stretch and in a contraction. And remember, without heat, the realignment is not safely possible. The primary ingredient of Power Yoga practice is HEAT. Think of what a glassblower can do with a piece of glass tubing when it is heated.
No matter how fit you are at what you do, when you start something new you have to ease into it.
This program does not promise or even remotely hint that we can get you fit overnight, or from one-sided to balanced, injured to healed, unconscious to conscious, out of control to in control, sloppy to disciplined, or fat to fit in 21 days or less. This practice encourages you to begin slowly, practice regularly, breathe deeply, pay attention, and build on the small, gradual changes you observe as you progress.
Pictures and text recreated with permission from "POWER YOGA" by Beryl Bender Birch