Fundamental components of Yoga practice

Yoga practitioner should keep the yoga practices effective and result oriented both of which should help in handling the challenges of the life. Regularity of the practice and sticking a disciplined schedule depend primarily on the benefits that one gets from the practice of yoga. We become irregular and muddled when we don’t see the desired results.

To make yoga effective, it is important to understand and apply the key fundamental components of the yoga practice. Broadly, there are four such components namely a) awareness b) breathing c) body sensation and d) movement.

 Awareness: Yoga practice is all about awareness i.e. awareness on breathing, awareness of movements and awareness of body sensation. During the initial days of the practice, mind is so strong that it just takes over our awareness within a split of a minute.  But, with regular practice, awareness gradually gains strength and a stage comes where it stays on top of the mind and the body. In this expanded state of awareness, one can observe both the movement of my mind i.e. the thoughts as well as the body sensations. Expanded state of awareness improves our sensitivity.  With increase in sensitivity, one gets the ability not only observing the gross body sensations but finer and subtler sensations too.

So, mind is stronger than our awareness during the initial days of practice and awareness becomes stronger than the mind with prolonged duration of the practice.

Breathing: Breathing is a combination of inhalation, retention and exhalation. Inhalation is an energisation process, oxygenating the body triggered by the sympathetic nervous system. Exhalation is a relaxation phase activated by the parasympathetic nervous system. In effect, breathing is a cyclic variation of stimulation followed by relaxation. By definition, yoga practice is nothing but this cyclic movement of stimulation and relaxation.

It is good to manipulate breathing by keeping the duration of exhale slightly longer than the duration of inhale during the practice of yoga. So, the net duration of relaxation becomes longer than the stimulation phase. A new breathing habit will be formed with the regular practice of this manipulated breathing technique that has tremendous benefits.

Body sensation: We are on an autopilot mode and 95% of our actions are subconsciously controlled. Subconscious mind communicates through the body sensations. As we divert our attention to our body sensations and with consistent practices, our brains become sharp enough to pick up finer and subtler sensations. This helps us to become aware of our emotions which are channelized as body sensations. We, now have the capacity to manage our emotions once we gain the ability to become aware of our own emotions.

Movement: The ideal way to practice yoga is to synchronise the body movements with the movement of breathing. This is a good start point to reach the ultimate goal of achieving the stillness of body and mind through yoga practices. A trained yoga practitioner keeps this fundamental so clean and given any other form of activities like weight training or running, he naturally applies this fundamental subconsciously in each of these practices. For example, he keeps the strides of his running automatically to match his breathing pattern.

Our automatic rhythm of our breathing is such a divine energy, the life giving force, a basic fundamental movement based on which all other movements are constructed.

So, understand the above fundamental key components of yoga practice in order to exploit the full benefits of yoga.