Kino MacGregor and Tim Feldmann are both world renowned Ashtanga teachers in their own right but they also manage to find time to teach together as well. I focused this joint interview around them as a couple; how they approach teaching together, how their practices differ, do the like to practice together or seperately, who goes to who when they have a asana conundrum, that sort of thing.
I really enjoyed doing this interview with Tim. He is easy to talk to and had lots to share. His experience and understanding of the body leads to some useful insights when discussing asana. We had time to talk about many topics including how his background in dance influences his teaching, as well as specific asanas.
Chaturanga Dandansana or ‘Chatuari’ as we call it in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, is a difficult and somewhat disheartening posture. A quite high state of strength is required to support it and and even more pronounced strength to utilize it well. Chaturanga furthermore tends to mess around a bit with our minds as it is not a ‘real’ asana but a transitory movement which we often cease to recognize the importance of in stream of on-going other activities, dogmas and ‘must-dos’ in our practice.
The question for this really is: ‘How do I accommodate my shoulders to move correctly when attempting Urdhva Dhanurasana’… Let’s take a look.
A tight shoulder girdle is common in the yoga room, especially amongst men as our arms and shoulders tends to be a bit more muscularly developed than women. When attempting this, you are looking for a relatively simple movement once it has taken root in your practice, once the shoulder girdle has found the necessary foundation of supported openness, yet accepting the importance and investing in the detailed movement mechanics often gets in our way.
When we decide to move our body, in asana practice or in daily life, we most often instantly begin with activating our muscles. We identify movement with activating various muscles. The muscles are the physical system that we mostly rely on to carry out any physical task at hand. So is it in asana practice too. Unfortunately our muscular system is of relative efficiency in complex movement tasks such as asana practice.
Our yoga practice can give rise to difficult emotions, causing unnecessary confusion in our lives. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offer a surprising context to help us understand this phenonoma. It seems there is a growing frustration in our contemporary yoga community as the popularity of this ancient Indian practice reaches new frontiers in our part of the world. Recently I have had several students approach me with a particular question about the presence of strong negative emotions in their practice and their lives.
To get the full benefits out of the standing/balancing asanas, we must master balancing on one leg to a reasonable degree. Knowing a few technical things about the body and mind will help us balance well on one leg, besides clenching everything we’ve got and pray that we’ll make it through! This article aims at assisting you with your one legged balances/movement.
A good use and healthy alignment is the natural state of the body. Connecting to this innate state unravels habitual patterns and untangles energy, enhancing well-being, vitality and effortlessness. The means is to practice with a simple yet profound kinesthetic awareness and understanding of the architectural structure of your individual body.
The foot: a double dome like shape arching from back-to-front and from side-to-side. The foot: a triangle, wide at the front and narrow at the back. The leg: connecting down into the foot like a pillar through the ankle which intercepts at the peak of the two domes combined.