Embrace Your Fall Yoga Practice by Making These Simple Changes

You can sense it in the air, feel and hear the new season - fall is here! Maybe you are reluctant to let go of warm summer days or maybe there is something else you’d rather not let go of?

Similar to yoga, it’s easier when you learn to embrace, not only the new season, but the journey itself. When you are rigid or resistant, it only causes frustration and sadness. Embracing change will allow you to grow and live life to the fullest.

You can be sentimental and sometimes clingy. You cling to things, people, and often you cling to certain seasons in your life. As long as you have breath in your lungs, seasons will change. It will serve you best if you learn how to be fluid as oppose to rigid, to embrace as oppose to resist the many changes of life.

This new season that is upon you can signify so much more than leaves changing. The trees may be your best example in letting go. As the leaves go through their brilliant metamorphosis, they then shed completely. If the trees can let go, so can you. If you let go of something that is holding you back, this created space can make way for new things or new relationships. 

In my fall yoga classes I say, “Exhale the old, inhale the new.” Not only do you eliminate toxins in exchange for fresh oxygen, sometimes it can be as simple as exhaling whatever is weighing you down.

Enhance Your Fall Yoga Practice

Focus on gratitude.

Take the biggest inhalation you have taken all day, fill your stomach up as much as you can. Then move this air into the heart center. Now, open your mouth, stick your tongue out as far as you can, now exhale – perhaps with loud audible sound – Haaaaaaa. You will literally feel the created space.

You are a part of the busiest generation in history. If you take a break or kick up your feet to rest, you feel guilty. Let’s exhale the guilt that comes from resting and embrace stillness, create time and space to rest your soul.

Once you create space in your life, don’t feel as if though you need to fill it with something else. Letting go of something, even if it’s a good thing, creates margin in your life. Creating space also allows you time to ‘sit with yourself,’ making sure you’re on the right path.

If your purpose is clear, then your daily habits and people you hang out must align with your purpose. Created space also allows time for divine interruptions that are embraced as opposed to something that may cause you aggravation. Margin allows you to welcome interruptions in your life, these interruptions often turn into divine appointments.

Begin your new chapter.

Nothing allows you to embrace the journey more than an attitude of gratitude. Being grateful will help you embrace not only any season of your life, but it will allow you to weather any storm you face with strength. Whatever you are facing, gratitude will get you through it every time. You may have heard this before but listen again with new ears:

“This morning, if you woke up healthy, then you are happier than the one million people that will not survive next week. If you never suffered a war, the loneliness of the jail cell, the agony of torture, or hunger, you are happier than 500 million people in the world. If you can enter a church without fear of jail or death, you are happier than three million people in the world. If there is a food in your fridge, you have shoes and clothes, you have bed and a roof, you are richer than 75 percent of the people in the world. If you have a bank account, money in your wallet and some coins in the money box, you belong to the eight percent of the people on the world, who are well-to-do.” 

Original Author Unknown used from: http://epistle.us/inspiration/blessed.html

Begin each day by setting your intention on five things that you will find throughout your day to be grateful for. Whatever and whoever crosses your path, you will receive with gratitude, look for the good. Give the benefit of the doubt at all times and because you have margin, ponder if this is a divine appointment or interruption that you might need to offer time or energy to.

Learn to embrace yoga.

Yoga can be a powerful tool to learn flexibility, not only physically, but in all areas of your life. A simple pranayama technique, like the one you just practiced, could change your life. Yoga has made me a more patient and fluid person.

There are numerous postures and breathing techniques that can help you embrace life’s journey and a new season, which can be summed up as: Your New Chapter.

Let’s practice a posture that may help you let go and create space, while preparing for your new chapter with gratitude and grace. Supinated or reclining (on the back) postures are generally postures of surrender, however, they can also signify postures of exhaustion as well as a pose of trust. They signify you ‘letting go of trying to do everything in your own strength’ – to rest – and completely surrender.

1. Lie on your back and get comfortable. Feel rooted to the earth. What is connected to the earth? How are you feeling? What or who do you need to release?
2. Place the soles of your feet together for Reclining Bound Angle (Supta Baddha Konasana). Feel the sensations. Are you ready to let go?
3. Using your core muscles, gently bring one knee over to the other, as if you are closing a book. Imagine you are doing just that. You are closing a chapter, say goodbye no matter how difficult. Remain here as long as you need to say your goodbye(s). Your core muscle gently, slowly and mindfully moves the knee back to Supta Baddha Konasana, feel your body, but also your mind and heart opening to a new, blank page. Reset here, inhale a “clean slate”.
4. Repeat on the other side while breathing or saying, “Exhale the old, inhale the new.” Remain here as long as you need to.
5. Mindfully come back to Supta Baddha Konasana. Place one hand on your heart and the other on the belly.
6. Silently or out loud say, “I embrace the new, and exhale the old. I am grateful for this body and all that it continues to get me through. I have an attitude of gratitude in all things and for all those who cross my path. My new chapter begins now.”