A Report on My Yoga Teacher Training: Changing Posture and Creating Space
My yoga teacher training has now transitioned from the daily immersive and intensive one-on-one sessions into a more steady and self-motivated continuation of the training to deepen what I’ve learned. To get my teacher certification I still have a paper to write and a class to teach. But the journey is really just beginning. For a full month, I showed up every morning for a planned session taught by a teacher, and I learned new yoga postures and practices every day. Now, digesting all that learning and experiencing how it has imprinted itself on me—and finding the motivation to keep on learning, practicing, and teaching, on my own and with others—is a very different affair, and probably a more important one. As Nikki Costello, my teacher, said to me, “Those 30 days were just the beginning. The next 3 months of working on your own and in classes with others, and incorporating what you’ve learned into your being, is what will determine the extent and depth of how these practices will affect your life.”
In my previous article on this topic, I described several areas of transformation that were beginning to have their effect on me. Here is a deeper dive into 2 of those aspects that are becoming more deeply ingrained—posture and space—and I will be writing about more in the future.
Changing Posture
In her Preliminary Course book, which is one of the books I am learning from, Geeta S. Iyengar (B.K.S. Iyengar’s daughter) states that the beginning standing poses, such as Tadasana (Mountain pose) should not be considered “easy,” as what they teach us is important in all the more challenging poses that follow. She also writes that these poses are particularly important because they teach us about our bodies and what needs correcting. No one’s body is without postural quirks. Yoga is about opening up channels of energy in the body that have been blocked by lack of strength, stiffness, or chronic inflexibility, qualities that can be physical and/or personality related. And the one area where all these issues show up is posture: how we stand and how we sit.
As I deepen my practice, my posture has radically changed, and I have come to realize how much it affects how I feel and move throughout the day, not just when I’m standing or sitting. In my case, the change in posture has been mostly above the waist, with a focus on my shoulders, chest, and neck. How I stand or sit, and hold my feet and legs, affects everything above the waist.
By focusing on and fixing the stiff or inflexible areas, with a combination of breathing and poses, the main effect is that my shoulders are relaxed and sit further back than they previously did, my chest and spine are more upright, and my shoulder blades move into my back while my chest rises. These effects have had a transformative effect on my chronically sore and stiff neck, which I have battled for as long as I can remember. Now, by focusing on my posture, I can release my neck and throat muscles on a much more regular basis, and I am working to ease them even more. Bringing awareness and openness to this entire area is offering me an alternative to what I have witnessed in many other people my age: the slumping and forward-curving back that restricts breathing and cramps the lungs as well as all the vital organs in the body.
These postural shifts and my awareness have become a part of almost everything I do in life now. They have changed how I exercise in the gym, how I stand and sit, and even how I drive a car. Plus, the visceral shifts in my posture have gone beyond my physical body. You would be surprised, as am I, at how profound posture can be in changing not only your physical life but your emotional and mental life as well.
Creating Space
This may strike many people as odd, but these changes in my posture have led to a more pronounced sense of physical space within me. Coupled with breathing practices—called Pranayama or controlled breathing, which focuses on enhancing lung capacity by breathing into the sides and back of your lungs and body as well as the more typical rising of the chest—parts of me that have felt constricted feel more open and lighter than before. This includes my abdomen and body cavity. My digestion is greatly enhanced, and I can only imagine the benefit to my vital organs.
But it’s more than that. The sense of space that comes from controlled and deeper breathing as well as the singular focus on poses when I practice have given me a sense of inner space. I have a sense of a quieter and roomier inner life, where rushing and getting things done is less important than focusing on doing them well or having the space to decide not to do them at all without feeling guilty about it. I would call this sensation slower if it weren’t so full of inner life and energy; it’s so vibrant that words like slow or relaxed don’t work as adjectives.
Over the past 20 years of my health journey, I thought I had already acquainted myself with the profound effects that changing my physical body would bring with the health practices I had developed and the yoga I was practicing. (An extremely limited yoga practice, as it turns out.) I was unprepared for the depth that my current yoga training would inform all aspects of my being, and especially as I’m certain it will affect my health and longevity in later life. As part of my teacher certification requirement, I am writing a self-study on an aspect of yoga that I chose that I am particularly concerned with. My topic is, you guessed it, the effects of yoga on healthspan and longevity. Depending on how it turns out as a written piece I might decide to run it here. Stay tuned.
