By Hazel Hoyle
Practising yoga outdoors yields
many benefits to improve your balance, strength, posture alignment, breathing,
meditation and overall well-being. This article will deal with three areas that
are most positively affected by outdoor practise.
Being outdoors while we
practise strips our practice of many comforts and controlled aspects we take
for granted in a studio. In doing so, we are disciplined in a different fashion
and will increase our body’s awareness of physical alignments and posture
placements even when we cannot see ourselves in a mirrored reflection.
These abilities are called Inner
Proprioception Skills. With them, you
can instinctively know directions and placements of feet, knees, back,
shoulders, etc. without physically seeing where they are; and without looking.
With this skill, you can get
deeper into your body. You will get to know your own body more intimately and
you will be able to get deeper into your poses while safely making adjustments
in backbends, warrior postures and inversions.
The first principle in yoga is
breathing, the second principle is alignment. With heightened inner
proprioception skills, you will achieve proper alignment and deeper poses. Practising
outdoors can help you attain this.
There are a lot of distractions
outdoors. Focusing on the placement of your foot, the arch of your back or
alignment and stacking of your hips is more difficult. However, by overcoming
those distractions and accomplishing your poses outdoors, muscles increase,
inner strength and stability heightens and balance achievement is enhanced.
People often struggle with
STANDING BALANCE POSES, sometimes in a studio we can place our feet on a wooden
floor off the mat, or lean into a wall to bring our balance to a more stable
point. Outdoors, these supports are not available to us and we need to dive deeper
into our inner core and focused breathing to accomplish such poses as Eagle (Garudasana), Tree (Vrksasana), or King Dancer (Natarajasana).
While conducting an outdoor
class to develop her student's focus, Yoga Instructor, Jeanne Heilleman, jokes instructing
them to “fix your eyes on one wave.” The
joke is that one wave moves into the next. They are not a stable point of
focus, nor can one wave be. Her point was that outdoors, nothing is stable, so
practicing in such an environment will develop these skills.
While in the Half Moon Pose (Ardha
Chandrasana), Heilleman mentions looking up was an amazing experience because there
was no ceiling; the sky went on forever and there were no walls to feel enclosed
by. But this phenomenon threw the balance on her leg off and she tumbled to the
ground. Clearly balancing while outdoors is more difficult than in the quiet,
controlled environment of the studio, but continuing to try outdoors will allow
you to master balance and it will ultimately amplify your balance abilities indoors
and out!
Meditating and practising breathing
outdoors can challenge you but with continued effort, will reward you with the
intensified ability to block outside sounds from your thoughts and to breathe more
deeply into your own clear, focused mind.
Being indoors we can turn up
the thermostat or turn on the air conditioner to adjust the temperature. If it
is noisy we can close the door, or we can put on some soothing music. Of course outdoors, we can always add or
remove a layer of clothing for temperature regulation, or we can wear earphones
or headsets for music, but without these modifications, the continual
distraction of outdoor sounds and climate is a reality that may pull your
thoughts in many directions.
Disciplining ourselves by
exposure to these distractions is exceptionally great for achieving much greater
success in posture alignment, balance, concentration and breathing. Ultimately,
practising outdoors will heighten your skill level and streamline your overall yoga
experience and ability.
One final thing to say about
practising outdoors is simply the beauty of being outside among nature. It is
refreshing to breathe the cool or warm, fresh air and to gaze upon the
magnificence of nature, be it at the beach, the ocean, beside a creek, a
valley, a mountain top. The peaceful quiet and the loveliness is a wonderful
gift to the senses. Of course, practising in a park beside a busy traffic street,
may not be as beautiful, but the green grass and the billowing trees dancing in
the breeze off in the distance are still remarkably comforting and soul
enriching.
Of course yoga is a practise
that can be enjoyed anywhere, and all of the outdoor choices available to you
will afford you the same challenges and advantages mentioned previously.
But there is nothing like striking
a pose on the top of a mountain after a great climb/hike through the forest, or
holding a strength and balance posture on the sandy beach while gazing out at
the sunset, sunrise or the mid-afternoon glistening water. Outdoor yoga and
meditation is a peaceful and enriching experience internally, emotionally,
spiritually and physically.
Practising yoga outdoors will
change your life!
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