YOGA WITH ITAY

Ashtanga Yoga

The Yoga I practice and teach is as taught to me by Master Teachers Erich Schiffmann and Senior Ashtanga teacher Tim Miller.  The thrust of the teachings is that yoga is more than touching your toes, or standing on your head, or folding yourself into a pretzel.  It’s about how you do what you do, and how you live your daily life on a moment-to-moment basis. Yoga makes you feel good. It’s relaxing. It’s energizing. It’s strengthening. Life runs more smoothly when you maintain a consistent discipline than when you don’t. Yoga enhances your experience of life. It changes your perspective. 

               You start seeing things differently, with less distortion - which results in more peace of mind, better health, more enthusiasm for life, and an ever-growing authentic sense of inner well-being. As you practice yoga and meditation regularly, this subtle sense of feeling good gradually becomes so pervasive, so natural and genuine, so much a part of you that it carries over into the whole of your life. And in doing so it helps clarify your deepest longings, motivations, and aspirations, thereby restoring optimism, hope, meaning, and purpose to life. 

              At any instant, the quality of your life is directly related to how interested you are in it. Yoga involves learning to generate energy, and also to focus it into different parts of your body. This enables you to break through physical and psychological blocks, increasing energy, which allows new interest to come into your life. 

              People think they are limited by their body’s endurance - that tiring is purely physical. I have found it is usually not the body that tires first, but rather, the mind, which loses the stamina, required for attention. When your mind tires, your attention wanes and begins to wander, and sensitivity to your body’s messages diminishes. You treat the body with less care, and this tires it more quickly. 

              Yoga involves a balance between “control” and “surrender” - between pushing and relaxing, channeling energy and letting go, so the energy can move you. 

  The way we build security in our life involves habits that we are often not conscious of. Some habits are necessary. They become dangerous if we unconsciously let them direct our lives. Repeating habits over time tends to put you on automatic like a machine, and filters how you relate to the present. If your habits are rigid and deep in the unconscious, the filter is very cloudy and you miss the present. If you miss the present, you miss all there really is. 

  One of the real gifts yoga gives you is more sensitivity to life, which moves you toward what is appropriate for you. 

  In the process of yoga, habits and ways of being can leave or modify on their own. Transformation is an endless process to be lived that cannot be captured or possessed - you can only participate in it.