OK, let’s be honest here – you’ve heard of yoga before, so it’s not as if you’re coming to this page expecting to have your mind blown. You’ve probably seen some pictures of dudes in purple leotards and noticed those $12 DVDs at Wal-Mart. You’re not reading this page without some pre-existing idea of what yoga is.
It’s a well-established fact that practicing Yoga will help you increase flexibility and learn to relax, and various studies have shown it to correlate to just about any marker of good health you can think of. You know all this already, so I’m not going to go on about why you should practice yoga. However, I do want to tell you about what makes Prasara unique and what it can do for you.
The short story is that Prasara was created to develop Flow. We’ll talk more about this later, but the gist is that Flow is a quality of movement in which you can transition smoothly form one thing to another.
Actually, Flow is a lot of things, and that can make it difficult to describe – and even harder to learn. But it isn’t impossible, and we’ve been teaching it for years to our private clients, in live seminars and workshops, and though this course, the Prasara Primer.
The unique element of Prasara practice as opposed to most other styles of yoga is simply that traditional yoga is fixated on sitting in poses while Prasara shifts the emphasis to the transitions between poses. You’ll still use the same postures and positions, but we’ll also work on your ability to “flow” from one to the next so you can develop real agility, grace, power, and yes, Flow in everything you do.
After you’ve used Prasara for two months, you’ll wonder at how much better you feel in your body and your overall physical prowess and agility. Guaranteed.
I have practiced yoga for the last 18 years and seen a variety of different teaching styles. Some styles of yoga exist in an almost mystical shroud: exclusive cliques practicing a difficult series of movements. Other styles prescribe a rigid, unchangeable series of postures. The wonderful thing about Prasara yoga is the intuitive, open manner in which it can be practiced.
The Prasara Primer is an excellent starting point. The material is phenomenally user-friendly, and the clear, open tone of the Primer will enable anybody at any fitness level to get started immediately on a lifelong Prasara practice.
There’s no such thing as a “best” way to move your body. There are wrong ways – injurious ways, like those awful stretches your high school gym coach used to make you do – but the beauty of yoga is that most of the poses are very difficult to do in a way that could cause you to hurt yourself.
While many styles of yoga insist on following a set sequence of however many poses for however many minutes, the ultimate goal of practicing Prasara is to teach you to flow without thinking of what comes next.
Yes, in the beginning, you’ll be practicing routines (this course includes six of them – more about those later), but through practicing the routines, you’ll actually be giving your body the vocabulary of movement you need in order to improvise your own movements.
If you’re an athlete in any sport, you already know what Flow is. Your focus tightens, and the outside world fades away. You breathe deeper. Time slows down. You get tunnel vision, and the path between you and your goal opens up. You don’t have to think about what to do – you just act, spontaneously, in the moment.
Even if you’re not an athlete, you’ve probably experienced flow while driving on the highway, playing a musical instrument, or doing something else that requires a relaxed concentration.
Even if you’re not the “sporty” type, you know that one of the least useful things an athlete can do is to stand perfectly still during a match. In fact, that might just be the fastest way to lose in most sports.
No, athletes have to move. So it’s important that a yoga style designed to develop athletic movement not spend too much time sitting still.
You’ve probably seen videos of athletes getting injured. These videos are painful to watch – not only because we can see an injury occurring, but because we can see it coming before they do.
The ball travels in an unexpected direction. Another player attacks from an unexpected angle. They step on a slippery patch. They get faked out.
Prasara yoga is like injury insurance for athletes because it trains you to always…
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