YeS Groups
Home Practice
Home practice is an essential part of this course. Although the sessions provide you with excellent guidance each week, as well as physical and mental practice, the benefits of the course will be far greater if you practise on your own. Yoga studies show that the more regularly you practise yoga, the better your physical and mental health.
Week 1: Body and Breath Awareness
“Notice/observe where you feel your breath.”
The aim of this first practice is to become aware of your breathing. Our state of mind and our breathing are linked: when we are stressed, our breathing tends to be rapid and limited to the chest. On the other hand, when we are relaxed, our breathing is slower and felt more in the belly. To take better care of ourselves, we first need to understand our own sensations and the influence of our emotions on our health.
Week 1: Mat Practice
Week 1: Chair Practice
Week 2: Grounding
“Feel the touch of the body on the ground.”
“Inhale/breathe from the ground into the lungs and exhale down from the lungs through the body into the ground”.
This week, our practice is dedicated to grounding. Grounding involves both a connection to the ground and the development of mental and bodily stability. During your home practice, as you move from one posture to another, notice the point of contact between your body and the ground. If the posture is stable, then imagine that you are breathing in from this point of contact towards your lungs, and that you are breathing out from your lungs towards the ground through your body.
Week 2: Mat Practice
Week 2: Chair Practice
Week 3: Grounding, elongating the exhale through the "ocean breath"
“Inhale from the ground, exhale elongated ocean breath back down to the ground”
Continuing with the theme of anchoring, this week we’re going to work on the ocean breath on the exhale.
This breathing technique has many advantages:
- it helps you to ground yourself
- it extends the exhalation, which relaxes the nervous system
- it gives us greater control over the air we exhale, keeping it smooth and regular.
Whatever home practice you choose, continue to bring your attention back to the points of contact between the ground and the body, as you did last week. You’ll then integrate this with the ocean breath.
Week 3: Mat Practice
Week 3: Chair Practice
Week 4: Grounding, ocean breathing on inhale and elongated exhale
“Inhale ocean breath up from the ground, exhale elongated ocean breath back down into to the ground.”
This week we continue to develop our grounding by practising the ocean breath on the inhale and exhale. Start with the advice given in week 3 and add the ocean breath on the inhale. Always breathe out a little longer, as this helps to:
- reduce stress;
- relax the cardiovascular system
Week 4: Mat Practice
Week 4: Chair Practice
Week 5: Spaciousness
“Inhale, exhale, pause/space.”
This week, we’re shifting our focus from grounding to space. Finding space, both physically and mentally, is an essential component of well-being. With the stress of modern life, our minds and bodies are often under pressure. This can result in muscular tension or intrusive thoughts that prevent us from relaxing.
This week, we’re physically integrating the notion of space by pausing after each exhalation, which has a number of advantages:
- This breath requires our full attention, allowing our mind to push away intrusive thoughts.
- It reduces the number of breaths per minute and encourages greater relaxation of the nervous system.
- It reminds us that even if life is intense and we sometimes feel oppressed, we can create space at any moment, between each breath.
Week 5: Mat Practice
Week 5: Chair Practice
Week 6: Spaciousness, upper back and shoulders
“Notice your shoulders. If they are holding tension, roll them down and back.”
This week, we’re continuing to explore the notion of space, working on both breathing and shoulders. When we’re tense, our shoulders tend to tense up. We usually roll them up and forward in a sort of rounded posture. Over time, the shoulders become very tense, leading to pain. This pain can also spread to other areas such as the neck and lower back. Practising yoga helps to gently reduce tension in the shoulders and surrounding areas. We can support this process by observing our shoulders in each pose and consciously opening them back and down.
Week 6: Mat Practice
Week 6: Chair Practice
Week 7: Awareness of bodily sensations
“Notice the sensations in the body.”
This week, we’re focusing on the sensations we experience when we stretch and contract different muscles in static and dynamic postures. Observing our sensations offers a number of benefits:
- It clears the mind, which helps to reduce constant, stressful thoughts.
- It tells us how our body feels in a pose, so we can adjust it to experience it in a more engaging way.
- It allows us to naturally develop a clearer awareness of how our body feels on a daily basis.
Week 7: Mat Practice
Week 7: Chair Practice
Week 8 - Balance
“Breathe with the chimes.”
This week we’re focusing on balance. Over the last seven weeks we have developed skills in relaxation and self-awareness. It’s now important to turn our attention to how we can foster resilience and balance in the mind, body and especially in the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Breathing has an immediate impact on the functioning of the nervous and cardiovascular systems.
We’re going to focus on 5 breaths per minute, with an inhalation of 6 and an exhalation of 6. Use the Ocean Breath on this rhythm for your practice at home.
Week 8: Mat Practice
Week 8: Chair Practice
Week 9: Change
“Notice the beginning and end of the inhale and the beginning and end of the exhale.”
“Notice the arising and passing away of sensations.”
This week’s programme is similar to the previous one. It’s based on the same pillars: 5 ocean breaths per minute. The only thing added is full awareness of the appearance and disappearance of this breath and the sensations felt during the postures. As mentioned in class, by concentrating on the internal experience of what appears and disappears, we clearly perceive how everything changes. This reminds us that we have the power to change things and even when we are going through difficult times, they always pass in the end. In terms of breathing, inhalation begins, peaks and ends, and then exhalation begins.
Week 9: Mat Practice
Week 9: Chair Practice
Week 10: Connection
“We are all breathing in sync, together, we are all connected through breath.”
Our theme today is connection. Actually, the translation of the word yoga is union. So yoga is about connection on different levels: connection between body and mind, between breath and body, between self and universe, between ourselves and others. As we’ve been doing for many weeks, we’re going to create links through the breath, like one big united organism. We share our breath with all the organisms on the planet, and in particular with plants and trees. Plants and trees create the oxygen we need to survive.
Week 10: Mat Practice
Week 10: Chair Practice
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