Warrior Poses | Hatha Yoga for Acceptance through Courage | YwM 510

Hatha Yoga

This intermediate hatha yoga class will be a lot like last week’s class working with steady and rigorous foundational yoga postures to help prepare your body for warrior poses. These movements help to build greater mobility, flexibility and strength in your body. This is the kind of approach I am going to be taking with the short hatha yoga classes I will be releasing in our membership community in January. The yoga poses in this class will build from the foundation of your feet, leg strength, hip mobility, core strength and back strength. We will spend time in Warrior One, Warrior Two, Warrior Three, Goddess Victory Squat and variations on those poses.

You may have perfectionist tendencies if you have excessive concern with details, you are extremely devoted to work and productivity at the expense of leisure, you are excessively conscientious, you are thrifty, you are inflexible and rigid when it comes to morals and ethics, or you are reluctant to delegate tasks or relinquish control. However, as we learned last week, perfectionism is the result of the culture and families we grew up in, so we do not need to be perfectionist about our perfectionism.

Perfectionism can lead to anxiety, worry and depression. It creates performance anxiety and leads to procrastination. Perfectionism often will stand in the way of our creativity.

Often times our perfectionism is an attempt to gain control or certainty in our lives. The reality is, as many of us have experienced, that our lives are full of the confusing and unexpected. Our lives often frustrate our assumptions and expectations.

With perfectionism we crave certainty and yearn for control rather than surrender to the chaos of our lives. In Present Perfect, Pavel Somov says that perfectionism is a hunger for approval, validation, acknowledgment, control and certainty. The good news is that we can feed the hungry ghost of perfectionism with ACCEPTANCE.

Pavel Somov suggests accepting reality for what it is in all its imperfect perfection, however he says, this actually takes great COURAGE.

The ideal reality exists only in our minds. Our real world experience pales in comparison to the world that we imagine is perfect. For perfectionists the ideal, fictional, and imaginary is always better than the real, factual and existent.

Every moment we experience, as theoretically imperfect as it may be, is beyond modification. This very moment we are experiencing is beyond improvement. It is too late to add anything to this moment or to make it better. We can start to notice the ordinary perfection in what is, not in what could be.

To which most every perfectionist will say, how is change possible? How will I ever improve upon myself?

In Present Perfect, Pavel Somov suggests that we recognize ACCEPTANCE as COURAGE not SURRENDER. When we accept this moment, we are actively engaging in the moment. Accepting the moment as it is requires a great deal of COURAGE rather than an ESCAPIST FLIGHT into FANTASY of what could be or what has been. When we acknowledge what is then there is actually the possibility for improvement as well.

It is possible to accept what is AND change. It is not an either or choice. You can accept that in this very moment you are doing the best that you can. Having learned from the experience you can improve in the next moment to the extent that you can.

In today’s yoga class we are going to practice a tone of creative progressions and different creative expressions of warrior poses. This will allow us to accept the moment as it is unfolding, perfectly imperfect. We will embrace practice, not perfect, process, not perfect, progress, not perfect and recognize the courage that it takes to open to our e...