Teacher Trainings Around the World

Yoga is Relationships

Our life is made up of relationships: healthy relationships, unhealthy relationships, functional, dysfunctional, loving, labored, compassionate, complacent.

Our lives are made up of so many different relationships. And our goals and our ambitions are so often based upon, dependent upon or aimed at establishing relationships and improving relationships.

Yoga, when it is practiced correctly is all about relationships. Specifically, yoga is about healing and rebuilding relationships.

Atma Yoga brings the energy of rebuilding relationships to the forefront of our yoga practice and ideally, hopefully in our daily lives.

In Atma Yoga healing and renewing, sometimes releasing and often recapturing relationships is done by changing our state of mind, expanding our consciousness, by examining and exploring the way we perceive ourselves and ourselves in the world.

When you come into an Atma Yoga class, you’ll be told to become aware of weight and to pay attention to breath, because these things are the beginning of renewing relationships.

When you become aware of weight you become aware of your relationship to the earth, the Mother Earth, the Goddess Earth, the pure devotee, who selflessly offers herself for your support.

As you become aware and conscious of that relationship with the Earth, as you become more appreciative, your relationship grows, heals. As you develop more awareness of Mother Earth’s qualities, your own qualities improve.

When you pay attention to breath, you begin a journey towards realizing that there is magic in breath. This magic is the very essence of life called prana and is actually none other than God.

As your awareness deepens that breath is the Divine and is coming in and out of you, you realize that you are not the doer. It is this prana that is the doer, the activator, the bringer of life.

So as your awareness becomes less self-centered, and you become more appreciative, grateful, and conscious of the role of the Divine and prana in your life, your relationship with the Divine begins to change.

You see yoga is all about relationships: rebuilding them, renewing them, recapturing them.

Atma Yoga Sets

Asanas are not thought to be invented by a human but are the gift of Lord Siva, who originally described 8,400,000 poses. Of this knowledge, only a scant few remain.

How were our Atma yoga sets created?

The sets are handed down in a secretive tradition. The capacity to do this was given to Atma, (Director/Founder) by his spiritual teacher, Bhakti Tirtha Swami.

1) Power Yoga

Power yoga is basically a derivative of flow or astanga yoga. It’s a continuous sequence of asanas, designed to improve the health of the spine, posture and lower back as well as to balance and strengthen the nervous system and focus the mind.

When you improve the way energy flows in your body, you change the way your energy interacts with other people’s energy.

2) Kundalini Yoga

Kundalini yoga is a practice for mechanically rewiring the way energy moves through your body, through your chakras, and through your aura.

This is accomplished through intensive kriyas (activities/exercises) which are combinations of asanas (yoga postures), pranayama (breathing techniques), mudras (gestures), bandas (energy locks), and mantras (sacred sound vibrations).

It is considered a very fast acting yoga. It strongly conditions and strengthens the nervous system. It is a yoga for modern spiritual warriors.

The origins of Kundalini yoga are ancient, said to be originated by Kartikeya, son of Lord Siva. They are secrets, only talked about recently. The full essence of it remains hidden. Preliminary descriptions of it can be found in the Gherad Samhita, Siva Samhita, and Kundalini Upanishad.

3) Slow deep & restorative yoga

Slow deep poses help relieve the effects of chronic stress in several ways. First, the use of props provides a supportive environment for total relaxation. As well as the use of gravity for developing the experience of surrender.

Second – each slow deep sequence is designed to move the spine in all directions. These movements illustrate the age-old wisdom of yoga that teaches well-being is enhanced by a healthy spine. Some of the slow deep stretch poses are backbends, while others are forward bends. Additional poses gently twist the column both left and right.

Third – a slow deep restorative practice usually includes an inverted pose, which reverses the effects of gravity. This can be as simple as putting the legs on a bolster or pillow, but the effects are quite dramatic. Because we stand or sit most of the day, blood and lymph fluid accumulate in the lower extremities. By changing the relationship of the legs to gravity, fluids are returned to the upper body and heart function is enhanced.

Fourth – restorative yoga alternately stimulates and soothes the organs. For example, by closing the abdomen with a forward bend and then opening it with a backbend, the abdominal organs are squeezed, forcing the blood out, and then opened, so that fresh blood returns to soak the organs. With this movement of blood comes the enhanced exchange of oxygen and waste products across the cell membrane.