Continuing Yoga

Continuing Yoga is a beginning to intermediate level class. Students are assisted with special instructions, alignments, and adaptations of the poses to meet each individual’s level of strength and flexibility.

Each class is 90 minutes long. The classes begin and end in Shavasana, yoga’s relaxation pose, with a guided awareness. 

***  Class Series Descriptions ***

New Beginnings -the Introductory Series

A series of four Svaroopa® Yoga classes intended to introduce new students to basic Svaroopa poses and prop set-up. The series of classes is discounted to encourage you to try this wonderfully healing and transformative style of yoga.

Dates and times for this series varies throughout the year.

 Bring meaning to your Yoga Practice with Theme Class Structures

Class Themes

Svaroopa® Yoga classes explore different themes, building on your body’s releases and on your ability to become aware of the changes in your body. The themes include Daily Practice (so that you can continue to do yoga on the days you cannot make it to class), Lower Spinal Release, Upper Spinal Release, Abdominals, Backbends, Standing Poses, Forward Bends, Neck and Shoulders, and Balance and Inversions. Intermediate to advanced themes include:  Classical Poses,Vinyasa, and Twists and Seated Poses.

Daily Practice

  A daily practice you do on your own, will enrich your life. In addition the poses you do in class become even deeper. The purpose of Svaroopa® yoga is to teach you to release the tensions in the spine and teach you how to move in such a way as to prevent the tensions from returning. When you have a daily practice you make progress on your own. You become aware not only of the release but you’ll notice where you tighten in daily life so that you can undo it. This is called “Core Opening”.

Lower Spinal Release

The most important poses of Svaroopa® yoga are the lower spinal release poses….and every Svaroopa® yoga class includes them! In Svaroopa® yoga, lower spinal release is not for your hips. Other styles of yoga use poses that focus on “releasing the spine”, but those methods reliably tighten the spine by over-stretching hip ligaments. This over-stretching can create instability in the hip joints and can lead to problems later on - including a need for hip replacement!   Svaroopa® yoga’s sequencing, precision alignments and adjustments in the poses reliably and effectively create the changes in your body that release deeply held  Lower Spinal tensions.  You may notice:

• Improved leg strength, knee and foot realignment, lower back opening and stronger,  diminished “sway back”, Hollowing of the abdominal cavity and improved digestion, neck and shoulder pain relief, breathing is more open and easy, and your mind becomes quiet

Upper Spinal Release

Every pose in Hatha Yoga is for the spine.  Specific poses are introduced in this theme so that students can identify and learn to open the “tight spots”.  Students learn to use their arms and legs to support and move them (instead of moving by tightening spinal and back muscles).  Students learn to move easier and more efficiently without causing spinal tension.  The wait and top of the neck usually move easily, so these areas become over-worked, hyperflexible and weak.  As a result, the rest of the spine tenses up at the tailbone and the area between the shoulder blades (ribs behind the heart).   While other forms of yoga emphasize stretching hip ligaments and shoulder joints, Svaroopa yoga poses open the spine to provide lenthening and decompression.  When the spinal tension is released, you’ll experience:

• Increased Vitality, Greater Strength and Stamina, Aches and pains disappear, Inner Calm, A Peaceful State, Mental Clarity and Inner Awareness

Abdominals

When performing abdominal strengthening exercises, students usually use their spine and back without realizing it. This theme demonstrates how the abdominal muscles automatically work when the spine releases. This theme is not for the purpose of “strengthening” or working the abdominals, but for the purpose of releasing your spine and discovering that your abdominals will work for you.  Working with the abdominal muscles in this way, you’ll use the superficial abdominals to release your spine - experiencing a different feeling in contrast to using the deep abdominal muscles you are accustomed to. 

Backbends

Backbends are the most important direction of movement for us to learn.  We live in a forward bend most of our life!  Consider your daily activities:  sitting…even standing given our usual posture!   As people age, the forward bend becomes more pronounced.  You’ve seen the older person walking with a cane, hunched over in a forward bend (almost in afetal position), legs extended to walk, the head juts out and the back of the neck (cervical spine) is scrunched up and compressed so that person can see ahead.  Getting frozen in this position is a real danger because the vertebrae can fuse together by this compression.  To get movement in you spine, you’ll learn to do backbends in the lower and upper spine - using the poses from prior themes.

Standing Poses

Learning to stand or lean into your bones as you stand means that you won’t tighten while standing.  This is taking your yoga into your life.  When you are able to stand in proper alignment, you can release the spine with the added benefit of experiencing a weight-bearing exercise…(this is what physicians tell you to do to keep your bones strong and healthy).  Standing poses help you develop a new understanding of strength.  You’ll build on previous theme poses, using spinal release poses, abdominals and more.  Redefining strength, you’ll find that your strength comes from your legs, not your back or spine. Releasing spinal tensions by leaning the weight of your body through the bones of your legs, creates strength in your legs.  Using your muscles to hold you up, depletes your energy levels. You’ll gain stamina and stamina is more important than strength.  It’s Stamina that gets you through your day!

Neck and Shoulders

In Svaroopa we learn that “everything begins at the tailbone”.  When the spine releases, your neck and shoulder will subsequently improve.  This theme will help anyone experencing neck and shoulder discomfort from tensions created by working at a computer, driving a car or suffering from the tensions of daily living.   The spinal release sequencing continues starting at the tailbone and sacrum (lower spinal release).  Deep releases are sequenced through the ribcage where the symptoms of tensions exist - behind the heart.   Release of tensions in neck and shoulders may include release of tension through the jaw and skull.

Balance and Inversions

Balance and Inversions theme is strenuous, but once you learn to lean into your bones and find the balance point, the poses become easier. Like standing poses, these give you stamina. They also enhance emotional balance and steadiness of mind by enhancing our ability to balance physically. Inversions gives you a completely different point of view.

Most of us tighten our spines instead of leaning into our bones for support and use our neck and eyes to hold the balance. This theme revisits standing poses to help us remember how to lean into our bones and find the balance point in our feet, finding it instead of creating it through spinal tensions. Next, we learn how to take that balance point into more challenging poses including full inversions (upside down).

Balance and Inversions is the culmination of many months of practice bringing the principles of balance to this practice by applying what you have learned (leaning into your bones in standing poses,using your superficial abdominals, arms, and legs to release your spine).

 Classical Poses 

This theme is a variation on the poses seen in most yoga books and videos. Variations of these poses have been used in other themes to teach you how to release the deep muscular tensions in the core and spinal muscles. Too often the classical poses are done in a way that creates spinal tensions. By the time you have advanced to the Classical Poses theme, you will have greater body awareness and will be practiced at moving your body in such a way as to release spinal tensions. Therefore, you will be as ready as possible to take these poses to their fullest expression and perhaps be able to do them without tightening the spine.  Spinal release poses are included in the class structure so that if you are tightening while doing the classical poses you will still get the benefit of core release from each class.

Vinyasa

Vinyasa is a sequence of poses.  Every yoga class is a vinyasa, and now you are ready to link movement with breath.  This theme challenges students to use Vinyasas, such as Sun Salutations, to open the spine. All the preparations from the preceeding themes come together to enable you to sequence poses together with movement of body and breath. Vinyasa is a strenuous theme which challenges students to find yoga in movement and in activity without tightening the spine. As in Classical Poses, the class will include an opportunity to release core tensions in case the Vinyasa created any tightening.

Seated Poses and Twists

Seated poses are the most important of all the Asanas. This theme returns to these primary poses first studied in the early themes to explore the changes that have taken place in your body and in your experience. When the seated pose is done properly, the pose can fully open your spine. All of the other poses practiced and explored throughout the themes are for the purpose of making it easy and comfortable for you to sit.

Twists are the most effective poses for opening the spine. The effect of the pose provides a profound quieting effect on the mind. Once the mind is quiet, a blissful state arises from within. This is yoga’s promise: the experience of deep tranquility once the mind has been stilled.