Last week I set a goal for the 40 Day Yoga Challenge to attend at least one class per week that I do not regularly attend. So today, I attended my first vinyasa yoga class.

Vinyasa is a dynamic style of yoga that emphasizes the flow of movement and breath between the postures, not just the postures themselves. My introduction to vinyasa was fun and thought provoking, so I’ll share a bit of both.

First the fun. I’m realizing that I really enjoy being upside down. Today I got to do 3 types of hand/head stands! We jumped, rolled, stretched and slinked between postures. I also found that the stress on my bad hip was lessened by the fact we didn’t hold the poses for a more than a few cycles of breath.

Islena instructed today’s class. She incorporated two thought-provoking ideas that I’d like to share (or at least my interpretations of them).

Resonance

The first idea is about finding resonance in your yoga practice. This is a place where your body and mind are attuned to the energy in every level of our being, from the atomic to a higher self. This sounded pretty esoteric until she demonstrated the analogy using a gong.

After striking the gong, if there is an interruption (like holding your finger against the gong), the tone is muffled and does not resonate. In yoga practice, if you have discomfort, excessive tension, or pain, you are muffling the ability of your body and mind to resonate from the poses. If, however, you free your practice by expressing your movements and postures at the “right” energy, the internal gong will reverberate with a spectrum of harmonics.

I thought this was a beautiful metaphor, and an alternative the idea finding the “edge”, where you measure your physical limits by monitoring your breath and body’s cues. Here, you seek not a limit – but a sense of harmony. This especially makes sense in vinyasa: as you move from posture to posture, the series of tones forms a song.

Fascia

Islena also encouraged us to focus our attention on the fascia (I never knew I had any of this stuff prior to today!) Reading further on Wikipedia, it’s described as “an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web of tissue that extends from head to toe, from front to back, from interior to exterior.” It wraps almost every other part of our anatomy in its casing. Because in our practice we commonly focus on sensations in the muscles and joints, we neglect to think about the stuff that binds it all together. I had always wondered how organs stay in place when I’m standing on my head!

But it gets more interesting – this stuff isn’t just structural. Again from Wikipedia, it “provides the medium that allows for intercellular communication“. That strikes me as a powerful idea. Each of our body’s cells is pretty much a self contained micro-system. But the fascia is what brings these units to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. I’m going to focus positive concentration on the fascia – I love these discoveries!

Islena’s suggestion to bring our attention to the fascia made particular sense in vinyasa, where interconnected movements are made possible by the physical structure that binds us.

All in all it was a great class, the kind that pushes your practice forward a notch, or three.