YogaResource.net Author's Practice

Author's Yoga Practice

Hatha Yoga Pradipika is a 15th-century yoga text. Chapter 1 verse 65 says “The practitioner will succeed; the non-practitioner will not. Success in yoga is not achieved by merely reading books.” Verse 66 goes on to say “Success is achieved neither by wearing the right clothes nor talking about it. Practice alone brings success.” It is like everything else in life: you have to experience it, as well as learn about it, in order to understand it.

“Do as I say, not as I do” is not credible advice, so let me describe my hatha yoga practice. It is based on the principles of this website, including the process described on the Yoga Practice Design page. My practice consists of yoga asanas & vinyasas, plus yoga sun salutations. As introduced on the About the Author page, my practice is founded conceptually on the ancient texts Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Gheranda Samhita, and Yoga Yajnavalkya, implemented through a melded approach from Krishnamacharya and Mohan, a dose of Iyengar, and a touch of Indra Devi, Desikachar and Pattabhi Jois. To my yoga practice, on many days I add some qigong. A couple of times weekly I hop on a treadmill or ellipse machine for serious cardiovascularpulmonary work.

My yoga practice goal is simply to live my life healthily. Physically that means flexibility, strength, coordination, balance, agility, and endurance. I am not interested in what I call “sport yoga” or “competitive yoga,” but there lurks in me a minor appearance concern -- I’m not proud of that (it is not very spiritual), but don’t we all have it to some degree? To look at the bright side, in another way I am making progress: I used to care about how much weight I could lift in the gym or how many Level III yoga poses I could do; now I just want to be healthy and fit enough to go through my daily life.

Here are the details of my practice design & execution. First, let's look at the objectives of my yoga practice and the design of my practice to achieve the objectives. Click on the Practice Design Summary below.

Practice Design Summary

Now let's look at the asana routines to implement my practice design. There are three routines below: 1) Whole Body routine, 2) short Whole Body routine, and 3) Sun Salutation. My daily yoga practice consists of one of these routines, selected on the basis of circumstances and preference, sometimes modified on that day to reflect the principles of Vikrti. Click on any routine to look at the specific asanas of the routine.

Asana Routine for Whole Body

Short Asana Routine for Whole Body

Sun Salutation

This is a link to a YouTube video of my Whole Body Routine: Yoga Resource Hapuna. Some still photos of asanas from my yoga practice are shown below. Neither the video nor the still photos are good enough for yoga texts, but they are suitable examples of hatha yoga for someone of my body type, health, age, lifestyle, fitness goals, and my interpretation of asana form for my interests and capabilities. They are an example of a real person using yoga for personal benefit for my life. They illustrate Flexibility, Strength, Coordination, and Balance. Sun salutations (not included in photos) and gym cardio work satisfy my Agility & Endurance requirements. Basically I am happy with my yoga practice.

Note: these photos were taken before I had any thought of a website, as a test of my computer camera’s capability to take unstaged photographs of me in various vertical and horizontal yoga poses. They have been cleaned up somewhat for lighting, shadows, and removal of unwanted background objects, but they are still pretty amateurish. Sorry....