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What is Kripalu Yoga?
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Although yoga traditions vary widely in their approaches, most teach the same basic yoga postures.
Here are the attributes unique to Kripalu Yoga:
• Practice begins gently with an emphasis on being present in your body, sustaining a flowing breath, and warming up. The overall experience is one of learning to love and nurture your body, develop a sensitivity to it, rather than pushing or forcing it into shape.
• The practice allows you to chose the level of intensity that is right for your body and teaches you how to listen to your body and honour it’s needs. Kripalu Yoga is practiced in a variety of ways some of which are: gentle, moderate and vigorous vinyasan routines or through creative freely inspired intuitive freeform movements or restorative practices.
• It recognizes that every body is different. It views postures as tools to release chronic tension, stretch and strengthen the body and increase self awareness. Rather than forcing the body into the classical form pre-maturely. Postures are modified to meet the needs of the students. This form of yoga places an emphasis on safe practice.
• It activates the life force of the body that yoga calls 'prana'. Rhythmic breathing charges the system with energy. A balanced sequence of yoga postures encourages breath to flow freely and evenly to all parts of the body. As the practice deepens, the life force becomes more active and can be felt as warmth, tingling, and currents of energy.
• It encourages you to create a lifestyle supportive of your health by listening to your own body. Kripalu Yoga considers each person’s body the ultimate authority on what promotes health and teaches you how to access this body wisdom to live with more vitality.
• It’s a yoga you can practice off the mat. Through Kripalu Yoga, you discover that the same principles that bring out the best in you on the yoga mat, can be applied to daily life. You can learn how to meet the challenges with a sense of relaxation, self acceptance, strength, courage and openness to change.
• It offers practical tools to foster psychological and spiritual growth. By teaching you how to fully feel strong emotion and compassionately observe the activity of the mind, Kripalu Yoga fosters emotional healing and facilitates psychological growth. As a result, your ability to express yourself, listen to others, and be in relationship deepens. Kripalu Yoga also includes sensible spiritual teachings that demystify the process of spiritual awakening and make it accessible to contemporary people living active lives.
"You can straighten out the tail of a dog, but the moment you let it go, it snaps back into it’s original shape. That is why yoga places such importance on character building principles."
- Swami Kripalu
• It acknowledges that regular yoga practice is designed to initiate a process of personal transformation. By nurturing the body, opening the heart, and clearing the mind, Kripalu Yoga removes the obstacles that so often stifle and stunt the natural progression of human development. Regular practice stimulates an ongoing process of positive change that inspires you to realize your full potential.
One senior Kripalu teacher best describes Kripalu Yoga as...
"being open to the questions and the inquiry into our bodies, our emotions, our breath, our witness consciousness, our souls."
- Devarshi
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