Deepen Your Yoga Practice: The Complete Guide to Breath, Alignment, and Mindful Movement for Practitioners Ready to Move Beyond the Basics
A practical guide to breath, alignment, and mindful movement for yoga practitioners who have stopped making progress.
You know the feeling. You show up, you move through the sequence, you leave, and nothing has changed. You do this for a month. Then six. Eventually you realise you have been holding the same postures the same way, with the same limitations, for longer than you want to admit.
Every book on the shelf offers the same answer: go deeper, work harder, take a stronger class. That advice is usually why you are stuck, and it is where injuries come from.
After twenty years of teaching, the author has watched hundreds of experienced practitioners hit the same wall. Almost none of them had the problem they believed they had. The student who chased an arm balance for eleven months had a breathing fault, not a strength deficit. The woman told for a decade to square her hips was built so that her hips would never square. The practitioner with the most admired backbend in the room was hinging on two vertebrae and could not understand why his back hurt.
Every one of them was working hard on the wrong thing. This book teaches you how to find the right one.
What you will learn
Why your ribcage, rather than your hamstrings, may be the reason your forward folds feel compressed
The five breathing faults common in experienced practitioners, and a ten-minute test that identifies yours
How to distinguish a limit made of bone from a limit made of tissue, and why forcing the first one damages joints
Why the majority of yoga injuries occur below the waist, and how to recognise the pattern before it develops
How to read your own nervous system before practising, so that a vigorous session lands on the days it helps
How to sequence a practice for the body you have today instead of following someone else's script
A twelve-minute practice that keeps your progress intact during the weeks when a full session is not possible
Twelve chapters. Thirty-six working sessions. Twelve detailed cases.
Each chapter is built around a practitioner who was stuck, what everyone assumed was wrong, and what was actually wrong. Including one concerning the author's own hip, seven months of misdirected work, and the ten-minute assessment he never thought to perform on himself.
Who this book is for
Practitioners with a few years behind them who know the postures, can move through a sequence without instruction, and have run out of road.
Who it is not for: complete beginners. The material moves faster than serves someone starting out, and the book says so on its first page. It does not promise rapid flexibility, does not claim your limits are all in your mind, and does not replace a qualified professional where one is needed. Where the material reaches the edge of what a book can responsibly cover, it says so and directs you elsewhere.
The practice has decades in it. Most people stop somewhere in the third year because it stopped giving anything back and nobody explained why.
You are not finished. You are between resolutions.
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