A Skinny Cow Is Not Yet A Gazelle…

A Skinny Cow Is Not Yet A Gazelle…

     - Get dressed in hot items!

     - Lose weight or got your muscles well exercised!

     - Good makeup can do wonders!

     This is the list of the most popular answers to the question of how one can make oneself look more beautiful. Here we shall note that people usually judge about their own appearance standing in front of the mirror or looking at the picture. And in this way they forget that the adequate perception of a person as a whole is possible only subject to observing the dynamics of the moves of his body, his facial gestures and the structure of his speech. One’s natural, well-coordinated and easy movements without neurotic gestures and a well-disposed facial expression make it possible to perceive the person as the one of natural beauty. Unlike the market pattern of beauty that emphasizes only the sexuality of one’s appearance that requires a good deal of both time and finance for its maintenance.

     In my opinion one should start to improve oneself with working out the dynamics of one’s body, with mastering the easiness of movement of every part of it. And frankly speaking, it does not matter much what way you choose to start doing it with: trying various kinds of sport in turns, trying different dance styles or doing yoga – the main point here is that you should enjoy it and it should not be detrimental to your health. Moreover, it is such doing different kinds of exercises that will help you avoid a specific deformation of body posture that is characteristic of some particular kinds of sports. It would be also good to periodically change the whole lifestyle as well, but this is already the next question to discuss.

      When start working on your body, you should first define which part of it is not that harmonious-looking. In order to do this you can use video, and it’s not necessary to shoot the exercises. You can take the movie of any event where you behave in your natural way. It would be even better if you were unaware of your being filmed. Try to analyze the way you stand, you walk, gesticulate, what poses you strike when talking to people.

      For instance, if you find out that wearing nice high-heeled shoes makes you look like a “wounded grasshopper”, you should start with mastering the smooth gait without heels and with your foot flat on the ground, adding up the equilibrium poses and evenly distributing the body weight on the foot. Such skill can also come as a result of doing various sports that train the balance-keeping.

      Or you’ve discovered that the clothes that were fitting so nice when trying them on have suddenly started to pucker up. Perhaps, you natural desire to look “more stately” in front of the mirror cannot transfer into the habit of imposing walk due to weak muscles of your back or chest. In this case some proper work should be done with your spine.

       There is a number of methods you may use for this purpose. But for already mentioned sports and dancing you can also get some result from physiotherapy, physical exercises and massage. But it’s probably only yoga as spiritual exercises that helps to understand the psychological backgrounds of disharmonious body posture and to proceed with conscious choice of the target and direction of your development, without falling into “dependence” upon a fitness instructor, a massage therapist or the social patterns.

The Guidelines for Those Who Start Practicing Yoga

Depending upon various understandings of the targets of yoga there exist a number of various styles and methods of yoga practice. Here I would like to give some explanations concerning my view of the initial practice of the yoga that I call yoga for life.

Those who start practicing yoga should take into account the initial condition of their organism that depends upon numerous factors, the basic of them been: the medical condition, the sports habits, the age, the body type. And it is not only the physical load on body but also the proper consequence of the methods of working with this body that should be correctly matched in consideration of these aspects. So, here are a few words about these factors.

A person having some serious diagnosis should start from therapeutic yoga groups or, if the case is even worse, from the doctor-led rehabilitation therapy. A competent yoga instructor knows the list of diseases that can entail negative results if practicing in scope of a standard group. I shall remind here that in defining the category of health the World Health Organization considers not only physical, psychical and moral well-being, but takes account of the social and material as well. And in one’s preparation to yoga practice of advanced level one should consider the situation in all of the said aspects. The required basic level of the strong organism ready for yoga practice assumes the availability of time, energetic and material resources. In this case the person shall not be driven by the desire to merely escape to yoga from his everyday problems.

In our reference to sports habits we obviously mean the kinds of sport that actively engage the whole of physical body. That is, the body has been formed under the influence of the respective physical loads and it’s as if been “sharpen” for them. Usually this is the level of the 1^st sport category and higher. Even in case there were some athletic injuries or occupational health problems in the sphere of sport the sportsmen usually come as already rehabilitated persons, or at least they know how to deal with it. As a rule, these people have a good feeling of their body and in scope of matching the exercise load their age limits can be increased by another few years, so that such people can be suggested visiting the basic yoga group ca. up to their age of 40. However, here we should also consider the remoteness of the person’s professional sport activity.

As an instructor, in terms of intaking the groups of those who want to practice I usually focus on people aged 20 to 35 (here a rather mean the biological age than the one given in passport) – this is the basic group. I shall explain the figures. Though in this country the person officially comes of full age at 18 and some people only start living when they turn 35, for me such choice is not random. The young generation of our age is characterized by some later emotional maturation. And it is only by one’s 20’s that one may have some moments initiating to adult life, so that the person starts to think and take decisions on his own. One shall then proceed to accumulate the life experience, while there is some solidarity in interests of the people belonging to the ‘up to 35’ (approximately) age category. Besides, the condition of the physical body in this period is more or less the same, and it makes one’s practicing in one basic group more comfortable.

To my mind, further effective division of groups in compliance with age scale shall be approximately the following: 35-45 years, 45-55 years and so on.

It also depends upon both the age and the medical condition of the person – whether the work with one’s body should be of training, maintaining or therapeutic character.

Within the process of mastering yoga techniques one should always take account of the specific features of one’s body (first of all I mean the muscular tissue to adipose tissue ratio). It’s not always that the person who starts to practice yoga can sort this out himself. For instance, one usually becomes alerted when having excess weight or being skinny. But don’t you make haste in getting rid of the overweight by means of increasing the physical load without establishing the reasons of the excess kilograms. This may be the consequence of puffiness or some disease of the cardiovascular system. Sometimes the excess adipose tissue may come as a result of hormone disregulations or other malfunctions that assume contra-indications against abrupt increase of exercise load. The proper diagnosis should also be established if one’s figure is too gaunt (you can at least start with general blood test), especially in our time when the line between telling the slender body from the sickly thin one is too vague.

I don’t adhere to yoga practice treated only as the means of upgrading the capabilities of one’s physical body. I shall be satisfied with the minimal required level of my organism’ survivability that can provide my life with colours and my body – with pleasant sensations.

Some of the wise men used to compare the body with a camel that the soul rides during its life journey. Should the camel die early, the soul will be unable to see all the delights of its journey. But it will be a great disappointment and regret if the whole journey turns into mere process of taking care of the camel and combing out his hair.

On Good Old Kumbhaka...

It’s not for once that one comes across a delusion circulating within the circle of the people practicing yoga that the more intensive is the muscular and volitional strain the practicing person is able to maintain the longer shall be the ceasing of breath at inhalation. However, as a rule, these are not only the muscles keeping one from exhaling that are strained in this case, but the panic-stricken body as a whole. And we all know the fact that the strained muscle consumes much more oxygen that the relaxed one.

Therefore in order to master the Kumbhaka technique one should first of all practice relaxation and get the habits of overcoming the breathing stereotypes.

Here is another method of mastering Kumbhaka. While standing breast-deep in a swimming pool or some outdoor water body one should breathe out the whole of the air with one’s head above the water and in relaxed manner dive into water. The task is to remain relaxed to the maximum as long as possible. This should be repeated in series and periodically, with gradual increase of the time spent under water. In scope of performance one should overcome the stereotype of compulsory inhale before diving (the breath holding when in water comes as an unconditioned reflex) and get the organism accustomed to refraining from panic as long as possible in the situation when one lacks air and has no possibility to breathe.

Dedicated to my Teacher...

 Praise to Soviet pioneers of Yoga who

have implanted the idea of Life in the mournful

process of the Soviet people’ surviving. May their

views directed at the attempts to distort the

understanding of the essence of existence

remain free from despair. May the force and persistence

be with those who have infused the ideas of

spirituality into human thoughts.

(a cry from the depth of a person who has been practicing yoga for almost a quarter of a century)

A man of today is active and energetic. Almost all his needs are “cultivated” by models to emulate. He has the proper example of the level of income, the example of appropriate clothes, the specimen of regular figure, the patterns of upright behaviour for getting married and a number of other “appropriatenesses” the person is perplexed with every other moment of his life. And if somebody by chance drops out from the dense layers of the fussing crowd, having become contented with the available amount of stuff and the number of sexual partners, he will get the opportunity/the risk of feeling the desired essence of his existence. One may continuously think about the sense of life in scope of the existing “patterns” as well, for there is such a model supported by public opinion, but I am sure that one cannot comprehend the sense of one’s life. This sense can only be felt, and becoming aware of this sense comes as the process called Life.