The Art of Yoga as a Individualised Process aims to reflect the fundamentals of Śrī T Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar’s teaching, namely transmission occurs through the personal involvement of the teacher with the student’s individual experience of Yoga practice and study through 121 Lessons.
Who are Individual Yoga Lessons for Personal Learning or Healthcare for?
Private lessons can be for anybody in any situation or life phase, though those with specific interests or needs will find the advantages of working individually more beneficial than groups. Furthermore certain situations may better suited to individual Lessons requiring personalised practices and lifestyle advice customised and developed for home use within the privacy of a 121 meeting.
Whether interested in learning Yoga as a:
- Personal Art or ability to achieve something through intense physical and mental effort, for instance to cultivate and maintain a state of concentration or to develop the body and the breath through exploration and refinement of of a wide range of postures or breathing or chanting techniques.
- Means of Self-Inquiry or meditative path both into and beyond what we view as the everyday self, its actions and its motives, this offers a space that can allow our actions or especially reactions to be less influenced by the more usual patternings within the mind.
- Form of Therapeutic Healthcare or restorative and preventative support, to help us work at changing or even anticipating the impact of problems and illness on our lives.
Meeting face to face individually can be beneficial with time to discuss your priorities in developing a practice appropriate to your lifestyle and short term and longer term requests. This is still seen as the most realistic way to explore Yoga practice in terms of realising our potentials according to the individual and given the many variables between our personal stories and current situation.
Personal Yoga Lessons can be offered whether for Development, Support or Recovery
Thus whatever your situation 121 lessons mean Yoga can be customised to meet your needs as a:
- Developmental Practice for Personal Pursuits of body, breath or mind, or
- Constitutional Practice for Lifestyle Support in sustaining health, energy and vitality, or
- Therapeutic Healthcare Practice within Recovery from illness, disease or unhelpful lifestyle consequences
It also provides an opportunity to adapt, refine and develop your Yoga practice and lifestyle support strategies, firstly by respecting your limitations and then exploring your potentials. Here time can be given to exploring your needs and developing personal practice and lifestyle support skills appropriate to your current situation, interests and ongoing and changing commitments.
Yoga Lessons are uniquely Customisable and Developmental according to your Needs
In modern life Yoga practice can be applied both developmentally or therapeutically to enhance health, well being or life potential from many different directions, such as to support our efforts to:
- Access specialised integration of specific Yoga or Chanting Practices
- Improve and Enhance personal fitness and energy levels
- Explore and Access physical potentials and specific physical goals
- Influence and Elevate attention and focus in mental or emotional states
- Address lifestyle skill issues, unhelpful living rhythms and dietary patterns
- Reduce dependency on social and medical drugs or overeating
- Learn to care for health issues such as back pain, arthritis, asthma, circulatory or digestive disorders
Utilising Yoga concepts it is possible, within a careful individual Yoga teaching, to introduce practices and lifestyle skill strategies that both respect our issues, problems or health, as well as supporting our intention to reduce their negative effects in the future, alongside cultivating positive alternatives.
“The Viniyoga of Yoga is a process rather
than just a collection of techniques.”
Here the approach must be different for each person as our potential to practice Yoga will be affected by the problem, or the problem by our attitude towards working with it. However, practicing Yoga for healthcare recovery, as a lifestyle support skill or for personal development also presumes that we are willing to accept responsibility for making and sustaining changes within our own situation.
“In the novice phase of our relationship with a 121 Yoga Teacher,
it’s not so much about what we bring to the Lesson,
it’s more about what we take away from the Lesson.A sign of a maturing in our relationship with a 121 Yoga Teacher,
is that we accept more responsibility for what we bring to the Lesson,
being a determining factor in what we take away from the Lesson.”
Also according to Āyurveda those diseases that are chronic and cannot be cured by medicine alone can also be helped by using Yoga. So Yoga can be used as a support alongside or complement to other forms of healthcare.
A Personal Yoga Practice is designed for regular use at home
It can vary from a two or three times daily short 10-15 minute practice for Yoga as therapeutic healthcare, to an hour or more single practice for students, depending on its role and how much time the Yoga student is prepared to make available. Typically it is around 25 minutes for beginners working with general postures. This can expand as we develop our work with postures or embrace progressive facets of practice.
“The spirit of Viniyoga is starting from where one finds oneself.
As everybody is different and changes from time to time,
there can be no common starting point,
and ready-made answers are useless.
The present situation must be examined and the
habitually established status must be re-examined.”
– TKV Desikachar
The Yoga Teacher guides the student through the Yoga practice, carefully ensuring that it meets their needs and that they are comfortable with the structure and forms used. The frequency and overall span of personal Yoga lessons can vary according to the needs, concerns and requests of the Yoga student regarding such as seated breathing, meditation or other practices.
