The only way to truly experience yoga is to make it an integral part of our daily lives. While doing a few stretches, breathing techniques and meditation once or twice a week may make you feel a little better than not practising at all, it is only when you connect with a comprehensive system of yoga practices and integrate it into your daily routine that yoga will really start changing your life for the better.
To help you make this qualitative change and establish a transformative routine that is easy to follow, practical, and with effects that are immediately palpable in your daily life, is the aim of this course.
Over a period of only ten weeks, you will get an in-depth exposure to all the major systems of yoga practices that each deal with a different aspect of our personality:
- Asana: yoga postures and dynamic movements. These take care of your body and make it stronger, more supple, and free from blockages.
- Pranayama: working with prāṇa, the energy that animates the body and mind, through breath and awareness.
- Shatkarma: the cleansing practices of Hatha Yoga, designed to remove impurities from the body as well as to stimulate the nervous system. This makes all other yoga practices more efficient, and helps to remove the physiological causes of lethargy, depression, and other low-energy mental states.
- Mantra: often misunderstood as “calming vibrations”, esoteric devotional practices etc., mantra yoga is an exact science with the power to directly transform and harmonise the mind, and free us from various vicious cycles of thinking and emotional upheavals that we often get entrapped in in the course of our lives.
- Deep relaxation: practices that take less than 15 minutes, as well as the longer and profoundly rejuvenating technique of Satyananda Yoga Nidra™, to help you unwind, de-stress, and recharge thoroughly, quickly, and efficiently.
- Meditation: practices that gradually develop our ability to maintain moment-to-moment awareness as we go through the day, allowing us to make positive changes in real time rather than being subject to the pulls and pushes of everyday life.
- Yama and Niyama: inner behaviours which, when cultivated, allow us to gain maximum effect from our yoga practices, by connecting them with actions in the external world. In fact, yoga practice without including these methods of mental reprogramming can lead to many undesirable side-effects, such as an inflated ego, and/or reinforcement of old mental patterns. Often mis-translated as “moral principles”, these are common-sensical adjustments to the way we think, feel, and act in relation to ourselves and our environment.
- Background to all practices is also given to help you understand where they are coming from and where they can take you.
All these elements are presented in a down-to-earth, practical, and easy-to-follow manner, allowing a gradual integration into your daily routine. The method of introducing the various practices is based on the Yoga Capsule system devised by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati (Bihar School of Yoga): rather than requiring an extensive time commitment once a day, the practices are split into “capsules” – small chunks – that you can seamlessly interweave with your daily routine, so they become your second nature.
In the Yoga Lifestyle Foundation Course, this is done through:
- a series of ten 2-hour classes – or rather workshops – with a different focus week after week, in combination with
- regular home practice, ideally 4-5 days a week, for which you receive all necessary guidance
- a progressively increasing library of instructional video clips, audio recordings, and PDF materials,
- home practice feedback in the closed community space of this course, ensuring you’ll never be left struggling on your own.
This allows for personalised modifications of the recommended timings and amount of practice, to suit your particular needs, aims, and situation in life.