Lecture: Awakening our Warm Up
(Videos Below Text)
Warming Up Awareness with the Three Jewels
The three jewels is a concept in both the Buddhist and Yogic tradition that describes the fundamental components of a spiritual path. They are traditionally described as the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. The Buddha represents having a teacher, but it also represents the healthy, focused and blissful true nature that resides within us all. When this aspect of our being becomes the director of our daily activities, we grow and flourish. Dharma refers to the teachings that guide us on the path, the practices that literally generate the inward focus of spiritual practice. And Sangha refers to the spiritual community that keeps us afloat as we move through deeper layers of our being and grow together.
When we approach our mats to begin our yoga class, we can use these three principles as focal points to prepare ourselves and our students for a productive physical and spiritual experience. The Buddha represents taking time to re-direct our awareness inside by down-regulating our nervous system through pranayama and relaxation. The Dharma, or teachings, are the practices we use to guide our student’s awareness within over and over again through rolling and cultivating inner sensation. And finally, the sangha represents our body’s buoyant muscles of support known as the Deep Core, like a sangha, these are the muscles that keep you afloat during the vast majority of life’s activities. When these three jewels are present in our warm up, we can be sure that the rest of our class is guaranteed to benefit us in all three worlds.
The Buddha: Redirecting our awareness to down Regulating our Nervous System
Biologically speaking, your body’s Teacher or Director is the nervous system, informing every move we make. Unfortunately, Scientific studies and direct personal experience have shown that this director is in an over-stimulated sympathetic state of fight/flight most of the day, and it is inhibiting their ability to direct our body in a sustainable way. The urgency of our jobs, the constant stimulations of our phone, the worries and planning of our mind mind keep us working long after work is over. This is much like being a car that is accelerating, but not knowing how to press the brake. Yes, we need to be able to press the gas pedal during our day, but we also need to be able to brake if we are going to make it safely from A to B. Yoga itself, and especially the warm up, is a time that we set aside to help our students understand how to oscillate between these two facets of our everyday life. To better understand this we can take a deeper look at the nervous system itself, and then discuss ways to keep it in a balanced state. (Review of Pertinent Anatomy and Physiology Sandy Fritz MS, NCTMB, ... Glenn M. Hymel EdD, LMT, in Clinical Massage in the Healthcare Setting, 2008Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/parasympathetic-nervous-system(accessed 30.1.2021)
Overview of Nervous System: Our nervous system has two main components, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The brain and the spine constitute the central nervous system, the control center. The nerves enervating your organs, muscles, limbs and skin constitute your peripheral nervous system, connecting the central nervous system to the rest of the body in order to allow it to direct how we interact within our environments.
The Peripheral nervous system is divided into two parts, somatic and autonomic.
‘Soma’ is Greek for ‘Body’. The somatic nervous system plays a vital role in initiating and controlling the movements of your body. This system is responsible for nearly all voluntary muscle movements. such as walking, talking or typing. These nerves are further divided into sensory and motor nerves, which we will touch on in our next section of the warm up. For now we will look closer at the autonomic nervous system.
The Autonomic nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system that regulates involuntary aspects of our body functions, such as heart rate, blood flow, digestion and breathing. This system is constantly running in the background and can function in a sympathetic or para-sympathetic state in order to meet our life’s moment to moment demands. The sympathetic state is like a gas pedal that increases our heart rate and blood flow, helps us sweat to regulate our temperature and even dilates our pupils to aid our work. Evolutionarily this was essential when hunting prey, running from a predator, or just getting us through the demands of our daily lives. This is the state we enter when approach our desk and need to get down to work— it’s a productive state. Studies have shown, though, that there is a limit to the sustaining this focused state, after which it becomes inefficient— about 1.5 hours actually (Huberman). At this point it is essential that we can apply the brake and down regulate our nervous system to the para-sympathetic state, which literally slows the heart rate, decreases the blood flow, closes the sweat glands and un-dilates the pupils— to name a few.
We have all heard of the para-sympathetic state as ‘rest and digest’, which is true, but we don’t always have to be on our couch to be in the para-sympathetic state. It is also the state of letting yourself focus on simpler tasks, like doing dishes or cleaning your room. It is a calm state that allows us to recharge between the tasks of our day. It is not only essential for our physical health, but also to ensure proper functioning of our sympathetic state when we need it. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “give me six hours to cut down a tree, and I will take the first four sharpening the axe.” This is a great way to envision the ratio of sympathetic and para sympathetic in our day. Each one is best— and the ability to pivot between the two states is the most essential aspect of our work with either of them.
For the purposes of our time on the mat, we can rest assured that our class probably needs to take time to down regulate their nervous system when they arrive. For the most part, our culture has their foot on the gas pedal without even realizing it— and we don’t even know where the brake is, really! We don’t know how to slow down, and that’s why we have to dedicate the beginning of our class to showing them the path to down regulating their nervous system.
The most important way to establish this shift is simply by beginning our class by lying down, or sitting comfortably in order to just arrive. Once this is established we can use our breath to further regulate and arrive in a restful state.
RECHAKA PRANAYAMA: How do we press the brake in this invisible car? Most people would say ‘take a deep breath’ to help their friend calm down, but study after study after study says that a deep inhale is not only the last thing we need when feeling amped up or stressed out, but it very well could be the cause of our stress in the first place— that our tendency to inhale deeper actually stimulates our sympathetic nervous system more, exponentially increasing the symptoms we are trying to resolve. The answer that is being proposed by science and yoga is to instead focus on the exhale, and the natural pause that occurs between the breaths. It is in these moments that our para sympathetic nervous system begins to engage, our heart rate literally lowers, more oxygen is assimilated, and so on. We start simply, just allowing the exhale to finish without rushing it, and then, as the possibility presents itself, we can lengthen the exhale by a second or two, or four. For the sake of a warm up, simply taking time to invite our students to exhale naturally and fully is a huge step to preparing for class, and even inviting the exhale to be a few seconds longer than the inhale can be successful and beneficial.
Rechaka and Relaxing Exercise
The Dharma: Teachings that generate Inner Sensation
The first step to down regulating our nervous system is to let our students slow down, exhale and arrive on their mats. After that, though, we have to continue to direct our attention inside through our movements. You could say that this internal awareness is the goal of all yogic practices, that when we bring our awareness inside we not only become more skillful in our external lives, but begin to use our lives to grow spiritually. Swami Rudrananda once taught that ideally we would have 95% of our awareness inside at any given moment, and that we would only need 5% of our awareness to navigate our external reality. But that kind of shift takes effort over time, which is where our warm up truly begins.
Looking back at the structure of our nervous system we see that our peripheral nervous system is divided into autonomic and somatic, aspects that we run automatically and bodily aspects that we control. Within the somatic aspect of our nervous system we see two different types of nerves—Motor neurons and Sensory Neurons.
Motor neurons are one directional, efferent, as they carry information from the CNS to the muscle fibers of the body— not just biceps, but heart beats as well. You can remember this by thinking “efferent exits”, as efferent nerves only go from the central nervous system to the muscles and glands of the body in order to initiate an action. There are about 500,000 motor neurons carrying information from the CNS to peripheral effectors in the peripheral tissues and organ systems (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/motor-neuron).
Sensory neurons are afferent, meaning they carry information to the Central Nervous System. You can remember this by thinking “afferent arrives”, as Afferent neurons carry information from sensory receptors found all over the body towards the central nervous system. Sensory information may involve special senses, such as vision, hearing, smell, or taste, as well as the sense of touch, pain, and temperature. There are Approximately 10 million sensory neurons exist in the body. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/sensory-neuron)
This means there are 20x more sensory neurons than motor neurons. As Researcher David Lesondak reflects on this statistic, “This ratio seems to indicate that the body’s need for sensory awareness and refinement is greater than its need for motor control. Why else devote so much bandwidth to it?” (76). Which means that our nervous system is built to feel 20 times more than it is built to move. Sensation is meant to inform our movement, both before and along the way. Unfortunately, it is all too common to cue the body into this or that posture, and then to ask “how does this feel”— this misses the data of the sensory neurons that were meant to inform those actions.
So our warm up is a time to flip this paradigm— feeling first and not worrying so much about the shape of our movement. This is most easily accomplished through the practice of rolling, as it generates tremendous amounts of inner sensation, cultivates natural movement patterns, and is intuitive and thus requires less externalized processing power.
Rolling Exercise
The Sangha: Cultivate Deep Core Support
The sangha is that which keeps you afloat in your sadhana, just like you swimming with a buoy behind you, its good to have a buoy buddy of support alongside you as you navigate the deeper waters of your practice. And as we know from our hip stabilizing postures, the deep core is our buoy of support that floats us gracefully through our daily tasks.
The strength of the deep core is like the strength of a buoy, and that’s exactly the kind of buoyancy it provides. How do you feel the strength of a buoy? If you try to push it down you’ll feel its strength, and the same goes for our deep core. As we un weight our arms or legs in certain positions on teh mat, we can directly feel the deep core condense to support us. After a certain amount of lift, though, and the superficial core takes over— so the key is to really feel at that first percentage of your movement.
The key to letting your deep core rise up to support you is to focus on the first 1% of your movement, as this is the critical window of time when the deep core either engages or lies dormant. Though these muscles are powerful players, they are easily overlooked, especially when we are in a hurry, distracted or trying to touch our toes in a pose so to speak. Unfortunately, when we bypass our deep core we end up relying solely upon our superficial muscles to both support us and move us through life. These more superficial players are intended to come online when the going gets tough, and then to be allowed to retire when the work is lighter duty. Bypassing our deep core both over-taxes our superficial muscles of support, and eventually leads to atrophy in the more intrinsic muscles, a downward spiral that eventually leads to soreness and/or injury.
Taking time to generate deep core support at the onset of a movement is accomplished through un-weighting our arms and legs body in a variety of positions. The term un-weighting refers to the action of only lifting a leg or arm 1%— your leg, arm hand or foot won’t even leave the floor, yet you will feel a chain reaction of work rippling through your deep core, stimulating this internal buoy of support. The work of our deep core and un-weighting can take time to feel and generate, but once you do you wonder how you ever lived without them. And though these actions can seem very gentle, we soon realize how critical they are for proper performance in larger movements on our mats and in our lives.
Deep Core Exercises:
Summary: Your warm up is a constantly metamorphosing aspect of your asana practice, evolving with you as your own practice evolves. But for now, we ask that you take time to establish a specific sequence of postures and movements that truly awaken students to the three jewels of calming the nervous system, cultivating inner sensation and generating deep core support. For this assignment you will write a 10 minute sequence and teach it to the class for feedback. You will also start to do this warm up yourself at the start of both your personal practice, as well as the time set aside to warm up before practice teaching at the start of every class. This will allow you to feel the efficacy of your warm up, and change it as needed to become even more awakening.
Warm Up Lecture Begins: 1:30:40
Below is a compilation of the exercises from the Warm Up Lecture: