Synch Your Body to Autumn Rhythms With Yoga
If you feel a pull to change your routine as the seasons change, you’re in synch with insight from ancient texts that suggest how the seasons - changes in heat, damp and light - impact our bodies’ abilities to maintain homeostasis, another word for balance. For our purposes, Autumn means mid-September to mid-November because the set of light, heat and humidity conditions are transitioning now.
Autumn is the perfect time to strengthen our systems through
how we move, breathe, eat and use our minds. You can make a major impact on your health and sense of wellbeing at these inflection points. If you’re already paying attention to your body’s signal to change things up - you’re ahead of the game! How you practice yoga can enhance your body’s natural rhythms, which modern life does a really good job of pulling out of whack.
At Badlands Healing Yoga, we practice in synch with the seasons, in the way that ancient texts and healers suggest. While you’ll experience all different kinds of body, breath and image practices in every class, different seasons we’ll focus on different kinds of practices, suggested by these texts, to support the body processes most in need and most used during those seasons.
In Autumn we’re experiencing a lingering but diminishing heat, a reduction of daylight and in many places a waning humidity. We use our movement, breath and image practices to help support awakening digestion, release pent up heat that we weren’t able to let go of when the Summer was so tempting and begin to return to more energetic practices like Sun Salutations to support immunity and balance. By using movement, breath and mind to balance the shifts in light and heat and any excess moisture (Hello, Fall allergies, I’m looking at you!), we can support our nervous, digestive, respiratory and immune systems into a healthy holiday season.
In your yoga practice, consider not only the asana, or movement you do, but your breathing patterns, imagery and even your daily routines: wake, sleep, self care and even your food choices. We’re not looking at anything super prescriptive or limiting. Most of it is actually pretty common sense and is likely to make you say, “Oh, yeah, I knew that….” and wonder why you’re not already doing it. The answer probably has something to do with overwhelm: where to start, how much to do…. Start with one thing you’re not already doing that seems really accomplishable. Add that, see what falls away. Maybe you add 5 minutes of breath practice in the morning for a month. Seasonal eating the next. This is your lifetime, not a race. Do the next thing, that is all. By practicing with us at Badlands Healing Yoga, you’ll have the Asana, Pranayama (Breath Work), and Meditation parts all set in one neat package. Schedule your class and let us cue you through your practice. Feel better.
Asana:
Add the Sun Salutations back in: a little slower than you were rocking at the Spring Equinox, and maybe not all the Sun Salutations. A couple to limber up or more for a morning practice, linger over poses that feel really good.
Backbending in General: think Upward Facing Hands, Locust, Supine Hero Pose, Cobra, Camel. Fish comes in for the lead!
Invert! Shoulderstand here we come! Do this with a teacher first.
Maha Mudra: Like Head to Knee Pose, but with all three bandhas engaged after the exhale. Learn it first with a teacher, for real.
Agni Sara Kriya: the belly pump with all bandhas engaged after the exhale. Yep, learn it with a teacher first.
Looking for some reach poses with some prime belly action? Lolasana and Mayurasana - Pendant and Peacock Poses. We’ll be approaching these with preparation and blocks in some classes. Remember, everything is optional.
Always, always, balance your practice with counterpose. Every inhale deserves - needs! - an exhale. Every backbend deserves a forward fold. The focus is on backward bending, opening the front of the body, and we follow the rhythms of yoga that make it a healing practice.
Breath:
Ujjayi is always appropriate for engaged practices.
Kapalabhati, a warming breath, starts to slowly come back in the morning when you aren’t already dying of heat.
We keep the cooling breaths - Chandra Behdana, Shitkari and Shitali, Horse and Bumble Bee and double down on the Chandra Behdana. Also known as left nostril breathing, you can either breathe in and out through the left only, or breathe in left, exhale right for a slightly mellower experience.
Meditation Imagery: Harvest, Roots, Tratak, also known as Gazing. For Gazing Meditation, you can use anything for a point of focus. Popular options are Sri Yantra and, a little more simple and accessible, an Om symbol you can draw, or a candle flame.
Wake/Sleep Routines:
Don’t be surprised if you’re rising a little later or harder if you can’t go later. The Sun is, too! It’s generally helpful to rise a little before technical sunrise - when roosters crow and birds start to sing, or 30-60 minutes before your app says sunrise.
Same thing with bedtime: start turning screens and lights down a little earlier and turn in with that good book or your journal just a touch earlier. You’re body is starting to make more melatonin and you want all of that!
How You Fuel and Enjoy the Bounty of Harvest:
As always, the focus is seasonal: think roots, apples, squash, onions, garlic, nuts and seeds, the last of the seasonal fruit.
Keep it light - your digestion is just recovering from the summer heat.
Favor Sweet and Bitter flavors, among all the six wonderful flavors (the others are Astringent, Salty, Sour and Pungent… not quite time for green chilis to be your main condiment, but get ‘em and peel ‘em for winter!)
Keep your proteins light, for instance, chicken breast.
Consider a week of kitchari and steamed veg, or maybe just really clean eating, right in the middle - around October 15th. This can be included in a larger week of reflection and self-care or just a week of focus on how clean eating can be fabulous, delicious and fun, how to use new spices and explore how it feels to give your belly a little rest.
Self Care:
Somewhere in the middle of this 2 month period - again, like around October 15th - start self-oil massaging (abhyanga) again to nurture your skin for winter.
Oil Pulling: usually with sesame, 2-3 minutes after your morning 16-24 ounces of room temp water (oh, yeah!), swish some oil around before you floss and brush.
In general, double down on your routines, whatever they are. Re-affirm them. Give them a zhush.
Energetic yoga in the AM. Grounding, calming yoga in the PM. 5-15 minutes will transform your entire day. Do it in your jammies. Do it in your bed. Do it next to the bed, in the bathroom. It’s yours - play with it!
Pick one of the above habits you want to re-affirm or start and incorporate it starting next week. Use the rest of this one to imagine how it will fit and feel into what will fall away. Pick another one next.
Commit to transforming just one habit a month - wake a little earlier or later, shut down screens a little earlier, oil pulling, a new morning or evening yoga time.
Like Coco said, before you greet your public, remove one accessory: is there one thing you can remove from your to do list? One thing that wouldn’t be the end of the world? After you add in a new habit, you’ll be surprised what can fall away with ease and grace.
You’ll know you’re on the right track when you realize you have a little more energy or clarity, a little less of something you maybe didn’t even realize was in your way. Give it at least two weeks.
What’s the alternative? In nature, what isn’t growing is dying. Allow your body clock to continue drifting out of synch with the universal rhythms of light and dark, hot and cold, wet and dry and the things that are nuisances now will grow to obstacles.
Use Autumn’s transition to connect to yourself, nature and your body’s natural balance and healing rhythms.
