Vinyasa?

How'd we do it? Vinyasa krama.

Thanks to everyone who made our inaugural Summer 2025 retreat, a half day joy fest in Southampton, Long Island, a tremendous success. How'd we do it? Vinyasa. Don't fret now - not the American-popularized style, the concept! It’s not a style, but a way of life.

The step-by-step approach is my best friend. Prone to overwhelm with significant tasks, my favorite take away from Krishnamacharya is vinyasa krama, the full term from which Vinyasa is derived. The concept, co-opted to be a style, is barely a half of a generation old in Westernized Yoga; however, it’s nothing new in Yoga’s ancient context.

Krishnamacharya is famed for having crafted elaborate, elegant, classical sequences of asana-s, which is where the “style” originated. Ashtanga Yoga was there, yet most practitioners are completely unfit for the practice. Enter: creative teachers who extracted core parts of it and heavily elaborated. Sometimes thoughtful and grounded in his teachings, the closer one has learned to the source; yet, most often heavily choreographed, overdone, uni-dimensional and counter intuitive. And downright opposed to what we know to be safe, holistic and aligned with Patanjali and Krishnamacharya’s wise, ancient teachings, targeted toward healing.

Much of the Yoga we see in our lives is diluted, and practitioners can be deluded, thinking that just because Yoga is in the name of the class, that it’s actually Yoga. Vinyasa can be applied within practice to an asana. For example, inhale open and raise your arms while raising your heels. Exhale, lower your heels and arms. It can be applied to an entire practice, tat kala vinyasa, the practice you are doing at that time, start to finish. It can be applied over time, dirgha kala vinyasa, evolving as we do, throughout our lives.

In the same way, it’s applicable to how we approach our goals. Conceiving of practice in this way has given me the insight to deconstruct long term goals into a series of smaller incremental steps. For someone like myself, not the most fond of change, but aware that it’s exactly how we evolve, the intelligent arranging keeps me feeling motivated without being overly anxious. Keeps me focused when I want to throw in the towel. Paces me, while grappling with my fluctuating levels of sraddha. Keeps me curious when doors close, or seem to be closing. Keeps me steady while everything around me is in flux, and quite frankly, sometimes chaos.

Applying Yoga in your every day life requires knowing the concepts, using them in practice, reflecting on them, and developing a working relationship with them, so we can effectively improve our relationship with ourselves and the other selves we are dancing with in this wild life.