Tread Lightly

If you do any form of vinyasa yoga there's a good chance you're going to be asked to "hop forward" or "hop back" into our out of some pose eventually. Sometimes it's a hop back into chaturanga, or hopping forward into a forward bend (standing or seated). Maybe your practice is crazy cool and you hop forward into eyeball defying arm balances. Either way - there's a reason people often use the word "hop" rather than bound, leap, or explode.

Hopefully with everything you do in a yoga practice, but especially in these transitional bouncy actions, you should ideally be seeking some level of grace or lightness of being. This is not happening at all when you throw yourself haphazardly forward with a loud "BOOM" that shakes the floor. It's harder on your bones (it might even break a couple if you're truly unlucky) and it sets up all the wrong tones for your practice. It also might scare the bejeezus out of your neighboring practitioners and that's not very nice.

How do you step lightly in yoga? Draw in toward your midline... pull inward and upward with your core. If everything is moving in and up, it's unlikely to fly apart at the seams and come crashing down. At first this might be hard. At first you might fail miserably - but that's why it's called practice.










Just so you know... I don't hop into arm balances. I wish I could, but it's not in my bag of tricks. Yet.