Naomi Annand - Yoga : a manual for life

BLOOMSBURY SPORT

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright Naomi Reynolds, 2019

This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Illustrations and cover illustration Kate Winter

Yoga pose photographs Scott MacSween

All other photographs Laura Edwards

Design by Studio Polka

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Contents

Directory of poses and techniques

Introduction

What yoga means to me

Just after my 21st birthday I bought myself a round-the-world plane ticket, thinking I was embarking on a journey into the unknown. It had been a traumatic year: injury had ended my career as a ballerina with the Royal Ballet. Seemingly overnight, years of training were rendered obsolete and for the first time since I was 10 years old, my life was stretching out in front of me with no obvious destination. Back then, I imagined that the adventure would be geographic and external, indexed by the stamps in my passport and the escapades I experienced along the way. Little did I know that the great personal discovery of this trip would not be out there in some uncharted landscape, but inside in the great unknown depths of myself. And the key to this, of course, was yoga.

To begin with, the attraction was primarily physical. After more than a decade of high-stress ballet training and years of dancing en pointe, my body was a mess: I had a cyst on the back of my knee, a fractured foot, arthritic feet and adrenal fatigue. But slowly, over the course of many weeks, in backstreet Thai boxing gyms and hot studios in downtown Honolulu, I started the process of mending myself. I stopped limping. My shoulders relaxed. My chest opened. My toes spread. I started to remember that my body was a part of me, not simply a tool to be wrung for all its worth.

But as I went through this process of bending and breathing and paying radical attention to my every action, I also experienced a more profound change. My confidence blossomed. I started the necessary conversations with myself that allowed me to grieve a vocation lost. I started to learn how to accept myself as I was. It might sound corny, but I befriended myself, maybe for the first time in my adult life.

And as this continued I realised that this was what I had to do. By the end of the year I was teaching full time and I havent stopped since. After 10 years of teaching all over the world, I set up a studio, Yoga on the Lane, in east London, hoping that I might introduce to others the practice that had done so much for me, as well as connect with teachers and yoga students of all stripes to develop a meaningful community. This book is an extension of that. All around me, I see people struggling with the demands of modern life: its pace and stress and relentlessness. But I also see how yoga can and does help people develop a more sustainable way of being in the world. Of course, this means articulating a practice that works for the here and now, a yoga that is alive to the reality of life, with its time constraints and hectic schedules. Here it is, then: Yoga: a Manual for Life.

How to use this book

Ive been teaching yoga for almost 20 years and the one thing Ive concretely learned is that Im still a beginner. Yoga is enormous. Its endless. Depthless. Its impossible to get to the end of it. It may sound like an awful self-help clich but Im afraid, folks, its true: the journey really is the destination.

Sometimes its exactly this that stops people from starting. Yoga just seems too big to conquer. Theres just too much to take in: breathing, moving, spirituality, philosophy. But whether youre totally new to yoga or an experienced practitioner, the starting-off point is exactly the same: you on your mat.

And its this essential, beautifully simple union that Im going to concentrate on in this guide. Trying to capture the enormity of the practice in a single book would be impossible; its philosophical breadth and historical weight alone are enough for a five-volume tome. And so, this book makes no claim to be the definitive guide to yoga and its ancient lineages (and I make no claim to be the person to write that book!). Instead, it is a guide to modern yoga, specifically its poses and how they can be combined in sequences to make you calmer, happier and more creative.

Of course, even this is highly subjective. What follows is based on how I practise yoga, based on my life experience and whats been good for me and, I hope, a good number of the many students Ive taught. As Ive always approached my classes with them, my intention with this book is to collaborate with you to help you discover how you might be your own best teacher.

As such, the bulk of the book is made up of Asana Libraries: detailed instructions on how to get into each of the practices most useful positions, where to place them in a sequence and common mistakes to watch out for. Obviously, these are things you could learn with a yoga teacher at a studio, and this book isnt intended as a replacement for that, rather as a complement to it a way of refining and deepening your practice at your pace.