In the Viniyoga tradition of Krishnamacharya and Desikachar, yoga poses/exercises (asana) are used to prepare the body for meditation. The meditation is a process of exercises while focusing on an object. The object could be gross, such as a mountain, or subtle such as a concept. The teacher chooses the object for the student.
The Mudras are also specific yoga asanas, which are often referred to as poses or exercises in the west. These Mudras are an advanced practice and should be done with the guidance of a qualified teacher.
Thoughts:
1. What tradition did you study?
2. I think a good teacher would make a difference if you studied a different tradition/line of teachers.
3. I'm interested to know what you are practicing.
4. As I mentioned before there are people doing private mentoring, but you have to look for them and find one that you like. We need to get a directory going, but that will take time. If you want, you can ping me here: [email protected]
and I can try to help you find someone.
orhmeh09, there's no link for me to reply to your comment. So I'll post here.
My understanding of things like boils is that the body is not able to release the toxins quickly enough through the digestive system, so it releases them through the skin.
The pranayama I was doing was pushing my body to get rid of toxins. After doing some juice cleansing, I was able to do this type of pranayama.
I practice on my own. In our tradition, yoga is taught one to one. There are some classes you can find, but the intent of these is to introduce people to the tradition and for people to get to know the teacher a bit before doing private sessions. Yoga is taught this way so that the program that a person follows has been customized for their situation. This can have a great effect.
Back to your question. My teacher is fully booked and not taking new students. He mostly does seminars and teacher trainings. His name is Chase Bossart and he studied with TKV Desikachar over a 20 year period.
I've had almost 12 years of study with Chase and I'm now teaching on a limited basis. There are other students of Chase here in the SF Bay area and there are many people who studied with Desikachar around the world.
There could be many different issues that could arise, it depends on the person. I will note an experience that I had.
I had been doing a Viniyoga practice for 1 or 2 years. I do pranayama in my asana (the physical exercises) and at this time I was not doing a separate pranayama practice. My teacher changed the pranayama in my practice and I became ill as if having a bad flu and I had some nasty boils break out on my legs. In retrospect, I needed to do some detoxing before doing this type of pranayama. My teacher kept me away from doing that pranayama for one or two years. Now I can, and have, been doing advanced pranayama for many years with no issues. I do this mostly in my asana practice but I do have seperate pranayama practices that I can do as well.
Agree! Pranayama and other yoga practices are very powerful and effective. It's very important to have an experienced teacher rather than trying to do it yourself. These practices can have very strong effects and can be misused. There is a lot of misinformation floating around. I recommend finding an experienced teacher in the Krishnamacharya/Viniyoga tradition.
This is an interesting quote that I think is somewhat relevant:
“Can these four Yoga Aṅga – Yama, Niyama, Āsana, Prāṇāyāma
– be practiced by everyone at every stage of life?
How often and how long should one practice?
How can we adapt our practice to changing circumstances?
These questions and others like them must be answered by a competent teacher,
according to each student’s individual circumstances.”
– T Krishnamacharya’s commentary to Yoga Sūtra Chapter One verse 30
In my experience I did some period of time (I can't remember how long - probably a few months) working on asana before I started meditation. In our tradition dhāraṇā is the first step in meditation, but is also part of asana practice.