Moving into Winter

Any change takes time. Sometimes we have no choice, there is no time, a loved one dies, the birth of a baby, a job is lost, you fail something you have put a lot of effort toward, or even the simple reality that winter will soon be here.

Change is not easy and we often meet it with resistance as we try to keep the stasis. We are asked to move and adapt all the time, yet it unsettles us, it shakes our cells, and then we do things to adjust. I am sure you are familiar with your ways of coping, like resistance (I haven’t got the time, I won’t go), denial (change happens all the time, just get on with it) over-compensation (seeing as I am buying this thing I cannot quite afford I will buy two).

In a yoga practice, one of the aspects we work with is balance and stability. What difference does winter make? One way to cope with the change as it gets colder is to not do our early morning classes/ practice, but then some rhythm is broken.

Inversions offer a transition, a coming back to centre, and a strengthening of this centre. They train us to be stable and to increase the amount of time we are in that stability, to balance, and to be aware of what is going on.

Head and shoulder-stand, Sirsasana, and Sarvangasana are the queen and the king of our practice. Headstand brings strength and stability, and Sarvangasana brings reflection, opening, both emotional and physical. When I first started practicing yoga shoulder-stand was an emotional watershed for me, I wanted to do the longer timing, but tears would just leak from my eyes, a grief, I knew nothing about, would break my heart open. I see these reactions in students too. Handstands can cause great fear, a kind of freezing and heaviness.

Once these responses are worked through, inversions provide a centre for us, taking us from the periphery to our core and developing stability in change.

Caroline Coggins, May 2013.