It took me some time to get into yoga. I had been doing choreography for 10 years since early childhood, and then practiced Qigong and Kung Fu. I first tried yoga in 2003. Although I liked it, I didn't practice for long as it was difficult to combine with Kung Fu training. However, the seed of interest in yoga had been sown. The next time I came across yoga 4 years later, I began practising regularly; simultaneously doing bodybuilding and Vietnamese Wushu. Gradually the other disciplines faded and only yoga remained as an interesting holistic system of knowledge for me.
I became acquainted with critical alignment in autumn 2014 at Gert van Leeuwen's workshop. Since then my relationship with my body started to change. Step by step I learnt to listen and hear what it has to say; to recognize bad movement habits; to understand where they come from; to release my physical tension and what stands behind this tension; to give the body a sensation of lightness, comfort, stability and freedom; and to increase body awareness.
In a precisely built asana, without tension, the body feels inner warmth, light vibration, and the mind gradually calms down. In such a state the body suddenly merges into the surrounding environment, time stands still, and the sensation is one of emptiness and fullness at the same time. I am grateful to Gert that now the most interesting place on the planet for me is my own inner world. Now that my inner support - my spine – has become stronger and more flexible, even if difficulties come my way, I can bend but I won't be broken, and I can return to my centre again.
For me yoga is an inexhaustible system of knowledge about human structure in general and about life in all its forms. That's why I constantly keep learning and acquiring knowledge, not only from workshops and seminars, but literally from all people I come across. There are lots of yoga schools now and they differ one from another in methods and approaches. It is pointless to argue which one is the right one. The right one for you will be the one you feel with your whole heart and embrace with your whole body.
For me it is critical alignment, because it helped me to comprehend (become conscious of? become more self-aware of? ) myself through my body. Not only on the yoga mat, but also in my daily life. Perhaps you will choose bits from every yoga system and it will be your own personal yoga. Which is natural, after all. Yoga is an individual practice, a subtle sensing of yourself, a perceiving your own inner world. You are unique.
Come and we will get to know ourselves better.
I've been teaching yoga since January 2011. Before then I worked in fitness (power training, Pilates, stretching, and wushu)