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Blog article: My Sadhana Is Taking Over My Life
Each week, from Sunday to Friday, I get up at 3 am to do a two-hour long asana practice before going in to work.
Sometimes I’m so tired, later in the day, that I’ll actually fall asleep mid-conversation. To get enough sleep at night, I have to go to bed one hour later…than my 18-month-old son. When people hear about my schedule, they look at me like I’m crazy.
And maybe they’re right. I’m freely choosing to do something that limits my freedom. Why?
Because it’s my sadhana.
Media: Elephant Journal DVD Review
Perhaps you have heard that in yoga, we ground to become light, we use our muscles to become effortless, and according to David Robson, a level-2 authorized Ashtanga yoga teacher, we can learn to float in vinyasa by creating a perfect union between breath and movement.
In this DVD, Learn to Float, David provides clearly guided instructions and detailed techniques geared toward helping us experience grace and weightlessness. He focuses primarily on Surya Namaskara A and B and covers them in three parts: Teaching, Technique and Practice.
"The beauty of the practice is that, inside of the structure of it, there is still room for interpretation." (David Robson, Co-Owner and Director of Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto)
To be honest, it makes little sense to hear David Robson, co-owner and director of the Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto, talk about struggling with focus. He wakes up at 3am each morning in order to do a few hours of asana practice before he heads out for his teaching day which begins at 6am. But then, it's often the people who have a measure of focus that know how disconcerting it is to work without it.
After completing a degree in Comparative Religion, David Robson made his first trip to Mysore in 2002, where he initiated studies with his teacher Sharath Rangaswamy. Since then he has returned annually to deepen and enrich his practice and teaching. In 2008 David was Authorized to teach Ashtanga by the Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute of Mysore, India.
I first saw David Robson speak at Yoga Festival Toronto, in a workshop he provocatively titled, Dogma and Discipline. In our hour-and-a-half workshop, David put about thirty practitioners through their paces, slowly and deliberately teaching a sun salutation, followed by standing poses from Ashtanga's first series. Words like regulation, prescription, numerical breathing, dharana, and drsti filled the air; sibilant, measured and consistent as the clock's tick on the back wall of the studio...
During his 7-day workshop in Copenhagen, Denmark, I had the fortunate opportunity to squeeze in a café Americano (times two) with level-2 authorized Ashtanga yoga teacher, David Robson.
The topic of discussion: Ashtanga yoga, of course, and how the practice itself can seem quite daunting for beginners as well as critics, the curious and even experienced practitioners.
i. There are Yogis and then there are Ashtangis. Really?
David: Ashtangis are considered ‘extremists’ maybe, but extreme on the side of yoga. Ashtangis, by following the prescriptions of tradition, tend to be very committed to this practice. It can seem that when we say one thing works, we are saying another thing doesn’t, but that’s not the case. All yoga is yoga; Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a particular path and it works, but that doesn’t necessarily mean any other path is any less effective.
I wrote about the release of Learn to Float earlier this week, and was looking forward to having the time to finally stream it and practice along. (Watch a snippet if you haven’t already.) Ashtanga.com was right in calling this production “mesmerizing.”
I think beginning and advanced ashtangis alike should download the video, stat. For less than the cost of a typical drop-in yoga class — the streaming video is $9.99 CAD (about $9.52 USD currently) – you get a 45-minute video that’s beautifully produced and keenly focused.