Yoga: A Manual for Life
By Naomi Annand
5/5
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About this ebook
In Yoga: A Manual for Life Naomi Annand shows you how to use the ancient practice of yoga to live better in the modern world.
Utilising simple, breath-led movement, this beautiful practice companion teaches you how to wake up feeling energised, calm an anxious mind, sleep better, feel inspired.
Ideal for total beginners to more experienced yogis, this manual includes everything you'll need to live a more balanced, grounded life, from five-minute lifehacks to longer sequences with specific goals in mind.
Always accessible, Yoga: A Manual for Life has at its centre the principle of authentic self-care. Be calmer, happier and more creative.
Naomi Annand
Naomi Annand has been a yoga teacher for 20 years and a mother for seven of them. Naomi lives in east London with her family and runs her own yoga studio, Yoga on the Lane. She published Yoga: A Manual for Life in 2019 (Bloomsbury).
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Reviews for Yoga
3 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Loved the book. Pure joy to read. Inspiring, uplifting, encouraging
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very well organized; written information about yoga and clear photos of yoga poses and directions.
Book preview
Yoga - Naomi Annand
Contents
Directory of poses and techniques
Introduction
What yoga means to me
How to use this book
What is yoga?
Breath is everything
The liberation of total focus
The search for balance
Radical acceptance
Getting started
Asana libraries
1/8 Standing poses
2/8 Balancing poses
3/8 Arm balances
4/8 Inversions
5/8 Back bends
6/8 Seated poses
7/8 Prone poses
8/8 Restorative poses
Three essential vinyasas
Sun Salutation A
Sun Salutation B
Lunge Salute
Sequences
A sequence for the morning – wake up and be inspired
A dynamic practice – to uplift and energise
Slow flow – mindfulness in motion
A grounding practice for anxious minds
Gut instinct – yoga to nourish your belly brain
Yoga for balance – finding clarity and simplicity
A simple practice for self-compassion
Yoga for better sleep
Strictly restorative – yoga if you can’t face standing up
Final repose
Belly Breathing
Three-part Breathing
Seated Meditation
Forward-facing Savasana
Weighted Savasana
Humming Bee Breath
Legs at the Wall
Turning Inward
Breathing practices
Small change, big difference
Reboot your posture
The daily Savasana
Laptop survival kit
Mini mindfulness
Face massage
Apply some pressure
Demystifying meditation – the two-minute check-in
The power of the body scan
Simple steps to better sleep
Essays
Yoga and difficulty
Yoga and discipline
Yoga and suffering
Yoga off the mat
Yoga and self-care
Poem
Acknowledgements
Further reading
Directory of poses and techniques
Alternate Nostril Breathing
Belly Breathing
Boat Pose
Bound Angle Pose
Bow Pose
Bridge Pose
Cat Pose
Camel Pose
Chair Pose
Child’s Pose
Cobra Pose
Constructive Rest Pose
Contented Pose
Cow Face Pose
Cow Pose
Crescent Moon (High Lunge)
Crow Pose
Dancer Pose
Diamond Pose
Dolphin Pose
Downward Dog
Eagle Pose
Even Breathing
Extended Puppy Pose
Extended Side Angle Pose
Fire Log
Foetal
Forearm Stand
Forward-facing Savasana
Four-limbed Staff Pose
Garland Pose
Gate Pose
Half Happy Baby Pose
Half Moon
Half Split
Handstand
Happy Baby Pose
Head-to-knee Pose
Headstand
Hero Pose
Horse Pose
Humming Bee Breath
Knees-to-chest
Legs at the Wall
Lizard Pose
Locust Pose
Low Lunge Back Bend
Lunge Salute
Mountain Pose
One-to-two Breathing
Pigeon Pose
Plank Pose
Plough Pose
Pyramid Pose
Reclined Bound Angle Pose
Reclined Hand-to-big-toe Pose A, B, C
Restorative Pigeon Pose
Revolved Chair Pose
Revolved Child’s Pose
Revolved Extended Side Angle Pose
Revolved Half Moon
Revolved Seated Pose
Revolved Triangle Pose
Savasana
Seated Forward Fold
Seated Meditation
Seated Side Line Twist
Seated Twist
Seated Wide-legged Forward Fold
Shoulder Stand
Side Plank
Sphinx Pose
Staff Pose
Standing Foot-bound Balance A and B
Standing Forward Fold
Standing Pigeon
Standing Revolved Twist
Standing Side Bend
Standing Splits
Sun Salutation A
Sun Salutation B
Supine Twist
Supported Child’s Pose
Table Top
Thread the Needle
Three-part Breathing
Tree Pose
Triangle Pose
Turning Inward
Upward Dog
Upward-facing Forward Bend
Victorious Breath/Yoga Breathing
Warrior One
Warrior Three
Warrior Two
Weighted Savasana
Wheel
Wide-legged Standing Forward Fold
Wind-relieving Pose
Windscreen Wiper Twist
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 haven’t 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
I’ve been teaching yoga for almost 20 years and the one thing I’ve concretely learned is that I’m still a beginner. Yoga is enormous. It’s endless. Depthless. It’s impossible to get to the end of it. It may sound like an awful self-help cliché but I’m afraid, folks, it’s true: the journey really is the destination.
Sometimes it’s exactly this that stops people from starting. Yoga just seems too big to conquer. There’s just too much to take in: breathing, moving, spirituality, philosophy. But whether you’re totally new to yoga or an experienced practitioner, the starting-off point is exactly the same: you on your mat.
And it’s this essential, beautifully simple union that I’m 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 what’s been good for me and, I hope, a good number of the many students I’ve taught. As I’ve 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 practice’s 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 isn’t intended as a replacement for that, rather as a complement to it – a way of refining and deepening your practice at your pace.
It’s also intended as a tool for those keen to develop a self-practice that they can do at home – a flexible form of self-care that can be fitted into the small gaps that open up in our hectic, time-poor modern lives. For this reason, the nine sequences that feature here are all adaptable; some can be done in as little as 10 or 20 minutes, or form the basis of a longer practice if you have the time. And each has a specific intention at its heart, be it to de-stress, uplift or ground, depending on your mood and your life circumstance.
And for those days when even 10 minutes feels impossible, I’ve included a list of immediate interventions, yoga life-hacks that can be done in a minute or two. I’ve called them Small Change, Big Difference because they really can bring about amazing shifts in little time.
Even before I became a mum to two small children and found the time available to practise almost disappear completely overnight, I always subscribed to the little-and-often approach to yoga. Not only is it more manageable, but it’s also well established that we learn better like this. What’s more, our nervous system responds to the practice more readily this way – it’s able to take on board these small recalibrations and develop a new, healthier baseline. Incremental changes lead to lasting results. Find the small spaces in your schedule (as little as five minutes) and make them the punctuation of your day.
But just because these moments are snatched doesn’t mean that you can’t strive for authentic focus. To help with that, I’m a firm believer in practising without music. Music is so evocative, so laden with associations and memories, that it prevents me from being completely present in the moment. And the point of yoga is about being radically here, alive and awake in the now. If you’re going to listen to music, listen to music, give it your full and rich attention, be present in it. And if you’re going to do yoga, do yoga.
And it’s in this spirit – radically paid attention, little and often – that the book is structured. I don’t imagine anyone sitting down and reading it through from start to finish. More, that you might use it as a reference guide to hone your practice when needed, and also as a source of inspiration, something that can be dipped into when you’re looking for a fresh approach, or a new angle to an at-home sequence.
Of course, before you start putting together your own sequences, you need to acquaint yourself with the fundamentals, beginning with the essential, foundational questions: what is yoga, and why am I practising it?
What is yoga?
This is one of those questions that when you sit down and properly think about it quickly engenders another, more pertinent question: what isn’t yoga? Because when you really get into it, when it starts to open up new ways of seeing, stimulates new ways of thinking, yoga quickly stops being something that just happens on the mat and expands to embrace all facets of life off it: spirituality, philosophy, morality, compassion, selfhood, love. For the purposes of this book, however, I am going to focus on the physical practice, since for most people this is their way in to yoga, their entry point, which for some will turn into a lifelong journey. But even when you choose to concentrate on the physical aspect of yoga, you quickly realise that there is no one yoga. There are dozens of yogas, each the product of the practice’s many lineages, its different focuses and approaches. And so, again, this book makes no claim to speak definitively, only personally.
For me, the physical practice of yoga is mindfulness in motion, flowing, breath-led sequences that open up layers of perception and remind us that we are embodied souls walking alongside others just like us. Having tried many variants of yoga, I have found that Vinyasa Flow (also known as Dynamic Yoga) captures this best for me. Vinyasa means to ‘place in a special way’, an indication of the precision and mindfulness at its heart. And just because it flows, it doesn’t need to flow fast. Slow, steady movement is the aim, with special attention paid to the transitions between poses. Unsurprisingly, for many people this radical focusing of their attention becomes the springboard for a new kind of relationship with themselves. They become more self-compassionate, more accepting, less quick to judge themselves. Which then leads to becoming, almost necessarily, more compassionate towards others, more accepting, less quick to judge. The social implications of this can be startling at the level of the family or friendship group and, I believe, genuinely emancipatory at the level of society. For these people, yoga becomes a way of life, a tool of personal transformation. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a 30-day challenge. It doesn’t promise instant miracles. It’s not a green-juice fast or a quick fix. It is a set of practices that might over time become life principles.
A great many brilliant books have been written about this process and the great many limbs of yoga: its philosophy, its historical lineages, and spirituality. For those who want to find out more about these matters, I have included a Further Reading list at the back of the book. For now, though, our focus is on the first step: mindfulness in motion. And it is this principle that animates all that follows.
Breath is everything
Bringing your total focus to your breath isn’t part of the practice, it is the practice. It is only when your awareness and breath are yoked together that you start to be able to experience your body through your breath, instead of through the thinking, judging part of your brain.
But this is difficult. We’re not used to using our breath as a tool. In fact, when we’re not thinking about it we often hold our breath when we’re concentrating. And this is the approach that has to be unlearned, which takes time. When you first start practising yoga it’s easy to find yourself directing all your focus on to the pose, particularly when it’s challenging and alien to the way you’ve moved before. I know people (my husband, particularly) who have found