One Teacher, One Student: The Deep Tradition of Viniyoga
Working one-on-one provides the context for personal growth
When I was taking a lot of group yoga classes, I was learning a lot about myself and about yoga. I was also getting frequent shoulder injuries because group practices weren’t always safe for my body. During that time, I had a very generous teacher who was willing to chat after class and sometimes she’d take an extra 10 minutes to check out my shoulder to try to figure out what was going on. Maybe she’d have a good tip or suggest something to try, but those quickie consults weren’t addressing the underlying instabilities that were making me vulnerable to injury again and again. I kept going back to class, continued to practice and continued to get injured worse and worse each time. Ten minute quickie consults every couple of months just couldn’t help me identify the problem with my movement or help me create a new way of doing things because that wasn’t the right context for personalized help.
When i found my Viniyoga teacher, i could address my shoulder pain and I got proper instruction on what postures were unsafe for me and what ones were possible in a modified way. i started to listen to the messages from that area, instead of listening to the cues of the group instructor. It was in these lessons that I could bring questions about my body and received the individualized guidance for my practice. This was the appropriate context for getting the kind of guidance I needed.
In one-on-one lessons you can learn how to practice yoga for your body and how to apply the teachings in your life. Skilled Voiniyoga therapists know how to apply yoga āsana, movement, breathing, chanting, and meditation so that they meet the student where they are and help them to go forward. Learning and support happens in your sessions, but the most impactful work is yours. Growth comes from the practice you do around and between sessions. Daily home practice is an essential and empowering part of the process and your teacher can design it with skill. Through reflection, practice and efforts you’ll test out and apply what you’ve learned and figure out how to engage with the teachings in a way that is meaningful to you.
This is, in many ways, the original design of yoga. For many thousands of years, yoga was not a public workout, but a transmission between teacher and student. refined and adjusted step by step. Yoga developed in this context and it continues to serve serious practitioners in profound ways.