Slowing Down Yoga Quotes

Balance comes from slowing down, from taking deep breaths, from understanding your body and what it needs. It comes from accepting who you are and loving yourself every step of the way.

Some of us would take our time, if we knew that we are rushing to our deaths.

S.T.O.P. = Start To Open Possibilities

Yogasanas have often been thought of as a form of exercise. They are not exercises, but techniques which place the physical body in positions that cultivate awareness, relaxation, concentration and meditation. Part of this process is the development of good physical health by stretching, massaging and stimulating the pranic channels and internal organs. When yogasanas are performed, respiration and metabolic rates slow down, the consumption of oxygen and the body temperature drop. During exercise, however, the breath and metabolism speed up, oxygen consumption rises, and the body gets hot. In addition, asanas are designed to have specific effects on the glands and internal organs, and to alter electrochemical activity in the nervous system.

Yoga is a perfectly imperfect practice, and the very next day we may hit a plateau that can slow us down or even stall us indefinitely. You know you have flow in your practice when you reach such a plateau and don't automatically react with frustration and anger.

Restorative yoga is just one way to slow down the DMN. Once you start searching, there are plenty of good mindfulness exercises that can “ground” you—get you out of your damn head and into the world. I started trying all of them out and asking friends what worked for them.

ADVICE ON SLEEPING “Many people will tell you that they can’t nap. The one thing I learned from a single yoga class I took many years ago was to slow down my breathing. I just keep breathing slowly in and out and don’t think I must fall asleep. Instead, I think things like, Sleepytime! and just focus on my breathing. I also make sure it’s dark in the room, or I cover my eyes with one of those airplane sleep masks. Also, I set my phone alarm for twenty-one minutes because turning a short power nap into a longer sleep can leave you groggy. This amount of time gives me what’s basically a cognitive reboot.” —Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist and catnap queen

You have to pay attention to that inner voice. Yoga, meditation, sitting in nature, slowing things down, and appreciating this moment are all ways to achieve this. You must check in with yourself. Most of the time that you are dwelling on the past or worried about something in the future is a waste of time. The practice of coming back to the present moment has made me calmer, less reactive, and more grateful. In my younger days, I had a much harder edge, and I used my humor in ways that were unkind. I know I’ve dropped that way of being, and it’s wonderful to let it go. It’s unnecessary and self-destructive.

Sadhana Sit in any comfortable posture, with your spine erect, and if necessary, supported. Remain still. Allow your attention to slowly grow still as well. Do this for five to seven minutes a day. You will notice that your breath will slow down. What is the significance of slowing down the human breath? Is it just some respiratory yogic acrobatics? No, it is not. A human being breathes twelve to fifteen times per minute, normally. If your breath settles down to twelve, you will know the ways of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e., you will become meteorologically sensitive). If it reduces to nine, you will know the language of the other creatures on this planet. If it reduces to six, you will know the very language of the earth. If it reduces to three, you will know the language of the source of creation. This is not about increasing your aerobic capacity. Nor is it about forcefully depriving yourself of breath. A combination of hatha yoga and an advanced yogic practice called the kriya, will gradually increase your lung capacity, but above all, will help you achieve a certain alignment, a certain ease, so that your system evolves to a state of stability where there is no static, no crackle; it just perceives everything.

Practicing yoga promotes peace. When you slow down and tune in to yourself, you feel more confident, less stressed, stronger, and free from negativity. It truly is being good to yourself; it is your gift to yourself.

Perhaps it means that we are, in every moment, to remember the whole, to remember the gift of life, to remember the preciousness of every second. When we do this remembering, something shifts inside us. When we do this remembering, we talk differently, we act differently, and we treat self and others differently. When we keep our awareness on this moment with gratitude, we increase our ability to choose how we act and how we interact with the world. To worship is to remember the sacred, however we conceive of it. ... When we slow down and open our heart and mind, we realize that we can't conclusively answer any of the really big questions about existence, especially questions of meaning. Not that we should stop trying! But slowing own and opening up allows us to enter a state of wonderment and humility in the face of the vastness of creation. This state is one of worship, a silent and embodied worship that is not necessarily shaped by specific ritual. Rather it is shaped by our intention and our willingness to understand on a profound level our small place in the Universe. This embodied worship allows our kinship with all beings and all of nature to become more than just apparent to our conscious mind. This kinship is now lived from our very cells. To experience this level of joy is not only to worship it is also to become worship. ... You could say that to worship is to invite the sacred to fill our body, mind, and soul, to surrender to the great mystery, however we experience it and whatever name we give it. The great benefit of this willingness to invite the sacred in is that it helps us feel healed and whole in that moment. When we worship in this broad way, we surrender our struggling ego and mind to the wholeness of creation and thus feel a little less burdened, a little less overwhelmed, a little less afraid. ... Worship is rather an internal shift stimulated by the external activity that we call ritual. To worship is to assume a new relationship with yourself and all creation - with God. To worship is to be willing to be unsure, unresolved, to admit how much we don't know and will never know. I invite you, dear reader, to be open to daily worship, to set aside any narrow interpretation of what worship is. Instead, allow yourself to imagine the possibility of creating a continuous conversation with the sacred. That is the path of the mystic, and it can live as a comfortable companion in a secular life. Worship is the music of the soul and as much is the ultimate universal language. In the end, to worship is to acknowledge life on the deepest level. Perhaps life itself is the ultimate prayer, the ultimate worship.

In meditation, you train your body to be still and your mind to slow down and focus on a point of concentration.

Restorative yoga is just one way to slow down the DMN. Once you start searching, there are plenty of good mindfulness exercises that can “ground” you—get you out of your damn head and into the world. I started trying all of them out and asking friends what worked for them. For some people, popping an ice cube into their mouth or eating a big bite of wasabi helps shock their systems into paying attention to a sensory experience. A journalist I knew had a lot of success tapping his face and hands. Lacey loves to focus on the rhythmic feeling of her feet hitting the pavement during a long walk or taking a swim in icy water. Another friend melts into a happy puddle when she covers herself with her weighted blanket.

In a culture committed to doing, striving, and pushing, what many of us need to cultivate is the critical counter-balance of "undoing," slowing down and being fully present in this precious present moment. This is the heart of our "Relax into Yoga" approach.

Success can be as simple as waking up healthy, alive, and grateful that the sun has risen another day and it is warm enough to enjoy it. Success can be having the freedom in your morning to start your workday slowly, with a cup of hot chocolate, a journal jot, a tarot-card pull, a stretch on your yoga mat, or a favorite library book.

Walking and hiking does this. Cooking does, too. The witchy, grandmotherly type of cooking where you prepare things from scratch and you treat it as a hobby, not a chore to be rushed through. Fermenting vegetables gets me back in sync. Yoga works. Hot and slow and controlled by breath, breaking down to our bone-heavy pace.

Quieting the internal strife frees the spirit. Leonard is constantly refining his techniques for getting high. Drugs don’t work anymore. Neither does public acclaim or the music industry or Scientology (which he once was into), but yoga, fasting, and his writing help. So does Suzanne. The process is ongoing and more profound as the years pass. You can see it on his face. Refining. Always refining. And that’s why I search out Leonard. Why I love the man. Leonard knows a lot about searching, and I’m trying to become better at it myself. He turned me onto it. My brother crystallized it when he took me aside one day and said: “You don’t like yourself very much. That’s why you run around. You’re afraid if you slow down you’ll find out there’s nothing to you … but there is.

mind and breath (or life energy) are closely connected. Influencing the one means influencing the other. When we are upset, we breathe faster. When we are calm, our breathing slows down. Yogins understood this early on and invented a battery of techniques for controlling the breath in order to control the mind. These techniques are called prānāyāma, which is widely translated as “breath control.” The literal meaning of this Sanskrit term is “lengthening of the life energy.” This is accomplished through breathing rhythmically and slowly and through the special yogic practice of prolonged retention of the breath, either before or after inhalation. In Patanjali’s eightfold path, breath control constitutes the fourth limb. He did not describe or prescribe any specific technique, and elaboration was left to the adepts of Hatha-Yoga many centuries later. They, like most other Tantric adepts, were eager to explore the prāna-maya-kosha, or the “etheric body,” and its subtle energetic environment. By contrast, most contemporary schools of Hatha-Yoga ignore prāna and prānāyāma, just as they ignore the mental disciplines and spiritual goals, and instead promote a plethora of physical postures (āsana). This emphasis is problematical, as it has led to an unfortunate reductionism and distortion of the traditional yogic heritage. The gradual re-inclusion of prānāyāma into contemporary Hatha-Yoga, however, is very promising, because this practice sooner or later leads to an experiential encounter with prāna, which is distinct from mere oxygen. According to Yoga, we are meant to live a full 120 years. Since we take 21,600 breaths every day, the total number of breath in our lifetime will be 946,080,000 breaths. This may seem like a lot, but we also know that life goes by very quickly. Therefore it makes sense to want our every breath count, and Yoga makes this possible. 53 Cultivating Wisdom WISDOM ARISES IN US whenever the quality of sattva grows stronger in the mind. Sattva, which literally means “being-ness,” is one of three primary qualities (guna) of creation. The other two qualities are rajas (the dynamic principle) and tamas (the principle of inertia). These primary qualities underlie absolutely everything that is other than the superconscious Spirit, which is pure Awareness. According to Yoga and Sāmkhya, they are the behavioral modes of prakriti, often translated as “Nature” but standing for the universe in all its dimensions. Together, in various mixtures, they shape all forms at whatever level of existence, material and mental. Only at the transcendental level of prakriti—which is called prakriti-pradhāna or “creatrix foundation”—do the three qualities exist in perfect balance. As soon as this primordial balance is disturbed, the process of creation sets in, beginning with the most subtle (mental) manifestations and terminating with the material realm. Sattva represents the principle of lucidity or transparency, as it manifests in and through wisdom. Just as the moon, which has no atmosphere, oceans, or vegetation, reflects the light of the sun, so sattva reflects the super-conscious Spirit

The seventh limb of the classical yogic path is meditation (dhyāna). This is a deepened state of concentration in which the same object is held unwaveringly for a long period. It is a more complete form of surrendering the mind. It is no longer a mental effort, but a state of reposing in a noncontracted condition of the body-mind. This condition is beautifully described in a passage in the ancient Chāndogya-Upanishad (7.6.1) where we can read: “Meditation certainly is more than thought (citta). The Earth meditates as it were; the atmosphere meditates as it were . . .” That is to say, meditation is abiding in the natural state, without mental complications. The practitioners of Yoga surrender the mind’s tendency to appropriate different objects, whether external or internal. Instead they trust in the Self as the Experiencer of all, the unfailing Continuity behind the incessant change of the finite world. The last limb of Patanjali’s eightfold path is samādhi, which is generally rendered as “ecstasy.” The world-renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade proffered an alternative rendering—enstasy. This coinage takes into account that samādhi is not so much a state of exuberance, as suggested by the word “ecstasy,” but a condition of great stillness and focusedness in which we “stand in” (en stasis) our true nature. Eliade’s coinage, however, has not achieved wide currency, and therefore, after using it in several of my publications, I reverted to the more common term “ecstasy.” The previously described techniques of concentration and meditation cause a slowing down of the movement within the mental world. In the state of samādhi, our inner architecture can be said to collapse altogether. For the practitioner surrenders the characteristic feature of human consciousness, which is its bipolar nature, its tension between subject and object. In samādhi, the experiencing subject becomes the contemplated object. At the highest level of this paradoxical condition, the experiencing subject awakens as the transcendental Self, realizing that he or she has never been anything else but the Self.

And now. This moment. It moves too fast. This is the practice, the way we slow down time. Each breath is a gift, each one an opportunity for reflection, focus, and purpose. What's gone is gone. What's ahead isn't real. I take each breath as it comes. Here. Now. I am here now.

Whenever you take a deep breath, you activate the SNS. The resulting burst of adrenaline speeds up your heart, which explains why many athletes take a few short, deep breaths before starting competition. Exhaling, in turn, activates the PNS, which slows down the heart. If you take a yoga or a meditation class, your instructor will probably urge you to pay particular attention to the exhalation, since deep, long breaths out help calm you down.

According to yoga philosophy, the human personality is a constant interplay of these three elements – inertia, energy, and harmony. All three are always present, but one tends to be dominant at any given time – in a day, throughout a stage of life, over a life itself

imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain— fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun waiting and ready to caress the chill from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember— when it is too late to pray the end of the flood we pray instead to survive it.

You’re not sure why you have that feeling, so you slow the car down. You have a green light and there’s no obvious reason to be cautious, but just as you reach the intersection a car from the street on the left, which was hidden by a building, careens wildly through the intersection. You suddenly realize with a shock that if you had continued driving at a normal speed that car would have smashed you broadside on the driver’s side. The bad feeling in this case might have been caused by presentiment—a future moment of fright affecting you in the present.

Another way to help an active child slow down to allow tiredness to set in is to use a relaxation technique such as massage or yoga.