About
Surya Warriors is a space where one can cultivate a practice of yoga for yourself, nurturing your own nature to the fullness.
Taking cues from the ancients, breathing techniques are used to encourage a compassionate relationship with ones’ own body and ultimately oneself through an asana (physical postures) practice. The emphasis is on softness of breath and softness of body, the ability to relax into the asana, starts the process of building both physical and mental strength.
If you are maintaining a regular practice but are unable to attend a live zoom class, I will be building an accessible library enabling a practice at a time that suits you, outside of the scheduled classes. The library will be inclusive of your subscription membership.
Taking a step out of your busy, or not so busy calendars, to create a moment in time to either energise, relax, heal or be mindful will benefit not just yourself but those around you.
Brief history
Yoga has been passed to us from the pre-Vedic civilisations that settled in the Indus Valley and the practices have evolved from the records of that time.
The earliest meaning of the word yoga, is to bring two things together, yoking or union. The definition of what is being joined has changed and adapted throughout the ages as the practices have also changed and adapted. Todays general academic consensus is that “joining two things such as the essence of an individual with a transcendent reality”.[1]
Yoga at its core consists of meditation for concentration, pranayama (breathing techniques) assisting with purifying the body and asana (physical posture) to gain and maintain suppleness in the joints and muscle groups, whilst building strength and aligning the skeletal system in moments of stillness.
In our current era, there are now many iterations of yoga, the more popular being an asana (posture) based practice. The asana-based practices have also flourished into many different forms. The contemporary forms that you may be familiar with are Ashtanga, Bikram, Iyengar, Hatha, Restorative, Vinyasa Flow and Yin just to mention a few.
Benefits
More and more people are finding the benefits in taking up the practice as therapy along with maintaining a level of fitness within the body. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) advocate regular exercise with yoga at the top of their list.
Yoga can help with disorders of the nervous system, cardiovascular system, respiratory system, endocrine system, and the digestive system. It can also be helpful with the recovery from injuries, again bringing realignment to the muscles to support the skeletal system.
Modernity
The proliferation of yoga today in its many forms has shed the idea of yoga being for people looking for alternative lifestyles. Footballers use yoga as part of their training schedule, elite tennis players rely on relaxation and mind quietening techniques. And many celebrities from theatre to film, writers, musicians, and artists use yoga as a part of their fitness regime or a tool to get deeper into their form of art. Yoga as a business has moved far away from the notion of a ‘hippy, sitting crossed legged and chanting’ and its benefits as a healing and therapeutic practice are now being used medicinally as science catches up with how a regular practice of yoga progresses and supports the mind and body.
[1] Ruth Westoby The Shala School of Yoga manual 2020
Online yoga classes for all levels 