5 principles of Krishnamacharya

The speaker shares their experience with yoga and how they found a different approach through Krishnamacharya's five principles. They emphasize the importance of breath in yoga and how it has transformed their practice. The five principles are: 1) the breath is movement, 2) the breath envelops the movement, 3) the breath comes from above as receptivity and exhale is strength, 4) asana creates bandha (tension) which serves the breath, and 5) practicing these principles leads to a meditative state and more peace in daily life. The speaker also mentions their classes and how they incorporate these principles into their teaching. They encourage combining these principles with physical practice for a healthy body. Hey, hello there, Rutger Diergaarde, I'm going to try and explain a little bit about the five principles of Krishnamacharya's yoga. Maybe first let me get a quick story out. I've been doing yoga for a very long time, maybe 19 years more or less, starting with Iyengar and then eventually just sort of going off and doing my own thing. I think for a long time, coming from a physiotherapy background, I found it difficult to marry and unite my yoga ideals, the straight lines in the Iyengar philosophy with what my patients and my clients really could do. So I guess I already had a feeling like something doesn't add up, there's got to be a different way of dealing with things. And luckily, about a year ago, I came upon this heart of yoga philosophy, you could say it is, the means to do yoga, which is, you can apply it, applicable, it's applicable, that was the word I was looking for, to a lot of different other forms of yoga. The five principles of Krishnamacharya's yoga are very much aimed at the breath. Everything evolves and revolves around the breath, rather than the poses. And since I started doing that, things have changed for me, I literally have noticed much more of a peace inside myself, and things that I haven't noticed in all those years prior in doing yoga, before it was a much more physical thing for me to do and it has become more of a mental sort of practice now, connecting my body up, body and mind I would say, the whole thing, to what is nature really. Connecting up to myself, feeling connected to whatever is out there, around us and being much more united somehow to other people, nature in itself, but even inside the city I somehow feel that I can be more myself and connect with people, rather than being so anonymous, which often happens in cities. So what are these five principles of Krishnamacharya? Well first of all, number one is that the breath is movement and movement is the breath. There is no distinction. Rather than doing a yoga pose and doing a bit of breathing with it, it all becomes one and that is really important. The second one is that the breath envelops the movement. As you can see I've got a little fly keeping me company here as well. So yeah, the movement of the breath itself is always a tiny little bit longer than the movement of the body. So say for instance if I want to raise my arm, you start with an inhale, then start raising the arm, you finish raising the arm and then you finish that last little bit of the inhale. That is with every exercise that you can think of. The third principle is that the breath comes from above, as receptivity. You inflate the chest and receive that air, that's sort of the feminine part of things. And then the exhale is strength, it's the muscles in the abdominal region that tends to gently push the air back up and out. The masculine part of this all. You can see a little fly is trying to make me annoyed here, I'll try to keep calm as it tickles me here and there. Anyway, let's continue. Fourth point. The fourth point goes already a little bit deeper in the philosophy of yoga. It says that asana creates bandha. Bandha is for instance the tension that we generate in our abdominal region. Asana all the postures are there that we do create these bandhas and the bandha then serves the breath. It helps us to for instance exhale. Very much an intricate play there. And the fifth point is that all of these things together, asana, bandha, pranayama, everything together done in a proper way leads us eventually to a more meditative state. Meditation is pretty much impossible to just practice. You don't just sit and then boom you have a blank mind. The idea is that through the practice of asana and the breathing and your focus that you need for that, your pure concentration, you start blocking things out more, you are very much in line with your practice, that eventually things just start to flow, you are just in the zone so to speak, that's the meditative state you are going to get when you practice in this way. And eventually that really helps us to generate more peace in our everyday life. So yes, those are those five principles we have been talking about a lot in my classes the last few weeks but there in my half hour classes, in my body equity yoga therapy classes it's very difficult to go a bit deeper into these principles and I thought it would be nice to have either a podcast as I'm recording both audio separately and I'm making this video to get a bit of an idea of what my classes really are about, what the principles are behind the class and of course we look at the physical part of it, I am a physiotherapist in the end, I do want to help everybody having a healthy body to get nice and oil-based defensive hopefully. So there is nothing wrong with doing that, we can combine these principles and still work at having strong, flexible, healthy bodies within your capacities, your age group, your health, everything, with all those individual differences we can still make it work. So that's it for me, I hope this was informative and if you have any questions of course you can always direct them to me, whatsapp, messenger, even on Patreon itself, there is always a way to get to me, okay? Hope to see you soon again and enjoy your yoga practice. Namaste.