Finding Play

So when you're working with with your emotions or your mood in the mud and you want to give space for a little bit of playfulness. For me the idea is that when you start this journey to explore your inner landscapes and you need to have a little bit of fun you know because sometimes it's just frightening to go out of your comfort zone and start exploring new territories inside of yourself and the helping either the playing helps a lot because it's like your mind gets kind of distracted and you are not focusing anymore on the fear you feel or all the things that you already know so it's like you're giving space where you can discover new things so playfulness helps a lot in that and when I first came to playfulness it was with my teacher with whom I was doing the teacher training and and he was also a Feldenkrais practitioner so he brought a lot of Feldenkrais practices into into the yoga sequences and and I started like having so much fun you know the way they work is different because they do a lot of repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition and and and the way I bring it into the mud it's a little bit different because it's just just be free to experiment with your body and allow this to take you wherever it takes you so it's like out of the frame of the asanas and but still playing with your body with this in mind that we want to bring gratefulness into the game because that will help us exploring new territories with a really open mind and I don't know we can't explore for example let's say that we want to explore today we want to work on on on attempting the wheel you know which is one of these postures that it's really difficult really so why don't play a little bit on it instead of going to the wheel do something else and play with it so just go down to the floor to the ground on your mat and I learned this from my teacher obviously I will do it on my own way but more or less it goes like this so you want to bring the hand into the posture that you will do if you're attempting the wheel and then you want to keep the leg bent but on the other side you're gonna stretch the leg so you're playing only on one side and the first thing you do is you bring your hand into your shoulder into your elbow and you help this elbow to move away from the center of the body and when you're doing this really allow the rest of the body to be completely relaxed and you can do this a little bit you can play here a little bit for a little bit and then you can start playing like bringing the elbow and the knee away from each other so you allow the knee to be on the game also and that means that you allow your hip to lift the floor and I'm sure that you can already see where am I going so basically what is happening is that I'm spreading this side of the body and then I can start playing and see how far can I bring this but for this I have to allow my head to move freely on the play and then I can open a little bit more and maybe I can turn the head looking up at this hand whoop and back and eventually maybe I can even wow roll on my belly so like this you can play and you can stay in each part of the play for as long as you want and you can experiment what happen if I keep the knee up here when I do this what happened if I bring the knee there actually nothing interesting is happening here because there is no opening anymore so basically you are learning while playing and experimenting with your own body and you're having fun because no one is telling you what to do actually you're finding your way your own way with your own body which is different than mine into the play so go and play and have fun namaste