When you enter the room, expect to find mats and equipment prepared for you.
It’s your teacher's way of helping to set the mood for what you are about to experience. Everything is considered, from the lighting to the orientation of the mats, the equipment placement, cleanliness, and the distance between the mats. Everything matters when it comes to creating a container or nest of safety. This helps to prepare the student's mind for deep internal work.
The ritual of preparing the room for students is similar to a massage therapist preparing their room for someone’s deep tissue work. The size of the room is considered, sheets are fitted to the table, blankets and equipment are made available, and lighting, sound, and fragrance are all considered to help the client feel supported and safe to move toward a much calmer state. When you enter the room, you feel a sense of relief; over time, the brain learns to associate massage with calm.
You can expect to leave a Kaiut Yoga class with a certain degree of tranquility. Similar to leaving the massage room, Kaiut Yoga, if approached properly, has the potential to have you leaving the room with a deep sense of peace and tranquility. Once the student learns to bond with the practice, they have reported accessing spontaneous meditation, unlike anything they’ve experienced.
Massage therapy facilitates nervous system regulation, but Kaiut Yoga teaches you how to regulate it on your own. A massage therapist manually works on muscle tissues and nervous system responses, encouraging relaxation through external intervention. This can activate the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest mode), temporarily shifting the body into a calm state.
Kaiut Yoga emphasizes self-regulation, body awareness and joint health. It guides practitioners to their nervous systems through voice, intentional movement, and breath. Over time, it helps people develop the capacity to manage their stress responses independently.
Massage therapy does it for you, while Kaiut Yoga helps you build the skills to do it yourself.
Though more challenging than it might seem, cultivating this skill requires both willingness and consistent practice. We all have tendencies to avoid what we feel. Creating a few rituals can be helpful in supporting this shift.
Enhancing your experience
In order of importance, here’s what students can do to support learning to regulate their nervous system through the guidance of a Kaiut Yoga teacher.
Listen. This can be one of the most challenging skills to develop within your practice, and it’s one of the most important. You’re not listening to do anything. You're missing the point if you’re listening to understand what to do next.
If the teacher says, “Flex your foot, " the student's work is to flex the foot based on what they feel in the foot. The student listens to understand how they can work with more awareness of the ankle and break internal habits that distract them from this awareness. It’s a subtle yet powerful way to shift the nervous system’s state.
If the student listens to flex their foot and then goes back to thinking about their workday or some other distraction, they will not take full advantage of what Kaiut Yoga offers. Kaiut Yoga wants to offer a strong neurological connection to the joints, a shift in the internal state, and the potential for spontaneous meditation.
Limit distractions. Gum, water bottles, jewelry, watches and phones are all distractions. The nervous system knows you have a watch on and will resist shifting without the student's awareness if it’s on in class. This plays out in class if the student comes in with these distractions, here’s how.
If the student is asked to flex their foot and feel how the flexion affects the leg structure, the habit of chewing gum, checking the time, sitting up to drink water, and/or checking the phone will be very close at hand. The student will miss the awareness we are trying to develop with this practice.
Observe habits. Many automatic nervous system responses show up when we start feeling the body. We wonder if we’re doing it right; we look around the room, scratch the itch, move to get more comfortable, and try to achieve the pose rather than feeling it. These are all habits we all have when starting a practice like Kaiut Yoga. It’s important to break these habits to establish the conditions for the mind to enter spontaneous meditation.
Keeping our eyes open. We all do this when we’re anxious, want to control the environment or need it for balance. Your Kaiut Yoga teacher will use visual references to give you specific access to the brain. At the beginning of class, it might help to keep the eyes open for a few minutes if there’s some anxiety. The student will want to eventually close their eyes to feel their internal state more clearly.
When the sensations become intense, opening the eyes can be a natural response to this new and increased awareness. The student will want to find a way to access the particular restriction with their eyes closed so that they can access the area more easily and access this shift in state.
When it comes to balance, students might be surprised to notice where they’ve lost balance in their system. At first, having the eyes open allows for a sense of control with this visual orientation. Over time, this visual orientation will help the student access spontaneous meditation in a new way, and they will learn how to use the visual sense to impact their own nervous system health.
Clothing. Consider clothing for both the environment and the practice itself. Many students like to wear layers of clothing if the room temperature is unpredictable. What students wear to class has a certain importance, but what’s more important is preparing the mind.
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