Do You Crave Intensity in Your Mindful Movement Practice?
In today’s podcast episode, I talk about intensity and why it might be revealing to take a look at its role in yoga and mindful movement practice.
Episode Details:
Whether you notice that you tend to crave intensity on the mat, or you tend to avoid it, it’s something you can learn to work with skillfully. Of course, life itself is intense sometimes, and we can’t really avoid that. But if we see our practice as a kind of laboratory for life, we can actually see how being mindful of strong sensations in a yoga pose might translate to breathing through a challenging moment during the day.
Here we’ll explore different expressions of intensity in mindful movement or yoga, like strong physical sensations, faster movements, more dramatic or acrobatic poses, environments like heated rooms, or having powerful emotions come up during practice. I’ll give examples from my own experiences practicing mindful yoga and meditation, observing my students in class, and from leading Yin Yoga Teacher Trainings over the years.
Clearly, not all intensity is bad or even avoidable, but it’s possible we have a cultural bias towards intensity. In movement practice, we can easily be drawn to whatever is most obvious (intense = obvious), but going deeper in our practice has more to do with getting curious about what we’re NOT seeing already.
You’ll hear about:
- where this intensity bias may be coming from
- why it makes gentle yoga and slower mindful movement practices so challenging for some of us
- Yin Yoga as an example of learning to investigate our relationship with intensity
Listen and reflect on what “going deeper” means to you! Perhaps you’ll come away from this episode with some new ways of looking at your experiences on the mat.
Resources & Links from this episode:
- I mention this topic of intensity in the context of other important aspects of practice in Episode 6 “Eight Key Attitudes for Mindful Movement Practice”
We will be exploring lots of topics like this in the upcoming Mindful Movement Teacher Training! Check it out at movedtomeditate.yoga/mmtt.
Or, for accessible guided practices that align with these podcast topics, check out my Moved To Meditate Class Library at movedtomeditate.com.
Find more insightful podcast episodes at movedtomeditate.yoga/podcast.
And, I’m on Instagram at @addie_movedtomeditate (for mindfulness, movement, yoga, and pictures of PNW nature and my adorable kitty, Mustache).