With yoga towards more connection.
Live less in your head, but more in your body and in touch with your heart.
Yoga Kitchen has a very earthy approach of yoga.
The core of our yoga practice is to strive for a deep awareness and to experience of what happens in the body. To make contact. To get in touch with oneself and one’s own body as a first step towards a better and more genuine relationship with the world and with life as a whole.
The worst plague that ravages human kind nowadays and that is accountable for a lot of problems in this world is this permanent state of separation or disconnection in which so many people live. This separation is caused by excessive living from the mind’s perspective, submerged in the illusions of mental thinking. From the perpective of the ego that never stops talking, the voice in our head that comments, mocks and judges everything around us, individually or collectively.
Yoga Kitchen aims to create a link with the heart, the body and its different dimensions, connection and compassion with the planet, nature and all living beings that inhabit it. Awareness of the inner body anchors us in the present moment and is a gate through which we can escape from the prison of the ego.
Mantras
A mantra is a text, often in Sanskrit language, that is recited or sung before, during or after a yoga session. Mantras help us to calm down the mind. In the classes of Yoga Kitchen, we make very little use of mantras. Only at the beginning and end of the session the simple mantras “Om” or “Sat Nam” are sung three times. This marks the opening and closure of the yoga session, the boundaries of time and space within which we practice.
Mudras
Mudra means literally: seal or gesture. Mudras in yoga are symbolic movements of the hand that have a specific influence on your energy or your state of mind or emotion. Energetically speaking, each finger has its own signification. By putting your fingers in toch with each otner in a certain way you will influence the flow of energy in your body. During certain yoga exercises or during our moment of meditation we sometimes use a specific mudra.
The influences of Kundalini Yoga
Kundalini yoga is a totally different style amongst the yoga forms. It is a dynamic, agile type of yoga in which the circulation of the vital energy throughout the body by means of an intense mobilization of the breath plays a key role. In Kundalini yoga, it is mostly the upper body and the spine that are being put to work. The base, legs and feet a lot less. It is a yoga style in which the spiritual dimension is very important and in which a lot of mantra’s are used.
At Yoga Kitchen, we do not organize complete Kundalini lessons for now, but we incorporate certain elements from the Kundalini-approach in the warm ups, the breathing exercises and certain series of stretches during the Yin yoga classes.