Not long ago I was doing my practice before teaching an evening beginners class.

It was the first week of the month so my teaching was focused on the standing poses. 

Suddenly I pondered this question: “If there was only one major lesson to be taken from the standing poses, what would that be?”

In his book “Virasamavesa, The Hero’s Contemplation”, senior teacher Christian Pisano has a chapter called “The Practice of Non-practice”, where he writes:

”You open your mat as if you were arranging your funeral pyre”.

As extreme as this might sound, I fell in love with this image when first reading it, as it resonated so much with what the practice was and is for me: an inner sacrifice.

Ayurveda is the Indian traditional system of medicine. This holistic science aims at restoring or maintaining the innate balance or “smrti” (memory) of health through individual constitutional analysis, diet, herbs and bodywork. 

Like the science and practice of Yoga, Ayurveda contains a wealth of knowledge that originated in the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago and has been handed down from one generation to the next over the millennia. Much like in China practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and Thai Chi adopted a similar understanding of the human mind, body and spirit and integrated their forms of medicine and exercise, similarly in India we find that the disciplines of Yoga and Ayurveda share many key concepts and often support and strengthen each other through their practices and regimens.

So how and where do Yoga and Ayurveda come together?