Tory Schafer

One of these days, I hope that little Star Trek screen can come on down so I can actually see what's going on in somebody's body because so many times people come up to a teacher after class and go, I have this going on.

And so many times you will hear teachers say, oh, you should do this.

My favorite answer is, I don't know.

I have no idea what's going on in your body, but are you breathing?

Because that's gonna help you understand.

I know I've worked with clients that have arthritis and things, and for one client, a little bit of pressure is gonna actually help relieve some of the tension and inflammation they have.

For somebody, that exact same move is actually going to stimulate and make the inflammation worse.

So it's really important that that word yoga is there by design.

It's not about, let me listen to somebody else prescribe and tell me what to do.

It's about, can I listen to the teacher that already lives inside of me?

And so back to class, we'll just slowly build off of that.

And when we look at the nervous system of the body, we'll usually start with the spine first, because when you warm up the spine, that's kind of helping the nervous system that pumps out to all the greater extremities, the bigger muscles, then eventually move into hips and legs.

And then eventually, and this is true, especially at Lifetime, we always have one part of class where we go, let's hold a pose or two that really sucks.

No kidding.

And there's a reason for that.

It's because within that, if you hold a shape long enough to allow the mind to start to say, I don't want to be here.

But you remind the students to breathe.

You all of a sudden give them the opportunity to recognize how does my mind respond when I'm dealing with stress?

And then you teach them to breathe.

So hopefully when they're off their mat, they can go, that's right.