essential elements

Humming~

I've always used sound in my personal yoga practice, particularly humming.  By humming, my breath was simply and naturally lengthened and it interrupted the flow of the river of thoughts in my mind.  Humming opened spaces in my body and mind.  My entire being was filled with vibration. Humming induces a deeper quality of relaxation.  In ayurveda, relaxation is the pre-condition which allows healing to take place.  In my teaching, I explain to students that yoga is not something you "do."  What you can do is create the condition where yoga might happen.  That condition is relaxation.  For information about physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits of humming see Jonathan and Andi Goldman's book "The Humming Effect".  

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Softening~

When I lived and taught at Kripalu, I embraced the soft approach to practice that we called "Meditation in Motion".  The habit of thinking and feeling "less than" is very familiar to me. I found softness comforting, and in softness I felt received. For those of us living with any form of disease, I've observed that a soft approach to healing is more effective than "fighting" a disease. Our classes begin by quietly softening into the sensations in the body,  around the thoughts running through the mind and the feelings that might be released from the emotional memory held in the cells of the body  Then, slowly, we enter into our own deeply personal expression of movement and sound.  A curious thing, when we begin to soften we immediately encounter that which is not soft. That "not soft" might be physical, emotional or psychological. Rather than demanding softness of ourselves or the world we live in, it behooves us to simply make an invitation to become soft. That our invitation is accepted, or not, is irrelevant.