Weekly Journal Entry #4

                In regards to the Nevrin article, my practices involving yoga can be seen as ritualistic. There are two times in which I habitually practice yoga, either before or after other forms of training or physical activity. A primary use for yoga in my life is to warm up before training or to cool my body down and stretch after a hard workout. Rarely do I practice yoga and just train yoga in any given day. Other habits in my yoga practice include a constant attentiveness to breath as well as always including a variety of lower back stretches. My yoga practice revolves around physical recovery and rehabilitation. Since I experience a lot of lower back pain due to my years of training in other martial arts, I always use yoga as a focus for my back rehabilitation in order to ease pain and work muscles that I do not use often. Furthermore, breathing exercises are also a staple in my yoga practice. As I mentioned in a previous journal entry, a similarity between yoga and the martial arts is in their practices on proper, calm breathing. I recognize this connection and always use a segment of my yoga practice to just breath normally because of its applications to my martial arts practice.
                These ritualistic behaviors increase the intensity of my yoga practice because I enter the practice with goals in mind that I feel need to be accomplished before I can finish my yoga session. Having these goals in mind of improving my breath and healing my lower back change the impact that the yoga class has on me. I feel that entering anything, including a yoga session, with goals in mind leads you to having a greater sense of accomplishment at the conclusion of the session. These goals also create a more intense nature to my experience because I feel that if I am not able to accomplish these goals during my yoga practice, my practice is not a successful one. All of this being said, breathing and lower back stretches are the only two constants in my yoga practice. My instructors like to mix it up each time when training yoga in order to hit different parts of the body before or after training depending on what we are doing before or what we did previously in training.