Much of my inspiration comes from music. For my latest yoga class, I was inspired by a band that I’ve come to love in the past couple months. They’re called The Books. They often have clever song titles and some silly dialogue in their music that makes me smile. The overall theme I’ve found is that they primarily use samples in a creative way. Sometimes the samples are from everyday dialogue or from a profound speech or maybe even from some random television show. When I am able to truly tune in to the words, I am usually always left with a sense of awe or enlightenment. I think that it’s because they have the ability to highlight the mundane and make it into something extraordinary. When I was studying photography, we had an assignment to go out and shoot pictures of something commonplace and find a way to make it look interesting in a photograph (the photo above was from that assignment). This is what The Books do, but in audio form.
The way they approach making music is with sense of play. In some of their songs, they delve into topics of the human condition and our strive for knowledge and understanding. As a whole, it seems that they have a curiosity for life, but figure that we’ll never quite know all the answers, so why not have fun? It is the attitude of Open to Grace, the first principle of alignment in yoga. Otherwise known as “the beginner’s mind”, open to whatever happens, full of awe, unbiased, non-judging.
This theme was quite fitting for the month of January, the start of a new year. Fresh year, fresh eyes. The winter can be so dreary, heavy, and sometimes uninspiring, but not with a “beginner’s mind”. For my class, I wanted to focus on many poses that may be overlooked in a general class. There can be a sense of appreciation for a typical sun salutation when you do it over again many times in a row and get an embodied understanding of it’s effects. Or to hold plank and notice how proper alignment makes a huge difference. Or just to experiment with a different version of downward dog. I also wanted to emphasize an open chest and breath, allowing for a sort of “cleansing” and openness.
I would recommend any of The Books’ music, but a fair example of what I have explained may be in their song “Take Time”. One of my all time favorites is “Smells Like Content”.
steph abraham yoga 