by Courtney Zenner, RYT-200
January 9, 2024
Whether in class or on my own, I am always happy to settle into SATYA’s freeing movement patterns. The movements feel easy yet invigorating.
SATYA goes beyond the traditional boundaries of yoga asana. It is an exploratory practice, engaging fluidity, range of motion, and healing in the body through innovative rocking, pumping, and sliding movements. And for me, most of all, through restful attention.
Tias’s first instruction after the opening of a SATYA class is to lie for 30 seconds in Savasana. As a Vinyasa yoga teacher and generally active person I initially resisted this instruction, preferring the energizing, heat-building dynamic postures I’ve known for years. “Empty before you begin,” Tias says, and so we do. We exhale the busy-ness and activity of the day so far and allow the air to evaporate the stress away. It’s so simple. It’s always right there. The ground, a place to lie down and breathe, to empty our lungs and our stress. How easily we forget. The benefit is immediate.
It’s this exact emptying that allows space for the stillness in between each movement pattern. This is the beauty of this practice: dynamic movement, attentive stillness. I listen to Tias’ oral cues, close my eyes, focus my gaze completely inward to attend to my own experience, to find the way my sacrum shifts on my right sight when I push my left heel against the wall, to shift back and forth between the two feet and see what feels relieving to the pressure and tension there, to find the pace and the breathing that work for my body.
In SATYA practice, there is not much to visually observe, and of course, this is Tias’ intention. Because we students don’t rely on watching the teacher, we watch our own bodies. This empowers our home practice. I learn to follow my body’s cues. Even ten minutes of SATYA on my own each morning creates a new space within my day, but also a new spaciousness within my body and mind. I have found the home practice to be very freeing.
I have never really loved online yoga instruction, finding it lacks the community connection that I cherish at my home studio. But with SATYA online, I relish the quiet, solo space Tias skillfully facilitates: I tune into my body and quiet my mind without the distraction of others’ movements. I completely abandon any sense of what I “should” be doing. I attend to the way breath and prana move through my body. Though I continue to learn and grow from twice-weekly online instruction and retreats, my home SATYA practice has taught me that the benefits of movement, intimate attention, and curiosity are available to me at any time.
