There is so much to talk about here, but let me make a few brief points.

First, we are so grateful for the kinds of thoughtful, sincere comments the channel receives generally; we have had almost 4,000,000 views, and we have over 37,000 subscribers – a far cry from any of the influencers out there, of course, but we are trying to do something useful, and we deliberately chose not to “monetize” the channel, too (although the latest shift in the way Google does things is that even if you don’t monetize, they sometimes put ads in anyway!). But the important point is that we have not needed to edit or delete negative or abusive comments because we don’t get any – and any of you reading this who use YT will know this is rare.

Faisal wrote that he had been overdoing his yoga practise over the last two years, and the reason was that his practise was not based around feeling what was happening as he was doing, and this is more common than you might think. As well, he has a tendency to overtrain; something too that is common among Westerners. And soreness all the time is a sure indicator that he is not sufficiently recovering, either – it’s easy to forget that any kind of training or practise (or ‘playing’ as we call it!) needs adequate nutrition and sufficient rest for optimal adaptation. The activity is a stimulation for adaptation, only – the adaptation happens later, according to the SAID principle. As Selye wrote in the book The Stress of Life, back in 1953, if you ignore the signs of insufficiently effective adaptation, then injury or illness are in your future.

And note that, because of his experience in yoga and other athletic endeavours, he expected that he would not feel anything as a result of the low order of difficulty of this beginner’s series early classes – and he was surprised at how good he did feel after the first class – and this is what we have been telling people for years. The basics are everything, and if you are experienced, then doing an easy series of movements and exercises always allows you to explore more deeply than when doing harder ones. Yet, because our culture rewards the more difficult of any activity, we don’t think to look here. As a friend of ours says, “experts are just people who do the basics better!”* And doing easy movements is simply sensual; they feel good. One of our frequent exhortations is, ‘Be nice to yourself.’

Start today.

Kit Laughlin

*Dan A., owner of “Falsegrip” in Brookvale, Sydney NSW