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About the Book

What if you are just starting a yoga practice, where do you begin?

It can depend on what your overall goal is. If your goal is to

• improve coordination,
• or flexibility
• or strength,
• or to get rid of pain
• or just to move your body,

it can help to get more familiar with your body. 

Learning to do yoga poses, you’re often not just learning a new pose, you’re also learning your body. So why not start with some simple exercises to get more familiar with your body.

Getting a Better Feel For Your Body part 1 focuses on simple pushing exercises that you can do within a set of basic yoga poses. You could think of these exercises as similar to pushing a car out of snow but instead of pushing a car, you’re pushing parts of your body using friction and simple pushing actions.

One reason for these exercises is that they help you to learn how to feel changes in relationship in parts of your body. But they also help you to learn to feel the muscular actions that cause changes in relationship.

Another benefit to these exercises is instead of thinking about whether or not you are doing the exercises correctly, you can focus on feeling your body as you do the exercises. The focus is on what you are doing versus how you look while doing it.

There are some basic alignment points but the focus is more on feeling how the parts of your body relate, and varying those relationships.

This ebook includes a simple routine designed to help you use basic pushing actions to better feel and control your hips and shoulders. These pushing techniques can be used in stronger poses like side plank but also in working towards improved flexibility in poses like the forward bend and front-to-back splits.

The book comes with a summary of the poses and their basic actions. It also comes with a detailed description for each exercise along with pictures so that you can easily see what you are trying to do for each exercise.

It also comes with preparation exercises to make learning the actual exercise easier.

The ebook comes in pdf, epub and mobi (for kindle) formats. You get access to all three formats when you purchase the book.

The intent of the exercises in this book are to help you better feel your body. If you're not feeling it, I've included an email so that I can help with any problems. If you're still not feeling it lean pub has a 45 day happiness guarantee. Nope, not 45 days of happiness, just if you let them know within 45 days of purchase, you'll get your money back. And that should make you happy, or at the least, not stressed that you're taking a risk in buying this book.

So what's the back ground of the material in this book, and me the teacher? I teach a variety of different actions in my yoga classes. I generally use the same general set of actions over a course of a few weeks, refining the way I teach them but also coming up with simple fixes for the students who don't get the actions. Of all the actions that I teach I feel that the ones covered in this book are the most basic and the most useful for a beginner just getting started in a yoga or "body awareness" practice. It's called part 1 because the hope is that you continue with the other books in this series as well.

Why not include all the techniques in one big book?

I've thought of that.

But one reason not to is that it's easier to focus on one set of related actions at a time.

As a student, hopefully it's less daunting for you and you can get on with learning.

Plus there's less risk for both of us. You get to try one set of actions (covered in this book) if it works for you great, if it doesn't then you can get your money back or leave it at part 1 (maybe you got some benefit but decide that the way I teach isn't for you).

Plus, if when I get to the point that I have a range of "Getting Better at Feeling Your Body" books published, its easier to make suggestions for where you should start, say if limited in time, resources, or you have a particular problem.

So why start with this book if there are others to come?

Well, you have to start somewhere. The important thing is to start.

About the Author

Neil Keleher

@kneelkeleher

Hi, I'm Neil Keleher

I’ve been a yoga teacher for about 20 years.

I have a degree in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Prior to that I served for five years in the British army as an armourer.

As a yoga teacher I teach my students how to feel and control their body. In this context I’m like a driving instructor for your body.

One of my other hats is “indexing specialist”. One of my current ongoing projects under this hat is designing an easy to use indexing system for Chinese characters.