Follow Your Heart
"Follow your heart and you'll never go wrong," says Anusara Yoga teacher Desiree Rumbaugh at the start of her all-day workshop. Your heart may lead you through paths you've never foreseen, she adds, but if you truly follow it, you're where you're meant to be.
"My theme for today is 'How to Make Yoga A Support System,'" she continues, "because eventually everyone leaves, everything ends. But if you find the support within yourself—that will never go away."
Rumbaugh says that she thinks of John Friend's system of Anusara Yoga as having three distinctive characteristics:
1. A commitment to always looking for the good in any situation;
2. A strong therapeutic orientation;
3. An interweaving of spiritual meaning and the technical details of practice.
"Looking for the good often isn't easy," she says. Life presents us with many challenges and difficulties, with pain we can't ignore. But if we can see what is good within any situation, she reminds us, we'll be happier.
Throughout class, Rumbaugh demonstrates over and over how Anusara Yoga brings these three principles to life. Whenever she stops class and has individual students demonstrate poses so that we can learn Anusara's Universal Principles of Alignment, she's quick to note what the student is already doing well. And she encourages us to do the same in our own practice.
As she uses various students to demonstrate common challenges in the asanas we're working on—the movements of Sun Salutation, a few standing poses, handstand and Pincha Mayurasana (Peacock Feather Pose, a.k.a Forearm Balance), and a few backbends like Dhanurasana (Bow Pose), Bridge, and Urdhva Dhanurasana (Upward Bow Pose)—she emphasizes that applying Anusara's alignment principles skillfully and therapeutically does NOT mean that the outer form of everyone's pose should look the same. Instead, it means that we focus on the proper actions within the pose and on where our bodies are—right here, right now, with all of our tightness or injuries or hypermobilities, rather than on some idealized outward picture of the pose. "I like to say yoga is a come-as-you-are party,"she jokes.
Desiree Rumbaugh is co-owner of