Our Term Break Intensive program holds philosophical themes of Niyama and Yama: what is an ethical practice of yoga?
Students attend both morning and evening (6:30-8:00am and 5:45-7:15pm) Monday to Friday. The evening component of the program focuses on asana from the Intermediate Junior Level syllabus. The morning Pune Style Practice is an opportunity to establish or maintain your own practice of what you have learnt with your own sequence, pace and timings. Support is provided for those who are new to a personal practice. If in doubt, we recommend the Led practice sequences from Yoga Mandir’s Sadhana Booklet. Working with a set sequence helps to cultivate concentration and to observe one’s responses and reactions. Each day you will explore a particular ethical precept from the first two limbs of Patanjali's yoga: the Niyamas and the Yamas.
'Most people practice yoga within the parameters of the first and second niyama, which are cleanliness and contentment. They get the immediate payoff of yoga practice (going to a class, doing a bit at home) from the fact that there is increasing health, which is cleanliness, and a deep health, an organic health, mental clarity, well-being and repose, and ability to relax and rest, to nourish themselves from better breathing. So this brings an improvement in cleanliness, in deep health and concomitantly there is greater contentment, integration with the environment, in our ability to handle its ups and downs. These are the two circles in which most people are living yoga. It is a quick and wonderful reward. Why then is it not enough just to stay with that since it is the definition of a good life decently and happily lived? …
The third, fourth, and fifth steps of niyama form a unit. The first is tapas, zealous, sustained practice that is at the heart of all yoga. … It is literally the heat, the heat that, in an alchemical sense, transforms. It is the practice that can never be abandoned, a continued application to human evolution.
Without the severe and penetrating insight of self-knowledge (svadhyaya), the fourth niyama, tapas would lead to power but neither penetration nor integration. It would merely generate energy but without direction. Tapas gives us the energy, svadhyaya the light of knowledge. Self-study is clearly intended to penetrate inward, and so the transforming fire of tapas enters progressively our different sheaths of being and illuminates with self-knowledge.' (Excerpt: Light on Life by BKS Iyengar, pp 260-261).
Prerequisites for enrollment:
The Spring Intensive (October) is for students who have completed a term of enrollment in any of the following Yoga Mandir programs. Developing, Established and Maturing levels, Mid-term intensives, interstate workshops or Retreats