What is Prasara Yoga?

Yoga - A physical, mental, and spiritual discipline.

With the attainment of great spiritual insight and tranquility, you can achieve the appreciable feats of strength in not only your mind, but your body as well.

Now most people already have an insight on what Yoga really is. There is no doubt that the mass majority have seen some pictures of flamboyant men donning purple leotards and/or noticed the vast amount of $12 Yoga DVDs at Wal-Mart. You’re not read­ing this page with­out some pre-existing idea of what yoga is.

However, do you know what type of yoga to look for; let alone, how to practice it correctly? The number of different types of yoga is uncountable. The list can begin from easy basics where meditation is the primary focus to power yoga where both mental and physical strength is involved.

So, what is Prasara anyway?

First, we should let you know that we have nothing but respect for traditional yoga styles. We’ve practiced a variety of them over the years, and you can get a lot out of that kind of practice.
It’s a well-established fact that practicing Yoga will help you increase flexibility and learn to relax, and various studies have shown it to correlate to just about any marker of good health you can think of. You know all this already, so we’re not going to go on about why you should practice yoga. How­ever, we do want to tell you about what makes Prasara unique and what it can do for you.

The short story is that Prasara was created to develop Flow.

We’ll talk more about this later, but the gist is that Flow is a quality of movement in which you can transition smoothly from one thing to another. Flow is also a mental state, some­times referred to by athletes as “being in the zone. Actually Flow is a lot of things, and that can make it difficult to describe — and even harder to learn. But it isn’t impossible, and we’ve been teach­ing it for years to our private clients, in live seminars, work­shops, and through this course, the Prasara Primer.

The unique elements of Prasara practice as opposed to most other styles of yoga is sim­ply that traditional yoga is fixated on sit­ting in poses while Prasara shifts the emphasis to the transitions between poses. You’ll still use the same postures and positions; but, we’ll also work on your ability to “flow” from one to the next; so, you will develop real agility, grace, power, and yes, Flow in every­thing you do.

Is Prasara Really The Best Style Of Yoga?

We’re not going to tell you that Prasara is better than any other kind of yoga.

That would be silly.

There’s no such thing as a “best” way to move your body.

There are definitely wrong ways — injurious ways, like those awful stretches your high school gym coach used to make you do. Moreover, the beauty of yoga is that most of the poses are quite difficult to do in a way that could cause you to cripple yourself.

Yoga is gentle (not to be con­fused with passive), and Prasara especially emphasizes mov­ing smoothly from one position to another, so you don’t have any jar­ring or wrench­ing effects that could pull a muscle.

Though we won’t claim it’s the “best,” we will tell you that Prasara is the most fun style of yoga around.

While many styles of yoga insist on following a set sequence of how­ever many poses for how­ever many minutes, the ultimate goal of practicing Prasara is to teach you to flow with­out think­ing of what comes next. Yes, in the beginning, you’ll be practicing routines (this course includes six of them — more about those later), but through practicing the routines, you’ll actually be giving your body the vocabulary of movement you need in order to improvise your own movements.

That last bit is the real magic of Prasara and what makes it such a natural fit for athletes.

Going with the Flow - On the Field and Off

Prasara is possibly the most athletic style of yoga out there because of its dynamic movements and focus on Flow.

If you’re an athlete in any sport, you already know what Flow is. Your focus tightens, and the out­side world fades away. You breathe deeper. Time slows down. You get tunnel vision, and the path between you and your goal opens up. You don’t have to think about what to do — you just act, spontaneously, in the moment.

Even if you’re not an athlete, you’ve probably experienced flow while driving on the high­way, play­ing a musical instrument, or doing some­thing else that requires a relaxed concentration.

Flow feels good, and when you’re in it, you don’t want it to end.

Even if you’re not the “sporty” type, you know that one of the least useful things an athlete can do is to stand perfectly still during a match. In fact, that might just be the fastest way to lose in most sports.

Athletes have to move. So, it’s important that one finds a yoga style designed to develop athletic movement and not one to spend too much time sit­ting still.

That’s why Prasara is built on “the movement between the movement.” Feel­ing balanced and centered is easy when you sit perfectly still, but you can’t do that all the time. Your life demands that you get out and inter­act with challenges in the world. For most people, Flow is a fragile state that crumbles when it comes in con­tact with the slightest change, but you can develop a stronger Flow by teach­ing your body how to transition through change.

To get better as adapt­ing to the unexpected (like an opponent’s right hook — or another car suddenly changing lanes), you must practice changing — transiting — from one movement (the one you planned) to a different one (that adapts to the changing environment).

If an athlete can’t access Flow, they can’t play their best. They make the wrong choices, their bodies will be a step behind their minds, and they’ll keep get­ting caught off-guard when things don’t go accord­ing to plan.

And that’s when injuries happen.

Prasara Is Like Injury Insurance For Athletes

You’ve prob­a­bly seen videos of ath­letes get­ting injured. These videos are painful to watch — not only because we can see an injury occur­ring, but because we can see it com­ing before they do.

When ath­letes get sur­prised, they get hurt:

The ball trav­els in an unex­pected direc­tion. Another player attacks from an unex­pected angle. They step on a slip­pery patch. They get faked out.

Things hap­pen that we can’t pre­dict or control.

Prasara yoga is like injury insur­ance for ath­letes because it trains you to always be ready to adapt to changes. If you can’t move the way you had planned, you sim­ply tran­si­tion to a dif­fer­ent posi­tion. Flow to the next move­ment and keep going. Side­step the other player. Jump to make the catch. Learn­ing to adapt can help you stay in the moment — in Flow — so you don’t get caught off-guard.

And it’s the same thing off the court too.

Be More Confident With Everyday Movements

And don’t think this just applies to ath­letes — we all use our bod­ies for a vari­ety of tasks every day, and it’s not uncom­mon to hear about peo­ple twist­ing an ankle step­ping off a curb or pulling a back mus­cle while bend­ing over to tie a show or pick up a dropped wallet.

What would it be like to know that your body was pre­pared to adapt to any­thing that comes up?

Flow isn’t just for sports — it means more con­fi­dence in every step. More power and assur­ance when you open a door and enter a room. More agility to nav­i­gate the unex­pected chal­lenges life throws at you every sin­gle day. And all of this trans­lates to more effec­tive and effi­cient move­ments that leave you with less stress, more energy, and a greater feel­ing of mas­tery in your environment.

The Prasara Yoga / Martial Arts Connection

It’s no secret that fighters are some of the most versatile and adapt­able athletes around. You kind of have to be if you’re job requires you to perform while simultaneously try­ing to avoid get­ting socked in the face.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that martial arts and yoga have an awful lot in common.

We are martial artists. Between the three of us, we’ve trained in a dozen different styles and competed on four continents. We wouldn’t waste our time train­ing any­thing that didn’t allow us to deliver powerful strikes and kicks with speed and precision.

In the ring, nothing is predictable. It looks like chaos out there, but the fighters have to adapt with agility and grace (the best fighters are always graceful). It might surprise you to learn that the key to developing speed, power, and precision under pressure comes from practicing pre-determined routine over and over.

In traditional martial arts, they’re called kata, but many modern arts also make heavy use of “flow drills” in which partners rehearse pre­set attack and defense pat­terns to masters various skills.

As they get better and more efficient, the drill is altered to become just a little more difficult. With enough practice, advanced moves hap­pen with­out any thought — like second nature — and that’s how fighters pre­pare every technique they plan to use in a match.

We do the same thing with Prasara.

In the beginning, we’ll show you a short sequence of movements. After some practice, we’ll add more. Eventually, it will start to get easier, and you’ll notice that your body sails through the transitions more efficiently, with no wasted movements.

That’s when we level up. Change the drill.

Each of the five core Primer flow routines have three lev­els of difficult so you can step up grad­u­ally from the most basic variations of each movement to advanced forms that you wouldn’t have even attempted in the beginning.

Since you’ll always be able to choose the appropriate level of practice for any flow, you’ll never have to worry about a movement being too hard or advanced for you. Just practice the level that fits, and over time, you’ll find that you can move on to the higher lev­els of each movement.

Yoga For Your Lifestyle

And that’s the most impor­tant thing, after all: apply­ing Prasara to YOUR life.

It’s great for us to talk about how we use Prasara, but it’s got to make sense to you if you’re going to prac­tice it. You’ve got to know that Prasara will work for your sit­u­a­tion and for your body. And it will, by the way. We’ve seen Prasara help peo­ple from all dif­fer­ent back­grounds achieve a wide range of goals with this prac­tice. It will help you too.

Whether you want to improve your ath­letic per­for­mance or just enjoy play­ing with your kids (or grand­kids), Prasara prac­tice will teach you to move with more con­trol and ease. You’ll find greater mobil­ity and con­fi­dence in every­thing you do with your body. And you’ll have fun.

Of course, if you can’t make Prasara prac­tice fit your lifestyle, it won’t help you.

Sim­ply put, you’re going to have to prac­tice if you want to see any ben­e­fits. So we’ve spent a lot of time design­ing the Primer to be easy to get started with and sim­ple to fol­low from the begin­ning, whether you’ve prac­ticed yoga or years or have no prior expe­ri­ence. The Primer is made to fit into your life now, no mat­ter how busy you are or what other activ­i­ties you have in your life.

We’ll show you how to make Prasara work for you so you can get all the ben­e­fits of this practice.

You won’t have to devote a cer­tain amount of time every day to prac­tice. Though you’ll see faster results with more work, just a few min­utes at a time is enough to get started, and you can lit­er­ally do this any­where, with no equip­ment or spe­cial clothing.

You can get started learning Prasara Yoga with the videos and articles on this site, but the really see how the practice works, you'll need to sign up for our free mini-course and learn the Cricket Flow, which will work wonders for your leg and hip mobility.