At some point in your practice, you may decide you want to create your own practice at home, and not using a DVD or download. You can create your own sequences and use yoga music or nature sounds in the background. Many people get nervous at the idea of beginning a yoga practice because they don’t know where to start in creating their own sequences.
There are many schools of thought for creating yoga sequences, depending on the type of practice. For example, the sequences in kundalini yoga are different than in Iyengar. While there aren’t any standard rules, there are some factors that are important for gaining the maximum benefit of your home yoga practice.
A well rounded practice is best for reaping the many benefits of yoga. Each asana category brings different effects and benefits to the body, mind and spirit. Include standing poses for strength and emotional stability, forward bends to calm, backbends for mood and inverted poses for energy. To round out the practice, begin with a centering of the breath and awareness and end with a relaxation pose, most often savasana, or corpse pose.
Poses of one category are generally done together followed by another category of asanas, and sequences don’t move back and forth between poses and counter poses. For example, all standing poses and forward bends are done, rather than mixing forward bends and backbends in one sequence. The similarity of the standing poses makes moving from one asana to another fluid. The same is true of other categories.
The practice should begin with a warm up, and then move into active poses, such as standing, inversions, twists and backbends. Then, move on to the cooling poses, such as forward bends, gentle twists, supported backbends to cool the body down. Follow up the cooling asanas by relaxing into savasana.
When building a practice in this way, it’s easy if you think of it as warming the body, doing the active asanas, cooling the body and relaxing to end the practice. The flow is much better for the body than randomly mixing active and cooling poses.
Consider your level of experience, when selecting asanas and building sequences. If you are at the point where you are considering building your own practice, you have likely taken classes or done yoga on DVD and know which sequences and asanas are within your level of flexibility and endurance and which are beyond it.
Yoga Journal has an online sequencing tool for building a yoga practice at home.