RussaYog® & Yoga Concepts

What is RussaYog®?

RussaYog® uses the basic yogic approach and adds a rope (russa). Click here to watch a video learning more about why we use the rope. The free flowing rope, held in each hand, coupled with yogic asans allows you to use gravity to create stresses and experience a complete body workout, taking your mind and body to a heightened state of awareness and fitness. RussaYog® includes over 200 trajectories that can be done using a rope, a length of fabric, a danda (portable staff), or no prop at all.

Tricon asan with ropes.

The RussaYog® Experience

This unique form of Yoga was developed by Dr. Jasprit Singh over the last several decades specifically to address the challenges of the modern lifestyle. RussaYog® incorporates the following aspects to ensure healthy mental and physical wellness:

RussaYog® creates wellness using four categories of movement:

Standing Bal asan with ropes.

RussaYog® is a five-layered holistic fitness based on:

  • Flexibility: reach, open, bend, twist
  • Strength: hold, pull, press, squeeze
  • Stamina: give sustained effort
  • Balance: focus the body and mind
  • Release: rest and reflect
RussaYog® employs these universal beliefs as metaphors to build solutions to daily life issues:
  • Ik OnKar (One Source)
  • Chardi Kala (Unlimited Options)
  • Puran Bal (Total Strength)

(Explained further in the Online Wellness section.)

Yogic Concepts in RussaYog®

RussaYog® stems from Yoga philosophy created in India over 5,000 years ago. Indian stories talk of yogis who experienced heightened awareness for hours or even days while in yogic asans, or poses. In popular yoga forms, each asan is held for less than a minute. Even such a short time appears to be enough to allow one to reach physical and mental balance.

RussaYog® asans have been specifically developed to address the challenges of the modern lifestyle. The high-speed pace of artificial deadlines, constant communications, demanding bosses, etc., do not give the mind an opportunity to stand back and observe where life is heading. Sedentary office life weakens the body. Information overload hijacks critical thinking. We gobble our food, exercise hard, stress our joints, and alleviate our pains with drugs. While this do-undo state may serve us when one is young, the goal is to move beyond doing-and-undoing in order to enter the coherent state. Each successive activity or karma reinforces the previous one.

The solution is not more busy-ness or faster, harder work, but more thoughtful actions. RussaYog®  asans demand strength and balance that challenge the mind and body. For a person who has just enough strength to stand up from a lying position by holding onto ropes, to the strongest Olympic athlete, the RussaYog® asans are designed to allow one to exercise muscles at a level that even exercise machines costing thousands of dollars cannot!

RussaYog® allows you to manipulate gravity (through the rope) to create forces in multiple directions. As the body copes with the discomfort to the muscles, the mind learns to feel calm under stress, thus maintaining a coherent balance. The goal is to reach ‘yog’ or coherence.

The yogi will see that RussaYog is especially useful the upper body posture. It builds strength in the core muscles as well as shoulders, chest, and gripping muscles. At the end of a session, the yogi should not only feel a sense of heightened balance and symmetry, but also a “pump” that is usually associated with weight training.

For more information on classes, click here.

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