Balance Basics sprang from a desire to teach people how to better feel their body and control it.

Sensitivity and responsiveness is something that can be learned and improved upon  and Balance Basics is one of the easiest ways to begin to learn.

Learning to balance is actually about learning to feel and control our relationship with the Earth. The better we can sense this relationship and the better we are at responding, the easier it is to stay balanced.

Balance Basics shows you how to direct your senses so that you can actually feel our relationship with the earth, in particular the relationship where our center of gravity, our foundation and the earth's center are all in one line.

It also shows you how to respond so that if you feel this relationship going out of alignment, you can respond to bring it back into alignment.

There's nothing mystical about it. It's as easy as learning to drive a car, or even a motorbike. The key is breaking it down into easy to understand and easy to assimilate steps with clear instructions on what you are trying to do.

With Balance Basics you don't have to think so much about what you are trying to do, you can get on with doing it.

The actual theory behind Balance Basics is grade 12 physics and dynamics and is very similiar to the idea behind the technology used to weighing trucks.

Instead of the scales being outside of our body, they are actually built in. We just have to learn how to use them.

And the same basic ideas apply in most balance poses. To illustrated this, Balance Basics includes exercises for balancing on the fronts of the feet, balancing on one foot, balancing on the hands in arm balances like crow pose, balancing on the hands in handstand and balancing in headstand.

While the postures range from easy to intermediate, the understanding that balance basics contains is applicable to most balancing poses, even the ones not contained in this book.

Yoga Basics is designed to make learning yoga poses easier.

Rather than focusing on alignment, it aims to teach you how to feel your body so that you can become a better "driver" of your body.

To make yoga poses easier to learn, Yoga Basics breaks them down into easy to learn elements so that even difficult poses become a little bit easier to learn.

Instead of forcing your way into challenging poses like chaturanga dandasana and wheel pose, learn how to feel your way into difficult poses.

Learn to work intelligently.

Want to take your yoga practice deeper but don't know where to start?

The hip control guide teaches you how to feel and control the deep muscles of the hip joint. It shows you how you can use these muscles to deepen your yoga poses, or make them more efficient.

If you have trouble with forward bends or back (I do) learning to feel your hip muscles and control them can help. 

The feeling part is important so that you know what you are doing is having an effect. 

The control aspect is learning what to do to consciously activate these muscles. 

It's like being in a conversation where you take turns listening to each other. You actually respond to what the other person says instead of just saying whatever is on your mind.

Learn to Relax and Activate

Now you might think that muscle control means just learning to activate those muscles. It also includes learning to relax them. In the hip control guide you practice both actions, relaxation and activation. This gives you the ability to activate and release almost at will but it also gives you a better chance to learn to feel the muscles involved.

What is it you feel? The target muscle activating and then relaxing. And even if the muscle itself is to small to feel, what you can learn to feel instead is the movement of the bones that the muscle attaches to.

Learning Your Body Made Easy

Very few people in the yoga world will tell you how to deliberately activate particular muscles. Nor do they break postures or action down into simple component parts that are easy to understand, and perhaps more importantly, easy to practice. 

With the hip control guide you learn to practice activating and relaxing target muscles in 8 different positions from easy to slightly more challenging. The intent is so that you can then activate the target muscles at will in yoga poses. 

The Hip control guide also provides an introduction on how you can use these actions in yoga poses like: standing forward bend, wide leg standing forward bend, triangle forward bend, triangle twist, warrior 3, chair pose, half moon pose, seated forward bend, wide leg seated forward bend, butterfly pose, janu sirsasana, bridge pose, wheel pose, low lunge and high lunge.

There are forward bends and backward bending poses in that list. And there are a couple of one legged balancing poses. Hip control can help you in all of them by improving your ability to tilt your pelvis forwards or backwards. It can also improve stability, you ability to stand on one leg without wobbling so much.

Whether you are beginner or advanced, the hip control guide will help you to understand your hip muscles and use them.

What's In It?

The hip control guide is a pdf outlining all exercises to help you control and feel the single joint hip muscles.

The really cool thing is that these are actions that help you to feel and control your body. Instead of thinking about what to do you can focus on feeling your body and doing it. And all of these actions are simple to do.

Once you've experienced them, it's like learning to ride a bike, you won't have to struggle to remember what to do, you can simply get on with using these actions and experimenting with them in any yoga pose where you are standing, or sitting, or even while back bending.

*One area in which these actions may not be affective is while doing inversions. 

If you want a simple guide to learning to feel your body, in particular your hips, then try the Hip control guide.

Knowing if you are Ready

Because this is about learning to feel and control your body, there may be some people who can't learn from a pdf (or mobi or epub file).

I'd suggest a simple test. If you can squeeze and release your buttocks at will then you can learn to control the single joint hip muscles.