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.

What if you are just starting a yoga practice, where do you begin?

It can depend on what your overall goal is. If your goal is to

• improve coordination,
• or flexibility
• or strength,
• or to get rid of pain
• or just to move your body,

it can help to get more familiar with your body. 

Learning to do yoga poses, you’re often not just learning a new pose, you’re also learning your body. So why not start with some simple exercises to get more familiar with your body.

Getting a Better Feel For Your Body part 1 focuses on simple pushing exercises that you can do within a set of basic yoga poses. You could think of these exercises as similar to pushing a car out of snow but instead of pushing a car, you’re pushing parts of your body using friction and simple pushing actions.

One reason for these exercises is that they help you to learn how to feel changes in relationship in parts of your body. But they also help you to learn to feel the muscular actions that cause changes in relationship.

Another benefit to these exercises is instead of thinking about whether or not you are doing the exercises correctly, you can focus on feeling your body as you do the exercises. The focus is on what you are doing versus how you look while doing it.

There are some basic alignment points but the focus is more on feeling how the parts of your body relate, and varying those relationships.

This ebook includes a simple routine designed to help you use basic pushing actions to better feel and control your hips and shoulders. These pushing techniques can be used in stronger poses like side plank but also in working towards improved flexibility in poses like the forward bend and front-to-back splits.

The book comes with a summary of the poses and their basic actions. It also comes with a detailed description for each exercise along with pictures so that you can easily see what you are trying to do for each exercise.

It also comes with preparation exercises to make learning the actual exercise easier.

The ebook comes in pdf, epub and mobi (for kindle) formats. You get access to all three formats when you purchase the book.

The intent of the exercises in this book are to help you better feel your body. If you're not feeling it, I've included an email so that I can help with any problems. If you're still not feeling it lean pub has a 45 day happiness guarantee. Nope, not 45 days of happiness, just if you let them know within 45 days of purchase, you'll get your money back. And that should make you happy, or at the least, not stressed that you're taking a risk in buying this book.

So what's the back ground of the material in this book, and me the teacher? I teach a variety of different actions in my yoga classes. I generally use the same general set of actions over a course of a few weeks, refining the way I teach them but also coming up with simple fixes for the students who don't get the actions. Of all the actions that I teach I feel that the ones covered in this book are the most basic and the most useful for a beginner just getting started in a yoga or "body awareness" practice. It's called part 1 because the hope is that you continue with the other books in this series as well.

Why not include all the techniques in one big book?

I've thought of that.

But one reason not to is that it's easier to focus on one set of related actions at a time.

As a student, hopefully it's less daunting for you and you can get on with learning.

Plus there's less risk for both of us. You get to try one set of actions (covered in this book) if it works for you great, if it doesn't then you can get your money back or leave it at part 1 (maybe you got some benefit but decide that the way I teach isn't for you).

Plus, if when I get to the point that I have a range of "Getting Better at Feeling Your Body" books published, its easier to make suggestions for where you should start, say if limited in time, resources, or you have a particular problem.

So why start with this book if there are others to come?

Well, you have to start somewhere. The important thing is to start.

When stretching and improving awareness, one of the most important considerations is Tensegrity which is a contraction of the terms Tension and Integrity. Tension is what allows us to feel our body in general. While it is pretty easy to learn to feel muscular activity and the tension generated within the belly of a muscle when it is active, connective tissue tension is something we can learn to feel when muscles are relaxed.

If we learn to feel this tension, then we can not only improve body awareness, but also our ability to control our body and respond quickly, even instantaneously. One of the keys to learning to feel this tension is to move slowly and smoothly. But another key is to focus on isolated elements.

After awareness (and control) is developed in isolation it can then be used in integrated "whole body" movements or postures.

The exercises start with unweighted exercises since in those it is easier to develop both awareness and control. It then progresses to weighted scapular awareness exercises.

It includes shoulder stretches and different stretching techniques for improving shoulder flexibility as well as improving awareness and control of the shoulder girdle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.