Yoga Challenge
If you’ve always wanted to start yoga, or maybe just make it a more regular thing in your life, this 7-day Yoga Challenge makes yoga available to everyone. Regardless of the mental or physical barriers you’ve faced, such as lack of time, resources or even feeling a bit intimidated, this challenge will leave you with the ability to create your own sequence in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Each day, Dina focuses on a different element of yoga, and by the end, you’ll find it easy to include all your favorite poses from seated, to standing, and twists. Enjoy a healthier connection to your body through breath and movement.
Skills You Will Learn
- Gain a greater understanding of the foundations of a well-rounded yoga practice.
- Dive into each element of building a self-practice, from postural alignment to creating a simple sequence.
- Safely learn a wide range of foundational yoga poses as well as proper alignment and modifications.
- Become more confident in your own yoga practice as well as in your body.
- Create your own yoga sequence to draw from regularly for your home practice.
About Host
Dina Ghandour
Dina Ghandour, a yoga, mindfulness, and meditation instructor based in the United Arab Emirates, dedicates her teaching and her practice to helping people heal and find calm amongst the chaos. With an aim to make yoga and meditation more accessible through a safe and uplifting environment – bringing a sense of balance and grounding to her students’ lives – the Duquesne University alum believes she has the perfect way to kickstart, or build upon the foundation of, your meditation self-practice journey.
Course Outline
We start the course by looking at the elements of a well-rounded yoga practice. Dina takes us through how best to support your practice through the use of props, suggested clothing, and the right setting. We’ll also look at a few situations where yoga may not be right for you.
This session dives into the gentle practice of arriving into the body and why it is important for the nervous system. We look at poses to help warm up the body before moving into more dynamic elements of the yoga practice.
Here we talk about standing and balancing postures, learning more about how standing postures build the foundation for stability in your practice. We also look at standing posture alignment and how to better support yourself with props. As we go, Dina also explains which parts of the body are being lengthened and which are being strengthened through these poses.
In session four, we will look at seated postures, primarily forward folds and hip openers. More specifically, hip mobility and hip openers, seated forward folds and how they lengthen the hamstrings, how to keep the integrity of the spine in these poses as well as the basics of the supportive props: blocks and straps.
Today is all about back bending! We address how spinal movement works and how to safely enter backbends by activating the back body as well as which parts of the body need to be open to support the backbend. To round off the session, we also look at the neutralizing postures for the spine after backbends.
This part of the course looks at the ins and outs of sun salutations. We explore the benefits of sun salutation, the postures that make up sun salutations as well as the different modifications you can use to best support your level of practice.
We end off by taking all of the knowledge gained throughout the course and creating a personalized and beneficial yoga sequence. We’ve been on an empowering journey that leads to this point: a full sequence you can feel secure in using for your home practice. Today we also integrate additional elements such as intention, meditation as well as the end posture - rest/savasana.
