Five-Minute Yoga

I did my best to make it look glamorous and desirable – surely someone wants to make them.

If only we lived in Melbourne, Australia.
Then we could go to EMP Industrial, makers of Pilates and yoga equipment in the nearby suburb of Malvern, and buy backless yoga chairs whenever we liked, for as little as $28 for a bulk purchase of 20 or more.
Sure, they have funny looking white feet on them, but we could live with that. Especially since EMP even posts a couple of interesting chair poses on its website.

But here in Vancouver, birthplace of Lululemon, home to an Iyengar yoga community for more than 35 years, with an estimated 1,200 people currently attending weekly classes, the choices are a lot slimmer.

What they boil down to is this: buy the chairs and take the back out yourself, or find someone who will do it for you.

Why does this matter?

It would be one thing if it were just a question of having a chair that worked a little better than a standard folding chair with the back still in place. And there are a lot of poses in the 50 or so done with chairs that would work just as well with a sturdy chair at home.

Happiness on a backless chair.

But the one pose you can’t do with a standard folding chair is a pose that everyone needs to have in their yoga repertoire: Dwi Pada Viparita Dandasana (two-legged inverted staff pose) preparation in the chair.

More than any other pose, this one can open our upper backs, teach us how to do back bends without moving only from the lower back, and, best of all, lift our spirits and alleviate depression, all without demanding that we have the strength or agility for unsupported back bends.

Not coincidentally, It’s also next Thursday’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge.

But how can you do the pose without the chair?

If you’re tiny, you can probably slip in between the seat and the back if you have a folding chair that still has its back.

If you’re not, then we have a problem.

I can no longer find the somewhat intimidating YouTube video on how to take the back out of a chair. Please let me know if you search and have better luck.

So I asked Grant Richards, an Iyengar teacher who I heard had done the deed. He said, “It’s not a big deal. Just a big hammer or tempered (cold) chisel and a drill with a grinder head attachment.”

The chairs sell for about $60 for four – less than $20 each including tax.

Chairs without the front rung, which would allow you to do supported plow pose with your head under the chair and your thighs on the chair seat, might be more expensive. So far I haven’t found a source for them, other than a studio in Austin, Texas, and a U.S. website, YogaChairProp.com.

Jeff Shultz, whose company, Texas Tall Chairs, makes the chairs for the Austin studio, doesn’t ship to Canada because of import fees charged to the recipient on arrival. (His website will be up soon.)

YogaChairProp.com does ship chair to Canada, but one backless chair costs $60, plus $20 shipping., A bulk order of 12 or more chairs costs $40 each, with a shipping cost, per chair, of $20. They also make tall chairs ($130 each, plus $30 per chair shipping), a boon for anyone too tall for the one-size-fits-some standard chair.

To my mind, $80, plus a possible import fee, is a little steep for a yoga chair, especially since it’s best to have two. (Really, they take up almost no space when they’re folded, and besides, you never know when a group of people might pop over and you’ll be looking for more chairs.)

Surely someone in these parts wants to make a small side business out of supplying them, even if tall chairs are a step too far.
So if you know someone who might be interested, please pass this along to them, and ask them to get in touch.
And if you don’t, but would be willing to post this request to your Facebook page on the off chance that someone knows someone who would be interested, please do.

Yogis all over the Lower Mainland will thank you.

Gabriella at the teacher training session, with Rose Rodden

It’s March. In Vancouver, we expect cherry blossoms, rain and spring winds.

For Iyengar students, that includes the friendly blast of fresh air called Gabriella Giubilaro.

Gabriella is a senior Iyengar teacher based in Florence. Last weekend she taught her annual Vancouver workshop, ending with a four-hour teacher training on Monday.

There were themes, of course. And each one of us came away with one that resonated more than another, and is, as Gabriella would say: “your work.”

For me it was a welcome emphasis on something I’ve been working on for a while now: the separate actions of the lumbar and thoracic spines.

We would bring our arms up in Urdhva Hastasana, and hear a shout of: “Why you take your lumbar forward? Don’t take your lumbar forward!”

Or we would move into Warrior I and hear: “Why you take your dorsal back? Don’t take your dorsal back!”

It reminded me of a video I once saw of B.K.S. Iyengar. At the end of an extraordinary asana demonstration, he turned, hands on hips, and said to the audience:

“You people have your bodies all in once piece, but your minds are in a hundred pieces. I move my body in a hundred different pieces, but my mind is one.”

But how do we give opposite directions to two different parts of the spine?

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is just that, to spend five minutes a day learning to move your upper back, or dorsal spine, forward and your lower back, back.

To get a feel for the action, stand with your back to the wall, heels about three inches from the wall.

Press into your outer feet and the balls of your big toes. Lift your inner ankles. Lift your kneecaps. From your top front thighs, press back until you feel your weight in your heels.

Plug your tailbone in. Extend your buttocks toward your heels.

Now bend your elbows and bring your palms to face each other. Place your elbows on the wall. Draw your upper arm bones back toward the wall draw your elbows slightly down.

Then press your upper arms (the two or three inches just above the elbows) into the wall. You’ll feel your shoulder blades come to life.

Press forward and up with your shoulder blades to take your chest toward the centre of the room.

Keep your lumbar spine long, thighs pressed back, weight in your heels. Hold the position for a breath or two, then push yourself away from the wall, and stand in Tadasana (mountain pose) with your arms at your sides.

If you’re just starting out, this is enough to win you the triumph of a Five-Minute Yoga Challenge as long as you work it in five times this week.

If you’re hungry for more, try the preparation in the picture above, from Monday’s teacher training session. (Rose Marie Rodden, the demo model in the picture, teaches Iyengar yoga at Mission Pilates and Yoga.)

Put a sturdy chair against a wall. Hold the top of the chair back, and walk your feet out two or three feet. Now, thinking from the front of your body,  roll your upper inner thighs towards each other. Thinking from the back of your body, roll them away from each other.  Make the action so strong that the heels fall away from each other.

Plug your tailbone in. Take your buttocks towards your heels. Then slowly, keeping the action of your tailbone and upper thighs, bring your thighs to the front edge of the chair seat. If you’re too far away, walk in.

Continue to plug the tailbone in and take the buttocks down. Then lift your thoracic chest and press forward.

When I’ve worked with this in practice over the past few days, it has always led me straight to Warrior I.

Once you’ve tried the motion, and can hold the actions in your lower back and thighs, come out, step one foot forward and one foot back. Bend your front knee, and spin the back inner thigh toward the wall behind you. Keep your lower back long.

Take your chest forward as your lumbar spine continues to move back.

If you can hold it all, take your arms up and complete Warrior I.

And, as your spine moves in two directions, check to see if your mind feels just a little bit more like one piece.

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Seven Strategies for Fluid Hips

Crossing the bridge is one thing. Being the bridge is something else.

As quiet as a yoga practice may be, the mat is a busy construction site. We make triangles, bound angles, side angles, plows, boats, half-boats, gates, bows, and yes, bridges.

And you can’t make a bridge without raising the idea of crossing it.

If you see the pose as the bridge, then  Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (literally: bridge lock all-limbs pose) is a bridge we can cross into shoulder stand because it creates the required openings in the chest and shoulders.
Reduce the muscular effort and increase the length of holding in a supported bridge pose, and you’re offered a crossing from the busy mind into quiet.

But when the body is the bridge, and you are the mind in the body, consciously interpenetrated, what happens then?
What do you span? What are the two sides you join? Where do you go when you cross the bridge? Do you cross from feet to head or from head to feet? Or is there an alternating flow? Or a simultaneous flow in both directions?

You tell me.

I won’t call this practice suggestion a Five-Minute Yoga Challenge, because it’s going to take at least 10 by the time you set it up and stay long enough to build your bridge.
But if you struggle to find time for yoga, I suspect you aren’t suffering from too much rest, at least not the deep organic rest of a supported pose.

Supported Setu Bandhasana will not only rest your heart, cool and soothe your busy brain, give you a gentle abdominal stretch and expand your chest, it’s also a great way to counter the effects of a day spent sitting.

Once shoulder stand is part of your practice, do supported bridge pose after you practice shoulder stand. You’ll find it helps relax and release your upper body. If you’re not yet working with shoulder stand on your own, place this pose toward the end of your practice as a way to quiet down and prepare for Savasana (relaxation pose).

Starting point

Here’s how:

Lie down on the floor with your knees bent and a belt tied around your upper thighs. As you tie the belt, make sure your upper inner thighs roll in.
The belt will help you hold that action in the pose.

Have a blanket under your shoulders and at least one wood or dense foam yoga brick. The second brick, which supports your heels at the wall, can be chip foam blocks or a stack of books. Place the support for your heels at the wall.
Press your feet into the floor and lift your buttocks as high as you can. Come onto your toes to get more height.
Slip the brick, on its tall side, under your sacrum – the bony triangle at the base of your spine. Make sure that your sacrum rests comfortably on the brick. Place the brick closer to your tailbone than to your waist.
Now place your heels on the brick at the wall. Hold the brick under your sacrum in place with your hands, and straighten your legs. If you are practicing on a hardwood floor or other smooth surface, you will slide backwards until your legs are straight.
If your practice space is carpeted, check your distance from the wall. Ideally, your heels and big toe mounds will both contact the wall strongly with your legs straight. If you can’t straighten your legs, or if your feet lose contact with the wall, bring your feet back to the floor, remove the brick, and adjust the distance.

Position the block under your pelvis.

Press deeply into the wall with your feet. Spread the toes wide. Bring your inner knees, inner ankles, and sides of your big toes to touch each other.

Begin to adjust your upper body.
Bend your elbows and press down into your upper arms and the back of your head. Your shoulders should lift away from the floor. Roll your upper arms to face the ceiling.
As you bring your shoulders back to the floor, focus on keeping your weight on the outer shoulders, away from your spine. Press your shoulder blades into your back ribs to help lift and open your chest.
Check that the back of your neck still has a natural curve. If you feel strain at the back of your neck, lift your chin slightly away from your chest. If that doesn’t solve the problem, come out and put another folded blanket under your shoulders.

The bridge constructed.

Now cross the Setu Bandhasana bridge into your inner body. Withdraw your senses of sight and hearing from the surface. Without pulling your breath or straining, watch as the inhalation fills your ribcage. Without tensing your body, keep what you can of your chest expansion as you exhale.

Stay for a few minutes the first time you try the pose. As you get used to it, lengthen your stay. Five minutes is a reasonable goal, 10 can be wonderful.
When you’re ready to come out, bring both feet to the floor. Press down with your feet to lift your pelvis. Remove the brick, and let your buttocks sink back to the floor.
Rest on the floor with your knees bent for a breath or two, then roll to the right-hand side and sit up.

Ouch: If the brick feels uncomfortable, you may have it in the wrong place. Check that it’s not too close to your waist.
Sometimes the shape of the sacrum makes the brick more comfortable when
it’s turned sideways (still on its high side).
If your lower back hurts, bring your feet to the floor. If it still hurts, work with less height under your pelvis. Try one or two chip foam blocks to start.
If you already have neck pain, ask your teacher to show you a variation that will work for you.

Image courtesy of Alan Cleaver at Flickr Creative Commons

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Photographer Alan Turkis calls this "Joy in the Cascades"

Full arm balance holds a special place in the great yogic enterprise of becoming and remaining conscious in our bodies.

In part, that’s because standing on your hands opens your armpits like almost nothing else, and as B.K.S. Iyengar has famously said: “If you keep your armpits open, you won’t get depressed.”

It’s also the most purely inverted of all inversions, the closest you can come to come to completely reversing the energy flow of standing with your arms stretched overhead.

It’s a testament to the power of handstands that there are non-yoga web pages devoted to teaching how to do them, including The Lost Art of Hand Balancing and Wikihow.com. I think Wikihow comes closest to explaining the magic of handstand when it states that doing a handstand “can be used to impress people.”

Yes, it can, and most of all ourselves.

More than almost any other pose, arm balance gives a sense of physical capacity. Just ask Pippi Longstocking, the most empowered nine-year-old in fiction, who stands on her hands whenever she can.

When your day includes a handstand, you come down from the wall with a fresh mind, and a fresh sense of what it might be in your power to do.

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to allow the possibility of doing a handstand into your practice, and to take one small step in that direction every day.

• Start with downward facing dog. Work to hold the pose for two minutes, with your arms straight and your shoulder blades moving away from your elbows.

• Do dog pose, and take one leg up the wall. Work toward holding the leg up for 30 seconds to a minute, twice on each side. Check out Get a Leg Up on Downward Dog for more instructions.

If you turn this sideways, it looks like spinal stretch with your hands at the wall.

• When that’s doable, try right-angle pose at the wall, a.k.a. half handstand. It will strengthen your arms, legs and upper body, give an intense stretch to your shoulders, and build your confidence for more advanced hand balances, and for life in general.
If you can do this, what can’t you do?

First, warm up first with downward facing dog. Then try out the pose in spinal stretch, with your hands at the wall and your feet on the floor. (Turn the photo sideways to see how it looks.) Then work with taking one leg at a time up the wall in downward dog.

When you’re ready, sit on the floor with your back to the wall, and your buttocks touching the wall.
 With your legs straight, lean forward and place a strap under your heels. 
Now kneel on your mat and place the heel of your hand to line up with the OUTER edge of the strap.

Measure before you take the pose.

Come into downward dog with your heels at the wall and the heels of your hands just outside the strap.

Lift one leg and bring your foot to the wall at about hip height.
 Press your foot into the wall and bring your second foot parallel to the first, hip distance apart.
 Aim to have your body form a 90-degree angle, with your heels in line with your hips.

Press down into your hands. Straighten your arms. Lift your shoulder blades away from the floor.

Make your feet firm on the wall.

Roll your upper inner thighs in. From your front thighs, press your thighbones to the ceiling.
 Keep your back long. Lift the back rim of your pelvis up, toward your buttocks and the ceiling.

Take your front lower ribs away from your t-shirt, toward your spine.
 Breathe.
Stay in the pose 20 to 30 seconds, come down and repeat. 
Build your strength until you can hold the pose in good alignment for one minute.

Ouch: If the idea of taking both feet off the floor frightens you, listen to your body’s wisdom, and work with taking just one leg up the wall until you feel stronger.
 If tight shoulders prevent you from straightening your arms, turn your hands so your fingers point out to the side. In this alignment, place the little finger side of your hand on the outside edge of the strap.
 Do not do this pose if you have existing wrist or shoulder injuries. Instead, talk to your teacher about safe ways to increase your strength.

J0y in the Cascades courtesy of aturkus, Flickr Creative Commons.

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Yesterday's headstand: no more gripping fingers for me.

 

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
“And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
“Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

Who can blame the inquisitive young man for asking? Anywhere outside yoga culture, headstand is an odd thing to do. Certainly Lewis Carroll, as he wrote this song for Alice in Wonderland, thought it was strange to wiggle your feet in the air while you take your body weight on the crown of your head.

For yogis, headstand is a given, so much so that we forget that a stable, aligned headstand is a huge accomplishment, at least for those of us who aren’t natural athletes.

I’ve been thinking about headstand a lot lately because, for the first time in at least 15 years, I stopped doing it for about three weeks.

At the time, my enforced headstand avoidance seemed like a loss. But I gained something too – a chance to come back to it with a fresh mind. And as luck would have it, I also have a new approach.

Over the weeks that I’ve been laying off headstand, Louie Ettling has been teaching a different hand position in the Wednesday morning class I take.

Instead of clasping your hands, you bring them together, maintain a grapefruit-sized space between the palms, and keep the fingers straight.

It’s a small detail, but it changes everything.

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to work with extended fingers in your headstand clasp, to extend instead of gripping.

And yes, you can do it, even if headstand is a distant glimmer on your yoga horizon.

First let’s check it out in the easiest way possible.

Sitting at a table, bring your elbows in line with your shoulders and interlace your fingers with the fingers stretched long.
Hold this position for 10 to 20 seconds, pressing your forearms down into the table, and actively extending your fingers. Notice what you feel in your neck and shoulders.
Now bend your fingers and let them grip the back of the opposite hand.
Hold the gripping for 10 to 20 seconds, and notice what happens in your neck and shoulders.

When I extend my fingers, my neck lengthens and so does my spine. My head feels lighter, as though it’s lifting to the ceiling.

When I clasp my fingers, the muscles at the sides of my neck, and in the middle of my upper back, grip.

You can’t, of course, relax completely in a headstand, or you would collapse. What we need to do is find the zone between collapse and rigidity, a way to balance without gripping. (Yes! Another valuable life lesson from yoga.)

Take away the ability to grip with your fingers and what you may find is a new way to work your shoulders. For anyone with a tendency to round in the upper back, that’s good news – an active pose to help you reverse the curve.

Here’s how to work with it:

If you’re not planning to take your feet off the floor any time soon, then work as above, in a chair with your elbows on a table.

Cultivate an awareness of how it feels to grip, how it feels to extend.

Then take that awareness into the rest of your practice and your life. Begin to notice what happens whenever you grip your hands unnecessarily. Release them, extend your fingers and relax your neck.

Stretch your fingers away from each other

Ready to go a little further? Kneel on the floor, plant your forearms, and extend your fingers. You’ll have more weight in your forearms than when you’re sitting, which will intensify the work in your neck and shoulders.

For the next stage, bring the crown of your head to the floor, tuck your toes under and straighten your legs. Keep your shoulders lifting away from your ears. Keep your fingers extended.

Already working with headstand?
Work through both of the earlier stages with your arms on the floor. Then set yourself up as close as you can to the wall with your fingers extended. Go up into your headstand, keeping your fingers stretched. Practice at the wall until you’re sure of your balance.

Eventually you can let your fingers curve back towards your hands, but wait until you can do it without gripping.

When you’re done, you might like to look up the rest of Father William, and perhaps even the poem Carroll was parodying, Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them”.

My mother used to recite the first two verses of Father William, the headstand verses, with enormous glee. I love them too, so here’s the second one, for no better reason than it makes me smile:

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

Headstand photo courtesy of Alan James.

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Use a Long Strap to Put Your Shoulders in their Place

Seven may be lucky, but luck has nothing to do with making your hips more fluid.

As far as I know, it’s entirely accidental that this collection of strategies for gaining greater range of movement in your hips turns out to be seven in number.
I didn’t plan to use the most potent magical number after three, or to subtly allude to the seven heavenly virtues, the seven deadly sins, the seven days of creation or the seven days of the week – although daily practice is one of the strategies.
Once I realized what I’d done, I naturally looked up the symbolic meaning of seven. In the end, my favorite Biblical seven is the seven priests, with seven horns, circumnavigating the city of Jericho for seven days, and on the last day, circling seven times, after which they blew a great noise on their trumpets, and the walls came tumbling down.
If walls can tumble, surely hips can release.
So here they are, seven strategies for taking tight hips and making them more fluid:

1. Do it daily.
Five minutes a day is long enough to make a difference, but it does have to happen every day. Remember, if you’re not getting looser, you’re getting tighter. Look for a place to slip in a seated hip opener, and make it a daily habit.

2. Get out of your chair.
For at least some of your sedentary time, sit on the floor. Slide off the couch to watch the news. When you settle in for a long phone chat, look for a comfortable place to sit on the floor. Sit on a cushion if you like, just not on a chair.
Prop your back against the wall and crouch in Malasana, do any of the seated hip openers, or just sit there. Either way, you’ll be increasing the flexibility in your hips.

3. Learn what release feels like.
If your hips are tight, classic yoga hip openers will be excruciating long before you look like the picture in the book.
Instead of going for the final pose, focus on finding the place where your stretch begins. Set the volume control on the sensation in your hips at “intense and yet pleasant.”
That would be your working place, defined as the spot where you feel the work, but it’s moderate enough that you can relax your face, soften your eyes, breathe normally, and contemplate willingly doing the same thing again tomorrow.
If you always shoot past resistance and into pain, all you will teach yourself is the way your muscles feel when they’re gripping.

4. Lighten your pelvis to free your thighbones.
If you’d like your thighbones to move inside your hip socket, it helps to make space. Do that by lifting your upper body out of your pelvis – the opposite of slumping.

Press your hands into bricks and lift: you'll make space in your pelvis.

For a super-charged lift, have two yoga bricks, or two stacks of books the same height, one on each side of your pelvis. If you’re sitting on a lot of height, make the bricks higher.
Once you’ve found your working place, press your hands down into the bricks and lift your pelvis up off the floor, the higher the better.
While your pelvis is off the floor, relax your thighbone (on one-sided poses) or your thighbones down toward the floor. Hang out for a moment, letting your knees descend with the help of gravity. Then, keeping your thighs released, return your pelvis to the floor.

5. Stay balanced.
One set of hip muscles is always either looser or tighter than the ones on the other side. Know which is your tighter side. In poses such as Baddha Konasana (bound angle pose), where both legs do the same thing, keep the more open side level with the less open side.
In two-sided poses, such as Janu Sirsasana (head to knee pose), start on your tighter side, then work the looser side, then do the tighter side again.

6. Use your breath.
Once you’re settled into a long, slow hip opening, and you’ve found the spot where you can work, then move your awareness into your breath. As you breathe in, visualize the inhalation filling your hip with warmth and expanding it. As you breathe out, let go of the tightness in your hip.

7. Be friendly.
Frame your journey into open hips as an exploration, not a battle. Watch what you tell yourself about your stiffness. Allow no criticism. Instead of thinking about the tightness, focus on the feeling of the hip opening, little by little, day by day. Congratulate yourself for showing up, and for every millimeter of movement you gain.

Looking for inspiration for a handy hip stretch? Here’s a list of all the hip-opening on this blog so far. More to come, and I’ll add them when they arrive:

Roll on the floor to free your hips

Step Forward from Downward Dog

Get a Leg Up on Downward Dog

Take the Five-Minute Malasana Challenge

Use a Strap to Deepen Your Malasana

Television Yoga for Tight Front Thighs

Sit Like a Pretzel to Stretch Your Hips

Take Rotated Triangle to the Wall

Drop a Block in Triangle Pose

Crank Your Thighs in Bound Angle Pose

Glowing seven image courtesy of Eurritimia

Spring the lock on tight hips. The key: gentle, quiet hip rotation.

In this week’s Tuesday 7:30 class, Jean told me that she’s making progress on her tight hips. “This week I actually thought about doing some hip openers,” she said. “Before, I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

Ah, tight hips.
If you have them, then every hip opening pose, no matter how moderate, hurts from the beginning.
You feel sheets of pain. Meanwhile, on the next mat, a yoga noodle who can wrap her legs around her shoulders sighs in contentment. Believe it or not, hip stretches are some of the most peaceful, bliss-inducing poses in yoga.

What would it take to unlock your hips and begin to tap into the bliss?

My guess is that you’d first have to feel your hips release without pain, so you’d know what you were aiming for.

Hence this week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge, which may be the easiest hip opener ever invented.
All you have to do is lie down on the floor, visualize that your kneecap has become a giant Crayon, and then draw the biggest circle you can manage.
There’s no weight, no strain, and even for the tightest hips, there should be no pain. Sensation, yes, but moderate enough to stay with it, and still keep your eyes relaxed and your jaw unclenched.

Can something this gentle be effective?
Well, yes.
Synovial fluid feeds the cartilage that covers the ends of our bones. When your synovial fluid circulates, your cartilage stays nourished and healthy.

When you roll on the floor and give your thighbone its fullest range of motion, you’re doing the equivalent of oiling your hip joint. What’s different is that you don’t add oil, like you might to a squeaky hinge. Instead, you move the existing synovial fluid around so it can feed all the parts of the joint capsule.

Relax and see how much freedom you can find in your hip joint

Here’s how to do it:

Lie down in constructive rest position, knees bent, feet flat on the floor. Let your eyes close and sink back away from your eyelids. Let your frontal brain release away from your forehead. Relax your jaw.
If you feel strain in your neck, put a folded blanket under your head.

Now straighten one leg, draw the other knee in toward your chest, pick your Crayon color and begin to draw the biggest circle you can, clockwise or counter clockwise.
Focus on your knee and let the rest of your body follow. You can straighten the leg you’re drawing with to make a bigger circle, open the leg so far out to the side that your thigh touches the floor and your opposite hip lifts, and roll right up on the straight leg hip when you’re taking your knee across your body.
Go slow.
The thighbone is a stick with the kneecap at one end and the pelvis at the other. As you draw the circle with your kneecap, notice the movement of the thighbone in the hip socket.
Keep your face quiet, eyes closed, mind relaxed. Focus on the movement of your thighbone in the hip socket. Notice what feels easy, what feels pinched or sticky. When you find a spot that urges you to hurry past, slow down instead. Spend extra time with the sticky bits, gently moving back and forth to ease them. Any clicking, bumping, clunking sounds you may hear are not harmful and should diminish in time.

After several rotations in one direction – four is a nice number – do an equal number in the opposite direction.
Change legs and repeat.
When you’re done, bring your feet flat on the floor. Spend a moment feeling the soft, fluid quality of your hips.

What is the best time to do this Five-Minute Yoga Challenge?

• If you wake up stiff and have the luxury of a slow morning, then morning works well.
• So does taking five minutes for yourself when you come in after work. It will help you shed the working day, and you’ll be in a more mellow mood for the rest of the evening.
• Or make it part of your bedtime routine. A hot bath first will help to relax your hips, and a quiet contemplative five to 10 minutes of hip work will help you sleep.
• If you’re incorporating this movement into a longer practice, do it near the beginning. See if you can continue to work with your awareness deep in your body for the rest of the practice.

Words of warning: If you’ve had hip surgery, check with your physiotherapist before trying this.
If you feel pain in your belly when you move your thigh toward your chest, or pain in your hips that doesn’t diminish as you work, get it checked out.

Photo courtesy of Brenda-Starr

Next week: Seven strategies for fluid hips, with links to every hip opener on this blog.

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The transition from sleep to waking gives us the best chance of forming a new habit.

I’ve come to believe that forming good habits would be a cinch if “first thing in the morning” could happen more than once a day.

Nothing lets us start a daily practice more easily than resolving to do it first thing. We’re fresh from sleep. The world has yet to place legitimate demands on us. As long as everything is set up the night before and ready to go, all we need to do is get out of bed and the habit we want to create  –  meditation,  breath work, writing, asana practice, a long walk or a trip to the gym – can reliably be ours.

Problem is, there’s usually more than one activity competing for that single space. Sometimes it’s a 5:30 a.m. hockey practice, or a punishingly early start time to the working day. Other times it’s a choice between two activities we’d dearly love to make a part of our lives. But you can’t, for example, write first thing, accessing the pristine mind on the borders of sleep, and have the same mind available for breathing practice.

I can wake up and do breathing practice, no problem. I can, with considerably more struggle, have a cup of something hot to drink, and write as I drink it. (Shouldn’t I check email? What about the laundry? What if it’s a sunny day in February – shouldn’t I walk to the beach while the birds are at their most active?)

After that, all bets are off.

What I need is another “first thing in the morning,” and that’s not going to happen.

Transitional moments, however, come scattered through the day. And while they don’t have the magic of the transition from sleep to waking, as long as we slow down enough to notice and take advantage of them, they can work as hooks to hang a habit from.

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to find a time of the day to lie down and watch your breath.

If first thing in the morning is available, congratulations. Learn the setup and you’re on your way.

If early morning isn’t going to happen, there are other possibilities.

One of my favorite ways to get small tasks done is the pomodoro technique, which demands a five minute break every 25 minutes. That’s  enough time stretch your shoulders or change a load of laundry over, but not enough time to  lie down and breathe. But every four pomodoros demands a 20-minute break, which is ample. If you work at home, 20 minutes is plenty of time to lie down and watch your breath, and come back more refreshed than if you’d had a cup of coffee.

As long as you don’t have to rush to get dinner on the table, the transition from work to home at the end of the day is  another excellent moment for breathing. Instead of sitting down to watch the news – it will, most assuredly, be on later – take the time for breathing, and perhaps some poses.

Then there’s the opposite transition, from waking to sleep. Do your breathing just before bed, and it will lead you to a sounder sleep.

This set up will tip your head into place for pranayama, and relax your diaphragm

Here’s how to set up:

Place two chip-foam blocks, lengthwise, on the centre line of your mat. Place a third block crosswise on top of the block at the head end of the mat.
Fold a blanket and line up the smooth fold with the edge of the crosswise block.
Set a timer for 8 to 15 minutes.
Sit with your knees bent and roll back so the bottom of your ribcage rests on the bottom edge of the blocks, and the back of your head rests on the blanket.
Check that your spine runs down the middle of the blocks, and your chest feels evenly supported.
Lift your pelvis and lengthen your lower back by taking your tailbone toward your ankles.

The final position should be completely comfortable, with palms facing the cieling.

Roll your palms to face the ceiling. The knuckles of your middle fingers should rest easily on the floor. Relax your shoulders. Lengthen your legs one by one and let your thighs soften and your feet drop away to the sides. If your feet feel unbalanced, one side releasing more than the other, take your feet further apart.

Relax your face. Soften your eyes. With your lips together and your teeth slightly parted, exhale and relax your jaw. As you exhale, let the weight of your body sink toward the blocks and the floor.

Let your awareness rest on your breath. Notice the moment the exhalation starts, be aware of a soft, even flow of breath, and notice when it ends.

At the end of the exhalation, pause. Wait and let the inhalation come by itself.

When the timer goes off, let your awareness drift away from your breath. Soften your face and eyes, and rest for a breath or two. 
Bend your knees, roll to your right hand side, then slowly sit up.

If you’re intrigued by breathing, and want to go further, get a copy of Light on Pranayama, by BKS Iyengar, and start reading.

You’ll find a list of benefits for this exercise, under Ujjayi I, that includes: it “makes one attentive, invigorates the nerves, loosens any hardness in the lungs and prepares them for deep breathing.”

Photo by Keith Roper, Flickr Creative Commons

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