Five-Minute Yoga will start to appear in your inbox on Thursdays from now on.
See you on February 3.
Niek Sprakel's "calculating the height of a tetrahedron, using the Pythagorean theorem"
Is there magic in right angles?
Pythagoras isn’t the only one who thought so. When you bring your arms into right angle position and draw your elbows back, you wake up serratus anterior, a muscle that connects your shoulder blades into your ribcage.
Once your serratus anterior is strong and intelligent, you’ll be able to access your shoulder blades to move your ribs, and to bring more stability to poses that call for upper body strength, such as Chaturanga Dandasana (the four-legged stick, or yoga pushup).
The "stick-em-up" pose gives access to your shoulder blades
This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to use the “stick-em-up” preparation at the wall to get in touch with and strengthen your serratus anterior, and your connection to your shoulder blades.
Stand with your back to the wall, heels about two inches away from the wall, feet hip distance apart. Bring your arms into a 90-degree angle between your upper arms and side ribs, and a 90-degree angle at your elbows.If you’re not sure of your form, try it in front of a mirror until you get a feel for it.
Stretch the backs of your hands toward the wall. You’ll feel the bottom edges of your shoulder blades pressing into your back ribs. Don’t overdo: keep the sensation intense and yet pleasant.
Keep your face soft and your breath flowing
Now, keeping the right angle at your elbows, slowly lower your upper arms towards your ribs.
You should feel a sensation of work on the front surface of your shoulder blade.
When your elbows reach your side body, you will also feel the bottom fibres of your trapezius muscle, the ones connected to last few vertebrae in your ribcage, drawing down.
Stay in this position for a slow breath or two. Relax your face and eyes. Bring your arms back to 90/90.
Start with three repetitions. Make the movement slow and even. Stay aware of the sensations on the front surfaces of your shoulder blades. Continue to breathe. Gradually work up to five or 10 repetitions.
Benefits: Strong serratus anterior muscles are a key to correct alignment in many poses requiring “pushing” strength in the arms. When you also strengthen and draw down through the lower trapezius, you’ll be able to hold good posture, with your shoulders back and down, and your chest open.
Sequence: Fit this in whenever you have a spare minute and would like to bring yourself back to good posture. As a Five-Minute Yoga Challenge, work to your maximum on this every second day, and benefit from the 48-hour rule for building strength.
In a longer practice, do this preparation before sun salutations, and use your increased shoulder awareness to maintain good alignment throughout the cycle.
Ouch: Stiff shoulders and weak muscles can make this a challenging preparation. Be content with small, gradual improvements.
Make sure you check your form with a friend or a mirror.
Photo courtesy of Niek Sprakel, Flickr Creative Commons
If this was your kind of post, you might also like:
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: Ease Your Shoulders in Gomukhasana
In other news: The long awaited Junior Intermediate I assessment weekend came and went.
I passed. I’m happy.
"Musu falls asleep just by thinking about yoga." Clearly she's not thinking Iyengar Yoga.
Every once in a while I read a description of Iyengar yoga that says something on the lines of: “This style of yoga uses props to make the poses easier and more accessible.”
Oh no, dear hearts.
Indeed, there are times when a cushy bolster, a stack of blankets or a well-placed chip foam block hastens us off to yoga heaven.
In other cases, such as height under your shoulders in shoulder stand, the props are there for safety, specifically to protect the natural curve of your neck.
But most often, Iyengar yoga uses props for clarity, not comfort. Sometimes it’s the clarity provided by correct alignment. Sometimes a prop makes things clear by providing resistance to work against.
That’s just what’s going on with this week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge.
It’s Urdhva Prasarita Padasana, (upward stretched out foot pose) with a dense foam brick between your feet.
Safety note: Be sure to use a foam yoga brick and not a wood brick. Losing your grip on a wood brick could have dire consequences.
Lie down on your back with a folded blanket under the back of your head. Draw your knees in to your chest and put a dense foam yoga brick between your feet. Line up the long side of the brick with your inner arches, so you can squeeze the sides of your big toes and your inner ankles – not your inner heels – into the brick.
This work will help strengthen your legs and your core muscles.
Now straighten your legs and bring them into a 90-degree angle to the floor.
People with flexible hamstrings can easily bring their thighs past 90 degrees. Here’s a clue: if it’s no work at all to hold your legs up, they are not at 90 degrees. Move them further away from your face, until you feel your abdominal muscles engage.
If you’re in the tight hamstring camp, you won’t be able to bring your straight legs to 90 degrees, so you’ll feel the abdominal work right away – usually far too intensely to be able to pay attention to how your legs are working.
The solution: lie down and find the distance from the wall where your heels can press into the wall and your legs can be straight with a strong and yet workable hamstring stretch. Then place the brick between your feet.
Once you’ve found your working place, roll your front thighs in.
Open the backs of your knees. Squeeze into the brick with the sides of your big toes and your inner ankles, and push the balls of your big toes toward the ceiling. Spread your toes.
Pull your hamstrings down toward your buttocks. Pull your front thighs toward your hip creases. Then, from the tops of your front thighs, near your hip creases, press toward the backs of your thighs.
Look at your knees to make sure they still face evenly forward. If they are rolling toward each other, lengthen the backs of your knees. Make the outer back knee long, and press the outer back knee straight back.
Look at your inner arches and try to move them slightly further away from your face than your outer arches.
Stay from 30 seconds to two minutes, breathing normally.
Bend your knees, relax your lower back, and repeat.
Benefits: With a block between your feet, you can intensify the action of the legs, the same actions that happen in every standing pose in which the legs are parallel. You will particularly feel the front thighs firming and the front upper thighs rolling in.
Building your strength in this pose will build your stamina in standing poses. It will also strengthen your back and tone your abdominals. When you rotate your front thigh inward, you will activate your psoas muscles.
Sequence: Working your legs in this way is a great preparation for inversions and for standing poses. You’ll also find it useful in downward dog.
If you’re taking this practice on as the one five-minute block you can devote to practice in a day, try setting up fairly close to the wall. Do your active work in the pose, and when you’re done, rest for a minute or two with your back relaxed on the floor and your legs up the wall.
Ouch: If your shoulders and neck feel strained, add an extra layer of blanket under your head.
If your lower back feels pinched or strained, try practicing this leg action with your legs up the wall.
Keep your heels at the wall as you work on the actions.
Sanskrit Corner: Say: OORD-vah pra-sa-REE-tah PAD-asanna. Urdhva means upward. Prasarita means extended or stretched. Pada means foot. Asana means pose.
Photo by Chika Watanabe, courtesy Flickr Creative Commons.
If this was your kind of post, you might also like:
Use a Long Strap to Put Your Shoulders in their Place
Well, it can be if you expect it, understand it, and know how to get past it.
“Building a practice has been impossible for me,” Susan, a new student, wrote in an email. “There is a part of me that is fighting yoga – it’s so weird.”
Not weird at all, really.
Undertaking a yoga practice will change your life.
You can let your practice grow gradually – in fact it seems to wear better if you do. You get to make all kinds of choices about exactly how you’ll change along the way.
But there’s no avoiding it: if you invite a yoga practice into your life, and maintain it over years, your life will change, because you will change.
And no matter how much your rational brain might see that as a good thing, it’s not always calling the shots.
As Robert Maurer explains in his excellent book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way
Announce to yourself that you’re going to be starting a yoga practice, and that mid-brain, the amygdala, aware that circumstances are changing, will put on the breaks.
The Kaizen approach suggests that you focus on taking just one small step, sometimes a step that seems ridiculously small – like, say, a five-minute yoga practice.
Here’s how Maurer describes what happens next:
“Small, easily achievable goals . . . let you tiptoe right past the amygdala, keeping it asleep and unable to set off alarm bells. As your small steps continue, and your cortex starts working, the brain begins to create ‘software’ for your desired change, actually laying down new nerve pathways and building new habits. Soon, your resistance to change begins to weaken.”
This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to pick one practice that appeals to you from the list, and do it.
Today’s suggestion is particularly useful for those moments when you ask yourself, “am I up for a five-minute practice right now?” and the answer turns out to be “no.”
Try rephrasing the question. ”Am I up for five minutes of total relaxation in Viparita Karani?” may evoke a very different response.
Experiment with more or less height under your pelvis to come into the most restful position.
Here’s how to do it:
Put the short end of your yoga mat at the wall. Have a bolster nearby.
Sit down with your left shoulder touching the wall, your buttocks at the right side of the mat.
Keeping your buttocks close to the wall, roll back so your spine is aligned with the centre of the mat and your legs are up the wall.
Bend your knees and press the soles of your feet into the wall to lift your pelvis. Slide the bolster under your waist. Then bring your back onto the bolster and straighten your legs up the wall.
You’re in the right place if your thigh bones feel like they are dropping down toward the floor on the wall side of the bolster, your shoulders rest easily on the floor, and your belly feels soft and relaxed.
Now draw your shoulder blades away from your ears, and press the bottom edge of your shoulder blades into your ribcage to open your front chest.
Check that you still have a natural curve at the back of your neck. Try moving your chin away from your chest and then back toward your chest, looking for a feeling of ease in your throat.
With your legs parallel, roll your upper inner thighs in. Bring the sides of your knees, your ankles and your big toes to touch.
Keeping your ankles and big toes connected, move your inner arches further away from you than your outer arches.
Spread wide across your metatarsals and separate your toes as much as you can.
Keep that alignment as you soften your legs. Remain for five to 15 minutes.
Benefits: Five minutes in this pose will relax and energize you. Stay longer and you’ll feel deeper effects from the chest opening, the gentle stretch of the legs, and especially from the inversion. With venous blood flowing down from your legs, your heart gets a rest. Like a mini shoulder stand, Viparita Karani also balances the hormonal system, strengthens the immune system and calms the mind.
Sequence: As a stand-alone practice, you can do Viparita Karani almost any time except after eating. Place it at the beginning of a longer practice if you come to the mat tired, or near the end of a vigorous practice to quiet your body and mind for relaxation.
Ouch: Viparita Karani needs to feel good from the beginning. If it doesn’t, adjust the bolster an inch or so in either direction, and see how that feels.
If your upper back feels strained, try moving the bolster lower in your back.
If you’re already working with back pain, try one chip-foam block under your pelvis instead of the bolster. Work with this lower height for the first few times you try the pose.
Avoid this pose if you are menstruating. Instead, just lie down with your legs up the wall for five minutes.
Sanskrit Corner: Say: vip-par-ee-tah car-AHN-ee. Viparita means inverted. Karani means action, or cause.
Photo courtesy of Teofilo, Flickr Creative Commons
If this was your kind of post you might also like:
Signs of Summer (Changed Priorities Ahead)
It’s Not All Bliss: How to Work With Poses You Don’t Like, Part One
Practicing contentment increases our ability to quiet our minds
It’s a new year. The clean, precise energy of January has replaced December’s animal urge to fight the darkness by drinking sparkling things and eating After Eight mints.
Now we’re in the season of setting goals.
For years, my yoga goals went like this: I will practice every day. I will do headstand in the middle of the room, I will bring my head to my shins in seated forward bends. I will finally get strong enough to do chaturanga (the yoga pushup).
Not any more. What they morphed into, and why it all changed is a longer story. But the first step was making the resolution that’s this week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: I will practice contentment.
This may seem odd if you think of contentment as a state that will arrive when certain conditions have been fulfilled, but from a yogi’s perspective, contentment is a practice.
In Sanskrit, it’s Santosha, the second of the five niyamas, or observances, that Patanjali outlines in The Yoga Sutras. And contentment is indispensable in creating the state of mind necessary for practicing yoga.
Isn’t it discontent that drives us to improve? Human beings thrive on challenge, and there is no standing still. Either our practice grows, or it shrinks. Why move forward if you are happy where you are now?
But just as in asana, the obvious direction isn’t always the right one.
When we wish to stretch up, we first press down into the ground. And when we’re extending toward the right, we first take our weight and awareness back to the left.
In the same paradoxical way, practicing contentment helps us sustain the fire of tapas, the burning zeal we need to sustain our practice. Far from making us self-satisfied and indolent, contentment helps to quiet our minds. And it’s a shorter step to the mat from that quiet space than it is from the busy mind of discontent.
So this week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is an exercise in contentment. If you only have five minutes in your day, then just sit and do this practice. Your can do your sitting in a chair, just as long as your spine is long.
First, settle yourself in a comfortable seated position, with your lower body releasing downward, and your spine lifting.
Bring your palms together, base of your thumbs to the base of your sternum.
Close your eyes and soften them away from your eyelids. Feel your brain cells softening and releasing down toward your heart centre. Soften your jaw, and let the root of your tongue release inward and down.
Exhale and let go of the past. It can’t be fixed. It doesn’t need to be hidden. Accept that your past is yours only, your unique circumstance to work from, and say yes to it, then let it go.
Now exhale and let go of the future.
Turn off the voice that says: “it’s not going to be okay,” and then the voice that says: “when I get my new practice space, lover, baby, car, ability to do this pose, then I will be happy.”
Spend a moment being grateful for the mat itself, for the space to roll it out in, for the gift of yoga, the freedom to practice, and the availability of teachers.
None of these could be taken for granted as little as 50 years ago.
Then find contentment in your own body, in the poses you can do, in your growing awareness. Feel the quiet and peace of contentment, and carry that peace with you as you either move into your practice or into your day.
When you end your practice, take a moment to feel contentment for what you have achieved, even if it was only showing up on a day when it would have been much easier to give the mat a miss.
Benefits: Practicing contentment helps us learn that happiness, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, “is an inward power of the soul,” and not a reflection of what we own, where we work, or who loves us.
Sequence: All the time, everywhere, but especially when you come face to face with your difficult poses. In Light on Life, B.K.S. Iyengar writes, “Let the goal be to reach perfection but be content with a little progress toward perfection every day.”
Sanskrit Corner: Say san-TOE-sha. Santosha means contentment.
If this was your kind of post, you might also like:
The list of previous Five-Minute Yoga Challenges
Another valiant attempt to marry Christmas and skeletons
As a yogi I practice, as best I can, non-grasping (aparigraha) and contentment (santosha), neither of which is helpful come late November and early December when we begin the first stage of our family Christmas, which is to make a wish list.
It’s been years since I’ve known what I wanted with anything like the certainty of my childhood requests to Santa. So I spend some time, think of books, music and bubble bath, and then email my list and Alan’s to my nieces, and stop thinking about it.
This year the question went underground for a week or two and then out of the blue, I suddenly knew, as if I were seven and it was a Muffie doll, that I wanted a skeleton for Christmas.
Yes, I know it’s not going to happen. There are good reasons why skeletons have never rivaled bikes, dolls and video games under the Christmas tree. It’s winter. There’s not a lot of daylight and much of the natural world is, if not dead, then certainly doing a good imitation.
No one needs another reminder of mortality right now.
But here’s why I want my own set of bones.
Other teachers at Yoga on 7th have occasionally stored skeletons at the studio. Our only place to keep them, other than out in the practice space, is in the closet with the hot water heaters.
So if I had my own skeleton, I would get to make the venerable “skeleton in the closet” joke time after time.
Seriously? There is no better way to understand and teach the three-dimensional reality of the bones than by studying a skeleton.
On a skeleton, you can see the delicate, floating shoulder girdle, connected to the ribcage only where the collarbones meet the sternum. Look at this structure often enough and you will understand that they are mobile and meant to glide, no matter what your upper back feels like after a day’s work.
Examples of this kind are endless, of course. One of the most important ones for me has been memorizing what the hip joint looks like, so I can visualize what I’m doing when I pull my femur heads deeper into my hip sockets to compact my hips.
Here’s another skeletal revelation: the bones of a skeleton are wired together. Without the wires, they would fall apart like an irregular game of pick-up-sticks.
The wrist bone is indeed connected to the arm bone, but it isn’t fused. Bones are pieces of living tissue held together by other pieces of living tissue. There are spaces between the bones. We are so much less solid than we often believe.
I once read a money book that suggested keeping financial magazines and newspapers out on the kitchen counter, on the theory that just walking by and glancing at them now and then would subliminally turn your mind in the direction of money.
Having a skeleton to look at works in the same way. It keeps us connected to our bodies on a basic level, as in relating to the base. Yes, there’s much, much more than bones to understand. But it’s the bones we align in our poses. Bones come first.
And just like the financial newspapers, skeletons offer both daily news and deeper analysis. You can’t study a skeleton, knowing that something similar exists beneath your skin, without beginning to understand the body as something other than the self. And that leads us back to the very reason skeletons are not a yuletide tradition: they encourage us to think of our own death, which is useful, but not festive.
So I’m reconciled to the fact that I’m going to be buying my own skeleton. What I don’t know is which one, exactly.
At the moment I’m thinking of a small model of the full skeleton and, either now or later, depending on the price, a full-sized spine and pelvis with anatomical features like the iliopsoas and the sciatic nerve.
Can you help? Have you bought a skeleton lately? Do you know a great source?
I have some suggestions of websites to look at, but I’m finding them confusing. Let me know about your experience.
Image Courtesy of Castaway in Scotland
If this was your kind of post you might also like:
Release Your Grip By Practicing Aparigraha
Bite-Sized Random Acts of Yoga continue daily. This one had obvious connections between Uttanasana and Prasarita Padottanasana, but Baddha Konasana, except of course for the long side ribs and the shoulder work, didn’t look all that related.
Then I thought about lifting the outer upper thighs in both of the standing forward bends, and moving the tops of the thighbones toward each other. There’s a very similar action in Baddha Konasana, when the outer thighs draw back toward the hips and in to the centre.
B.K.S. Iyengar with the Dalai Lama at a conference in New Delhi in November, 2010. Click on the photo to read more.
Vancouver is a long way from Pune, India, and B.K.S. Iyengar is miles removed from my first Iyengar teacher, who could be fiery when the situation demanded, but was most often gentle and calm.
So for the first years of my yoga life, I didn’t feel very connected to this faraway guru, with his habit of hitting people and his demanding, not to say grueling, way of teaching poses.
My how things have changed.
I still wouldn’t say that B.K.S. Iyengar is my guru, although he is my teacher, and more directly, my teachers’ teacher. But he has profoundly changed my life, in ways that I could never have predicted when I took my first classes.
So when his birthday comes around, I have to stop and pay my respects. On December 14, Bellur Krisnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar turns 92, and I’m very glad he was born.
When I took my first Iyengar yoga classes, I was writing about food for a newspaper. Yoga for me was all about fitness, emotional stability, and becoming a better writer by applying what I learned about yoga practice to my writing practice. Years passed. Things shifted.
First I realized that I was no longer doing yoga “for” anything. Yes, it made me fit and happy, or at least resilient in the face of challenges. But doing the poses was compelling enough, all by itself.
Then writing changed. My writing became a way of communicating the state of mind fostered by my practice – the wisdom of yoga, if you like – without ever having to mention it.
Thirteen years after I became a student, I taught my first class. Now I teach Iyengar yoga, and write about yoga practice. What I took to be my unstated philosophical background has become my subject.
I think it’s nothing short of magical that this man has changed my life and the lives of millions of other people. As a sickly little boy, in a struggling South Indian Brahmin family, he seemed unlikely to survive, much less become the world’s greatest living yoga master.
Another notable meeting from 2010: Guruji meets Bikram Choudhary in the library of the Institute in Pune.
Iyengar was sent to live with his married older sister when he was 15. It is an astonishing twist of fate that her husband was Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the root guru for not only Iyengar, but for Ashtanga yoga guru Patabhi Jois.
Iyengar became one of Krishnamacharya’s demo boys, teenagers trained to put on demonstrations of the new asana practice he was developing as a homegrown form of physical and mental fitness. You can see a very young Iyengar in that role in the famous 1938 news clip.
And while his relationship with his formidable brother-in-law was never warm, Krisnamacharya did send him to Pune to teach in 1937, and thus changed the direction of yoga, and of millions of lives, forever.
Guruji and me, taken in July 2008
In Pune, Iyengar began to invent the first iterations of the yoga props we now take for granted, such as blocks, straps and bolsters. He was looking for a way to stop using his own body to support his students and improve their alignment in the poses. The first props, he has said, were pots and pans from the kitchen.
Now, at 92, he seems deeply happy, despite the still present ferocity. His old age is one of prosperity and honor. Given the happiness he has imparted to others, that seems only right.
If this was your kind of post, you might also like these BKS Iyengar-related posts:
Life, Happiness and the Pursuit of Liberty?
I’m in Technical Hell, and It’s Gnarly, Dude
Four Ways the Brahma Viharas Can Keep You Clear
Baya in her studio, with a little reference material
Since last Thursday, when I announced my holiday break, I’ve learned that some readers thought it was time off from yoga in general.
Oh dear, no!
I’m only taking time away from teaching.
We all go on practicing, don’t we?
Perhaps we’re a little less diligent when the parties and holiday errands come on full force. But practice is what makes me feel good, physically and emotionally, so stopping completely isn’t an option.
Here’s a secret weapon for keeping your practice alive in a break: practice buddies.
Let me introduce the woman with the unmistakable yoga glow in the photo above, Baya Hammoudi.
Baya and I are in the same Jr. I assessment in Vancouver in January, so we have, of late, been coming together on Friday mornings, sometimes by ourselves, usually with others, to practice and prepare.
(Baya has her own studio, at 2275 West 10th Avenue in Vancouver, and teaches four classes a week. On Tuesday nights at 5:30, she teaches a level one class in French. Get in touch with her by email at yoga@bayah.ca.)
I also practice, whenever I can, with Gerie Primeran0, who is going for assessment in February. We work through a practice that includes all of the poses on the Jr. I syllabus in its gnarly two hours.
Why secret weapon?
On a gray winter day, when it seems as though the rain will never stop and the days will never start getting longer again, a practice buddy gets you on your mat and keeps you going.
At that point near the end of the practice when all that looks appealing is Savasana, a somewhat magical effect kicks in.
Two equally tired people, who, on our own, might easily give in to fatigue, will joke, complain, groan and sigh, but we keep going. And when it’s all over, our bodies are profoundly glad we did.
A few thoughts on practice buddies:
• The best practice buddy is a friend you go to class with, because you’re both familiar with the style and the poses you’re studying. But any willing practice buddy is better than none.
• Decide what you want to practice ahead of time. Save yourself last-minute indecision. You can find a good beginning practice on the Iyengar Yoga Centre of Victoria website.
If you can cope with Sanskrit names, check out the practice sequences in my Sadhana blog posts from last July. There’s one for forward bends, backbends, twists and restorative.
• One of the joys of a practice, as opposed to a class, is that you can hold the pose for as long as you like, or do your difficult side twice in a two-sided pose. So have a structure, but let yourself modify it.
• If you see something you think you might correct in your buddy’s pose, resist the urge, unless you have an explicit invitation. Practice is a time for looking inward. Take any urge you might feel to offer corrections as a sign that you’re not fully involved in your own work.
• Try to set a regular time and place. It’s just easier to say “Tuesdays at 7:30” than to negotiate a new time every week. But if all you can manage for now is a session or two over the break, rejoice anyway. A practice buddy is a precious jewel.
If you liked this post, you might also like:
Weaken the Afflictions to Bring Harmony Into Your Life
What’s the Difference Between Movement and Action and Why Does it Matter?
Oh Joy! Easy linking on this set.
Today’s Bite-Sized Random Acts of Yoga fell onto the table like a little gift from heaven. Each one of these poses has one straight leg, which means you can link the actions of the straight leg all the way through.
In Janu Sirsasana, I particularly like the action of pulling the quadriceps of the straight leg thigh toward the hip crease because it brings stability to the pelvis. Pulling the head of the thighbone on the straight leg deeper into the hip socket works too, and those actions also support the pose in Utthita Parsva Hasta Padangusthasana II and Virabhadrasana III.
Of course buttocks drawing away from the back waist, side chest lifting and shoulder blades moving down are all, as usual, there in all three poses.
Further thoughts?
Stretch your arms out wide, and energise your legs
Last week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge could actually be accomplished in 90 seconds.
This week’s challenge adds the remaining three minutes, in the shape of Utthita Trikonasana, (triangle pose).
Triangle pose at the counter is a wonderful variation in several ways:
• It entirely removes the possibility of touching the floor by your front leg with your fingers, which is one of the most popular “false goals” in all of asana practice, rivalled only by the keen desire to bring your heels to the floor in downward facing dog.
We see people with their hands on the floor in triangle pose in pictures, and almost everyone can touch in some way or another. But until the pose and the practitioner are both ripe, we’re always going to reach a false goal by letting go of one that’s real – in this case, the even extension of the spine.
At the kitchen counter, with the measuring stick of “how low can I go?” removed, your mind can turn back to the much more fruitful question of aligning your body and creating the actions in the pose.
• By pressing down on the counter, you take weight out of your pelvis. This allows your hips and thighs to move more freely, a boon for stiffer people.
• With the counter as a guide behind your front leg buttock, you can tell where you are in space. This is especially useful for the more flexible among us. If you have lots of mobility, you can drift around inside triangle pose, out of alignment in any number of directions, without a stiff hip or a tight hamstring to tell you where to put the brakes on.
Keep your legs firm as you bring your right hand down to the counter.
Here’s how to work it:
First do last Monday’s challenge. It will stretch your side body and wake up your hamstrings.
Then stand with your back to the counter, buttocks just touching it. Step into as wide a stride as you can safely manage without sliding on the floor. Bring your arms up, palms facing each other. Stretch your side body. Lift your ribcage. Press your feet down, lift your kneecaps toward your hip creases, firm your thighs. Keep your ribs lifted as you turn your palms toward the floor and slowly bring your arms to horizontal.
Roll your right ribcage to the ceiling your left ribcage back toward your spine.
Turn your right foot and thigh 90 degrees toward the right. Turn your left foot slightly toward the right. Press your right big toe mound down. Press strongly into your outer left heel. Pull your right front thigh muscles toward your hip crease and begin to hinge toward the right.
Bring your right hand onto the counter. Push down into your hand, and stretch away, from the right hand into the left hand.
Begin to slide your right hand along the counter. From the right side of your ribcage, turn towards the ceiling. From the left side of your rib cage, turn toward your spine.
Breathe. Relax your face. Pull up on your front thigh. Press down into your back heel.
Now firm your legs, inhale, come up, and turn your feet until they are parallel. Repeat triangle pose to the left.
Step your feet together. Stand in Tadasana. Press your feet down. Lift your front thighs. Lift your front chest toward the ceiling. Spread wide across your collarbones. Roll your shoulder blades down your back. Bring your hands together into Namaste, base of the thumbs to the base of your sternum.
Exhale, and step into your day.
If this was your kind of post, you might also like:
Roll Your Feet on a Tennis Ball to Loosen Your Hamstrings
Half a Headstand with Three Blocks and a Wall
Drop a Block to Tune Your Triangle Pose
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: Kitchen Counter Series, part one
Winter break - a great time to be outside, alone or with friends
By this time next week I will have taught my last yoga class for 2010.
The new session starts on Sunday, January 9, and in between, except for a few private classes, I don’t plan to tell anyone how to move their thighbones, align their feet or activate their shoulder blades.
Why take a break? Why so long?
Because it’s good for me, and I believe it’s good for my students too.
As a student, I was completely absorbed in my classes. To miss one, I would have to be sick in bed or out of town.
But when Wende’s classes ended for a winter or summer break, I relished my Thursday evenings at home, and my unscripted time.
In the break I practiced, as best I could, and sometimes got together with a yoga buddy who could meet when we would have been in class. But mostly I rested.
When I came back, the work was new again. Being away from class allowed the awareness I’d been cultivating to settle into my body – like Savasana, only longer.
As a teacher, I treasure evenings at home, more time to cook, dinner before 8 p.m. and lazy Sunday mornings.
I keep my practice going, but I also rest, because, by the end of 12 weeks of teaching, I’m tired.
In some regions of yoga world, this is heresy. As yogis, we’re supposed to be riding on a constant wave of energy that comes from being plugged into the source, like the Na’vi from Avatar only through our poses instead of our hair.
Don’t get me wrong. I love teaching yoga. Iyengar yoga is the best thing I’ve found in my life – wholly engaging, rewarding and transformational, and I want to share that with other people.
What yoga teachers really teach, inescapably, is their understanding of the whole of the work, yoga in life as well as yoga on the mat.
For me, that understanding deepens when I’m alone and quiet. I could be out walking, doing a practice with my teaching voice turned off, writing without a deadline, or sitting in meditation.
Whatever the outer activity, I’m essentially listening, filling up so I’ll have something to give. I take a break so I can talk less, and listen more. When you’re on your yoga break, I hope you’ll find the time for some quiet home practice, plugged into the source through your poses.
Image by Steve Evans babasteve, courtesy Flickr Creative Commons
If this was your kind of post, you might also like:
Signs of Summer, a souvenir from travel in England
Yoga Bear in Finland, but what does it mean?
If you came to my classes at Yoga on 7th, you’d have been offered Chocolate Cappuccino Shortbread in the week before the break. Since I can’t give you all a cookie, here’s the recipe.
This recipe is from Five Star Food, my first cookbook with the Vancouver Sun, published in 1993. The recipe came from Jane Bailey, then a caterer in Ocean Park, south of Vancouver near the U.S. border, now a realtor. So I can say without self-aggrandizement that these may be the best Christmas cookies ever.
It really does matter that you use good chocolate. My favorite is Daniel’s 70 per cent cocoa mass, but any good bittersweet chocolate will do just fine.
Chocolate Dipped Cappuccino
Shortbread
Makes about 34 cookies
4 teaspoons (20mL) instant coffee
1 cup (250 mL) butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup (125 mL) sugar
1/2 teaspoon (2mL) vanilla
1 3/4 cups (425 mL) all-purpose flour
1/4 cup (50 mL) cornstarch
6 ounces bitter-sweet Belgian chocolate, melted
Finely crush the instant coffee in a coffee grinder. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in instant coffee and vanilla.
Sift flour and cornstarch together, stir into the butter mixture. Mould into the shape of coffee beans, using one tablespoon (15 mL) of dough for each cookie. Using the back of a knife, press an indent about 1/8-inch (2.5-mm) deep, lengthwise, across the top of each cookie. Place on a greased baking sheet.
Bake at 325 F (160 C) for 15 minutes. Place on wire racks to cool.
Dip either one end or both ends of the cookies in chocolate. Place on baking sheet lined with wax paper and refrigerate.
Not an immediate set of links, at first glance.
This Thursday’s Bite-Sized Random Acts of Yoga is easy to sequence, but not so easy to link. Parighasana gives a great stretch to the side ribcage, which can carry on into Dhanurasana.
Also, both poses require lengthening the buttocks away from the waist. Both of those actions continue in Salamba Sarvangasana I . And the shoulder blades move away from the ears, of course, in all three. Do you see a more subtle set of links between actions?
