Five-Minute Yoga

In everyday life, there’s not much call to distinguish between movement and action. Sure, a man of action sounds impressive, and a man of movement not so much. But trust me, you can live a full and happy life without ever giving it another moment’s thought.

In yoga, on the other hand, being clear on the difference between movement and action will change your practice completely.
A movement is a change of position.
Here are some movements: Take a wide stride. Stretch your arms out to the sides. Turn your feet to the right.  Bend your right knee to 90 degrees.
Follow these instructions and you will be in the outward shape of Warrior II, with or without a shirt and a background of the Himalayas

Looks chilly, but the alignment is great.

An action gets something done.
Here are some actions in Warrior II: Spread the soles of your feet. Press your outer left heel down and lift your inner left ankle. Press your left thighbone from the front of your thigh to the back of your thigh. Push your right heel down into the floor. Without straightening your leg, pull back from your outer right knee toward your outer right hip.
Lengthen your buttocks away from your back waist. Lift evenly on both sides of your ribcage. Release your shoulder blades away from your ears.
Spread the palms of your hands.

In essence, movements make the shape of the pose. Actions bring the pose to life.

And that’s not all they do.

• Actions make yoga poses easier to understand.
Work with movements and you’ll see hundreds of ways to arrange your body in space. Work with actions and you’ll see patterns.
All straight legs are likely to behave in much the same way. With few exceptions, the shoulder blades move away from the ears, the chest and the lumbar spine stay broad and the buttocks lengthen away from the waist. Even when you’re upside down, all those actions apply.
• Actions bring your mind into your body.
Some can be confounding at first glance. “Widen across your collarbones,” for example. Or “pull the skin of your shins up over your knees.”
Creating actions takes concentration. It demands our attention, especially as actions build on actions in a pose, and each one needs to be stable and maintained as you add the next.
The difference between a beginner and an advanced student is not the length of their hamstrings, or their ability to kick up into a handstand. It’s the actions they can understand, accomplish, and hold.
• Actions erase competition.
Movements are external, and can be compared. Is your knee as deeply bent as your neighbor’s on the next mat? Does your hand come all the way to the floor in Triangle pose, like the model in the picture?
Actions turn off the competitive mind. It’s not just that they are internal, and hard to see. Once you start to work with actions, you move inside yourself. You become an observer of your own pose, and you have no time to compare.
• Actions make you your own expert.
Study actions and you will be able to practice confidently on your own. You will no longer wonder if you are doing the pose correctly. Once you know what straight legs do, you can do those actions in every pose that has straight legs. From the life those actions bring to your pose, you will know with certainty that your practice is accurate.
• Actions prevent injury.
Lusting after big movements leads to muscle tears and wrenched backs. Fixing your mind on actions will keep you in a range of motion that’s safe for your body.
When do you stop in a pose? When do you come out?
The answer is always the same: when you can’t make the actions any more.
• Actions lead, eventually, to embodied stillness.
B.K.S. Iyengar famously calls asana practice “meditation in action.”
For the ear that’s not attuned to the distinction, that sounds like meditation for people who can’t sit still.
Once you cease to be a yogi of movement, and become a yogi of action, you’ll know that it’s something else entirely.

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There's at least one straight leg in all three of them.

Another week, another seven Bite-Sized Random Acts of Yoga.

Today’s is a fairly easy set to link, with plenty of similar actions in the straight legs, and in the long side ribs, and the concave spine in the first stages of Padahastasana and Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimottanasana (check plate numbers 136 and 137 in Light on Yoga.)

In Urdhva Prasarita Padasana (it’s the fourth picture in the article) there’s no concave spine, but the length of the ribcage has to be maintained.

One of the most revolutionary Five-Minute Yoga Challenges you can do

If setting down roots is the fundamental act in a yoga practice, then we’d best pay attention to our feet, the primary roots for all standing poses and for much of our life off the mat. The more time we spend increasing the liveliness and connectedness of our feet, the more we can, both literally and metaphorically, take a stand, stand on our own two feet, feel grounded, and create a firm footing for ourselves.

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to take five minutes a day to interpenetrate your fingers and toes. In fact, if there were just one practice you were to take on, for five minutes a day, this one would give you the biggest rewards.

Everything from tight shoes to walking on pavement conspires to turn our feet into lifeless slabs – a process that only accelerates with age. Good yoga feet with active, mobile toes bring life to every pose. They help you connect with the ground in standing poses, and pull your energy upwards in inversions. And of all the Five-Minute Yoga Challenges, this is one of the easiest to incorporate in your day, at least when you’re able to take off your shoes and socks.

Television yoga? It’s a natural. In the bathtub, soapy water makes it easier to work the fingers in between the toes. The same goes for giving yourself a foot massage, or putting lotion on your feet  – all you need to do is add a little extra time for opening the spaces between your toes.

Here’s how it goes:

Sit down on a chair or the floor. With the palm of your left hand facing the sole of your right foot, interpenetrate your fingers and toes all the way down to the webbing.
It helps to pull on your fingers with your right hand, as though you were milking a cow.
Now squeeze your fingers onto your foot, and press your toes back toward your right knee. Hold the squeeze for 30 seconds or more.
Then squeeze your toes onto your left hand, curling your toes toward your knuckles. Hold this squeeze for the same amount of time.
Take your left thumb to your big toe mound and press down, so the sole of your right foot faces the ceiling.
Then, with the little finger side of your hand, press the little toe side of your foot, so your sole faces toward the floor. Release your fingers and compare feet. One will be pink, healthy and glowing, the other, not so much.

Then change sides.

Unless you already have exemplary yoga feet, expect some discomfort at the beginning. You might also find that one foot is easier than the other. Know that very quickly the discomfort will diminish until it’s just intense sensation. Eventually, playing with your toes will feel good.

If your toes are very tight, and your fingers are thick, don’t despair. Try using the foam toe separators sold for use in pedicures to start. Or use pencils, which are thinner than most fingers.

Be patient and keep at it. Your feet will thank you, and, as you increase your ability to root down, you’ll be firmer on your feet.

Do you have a tale to tell about how working with your feet helps your poses? Do share.

Photo courtesy of Casey Phalsalakani

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The Category Page with all the previous Five-Minute Yoga Challenges

Roll Your Feet On a Tennis Ball to Loosen Your Hamstrings

Television Yoga for Tight Front Thighs

Photographer Aaron Escobar reports that his tree has been sitting this way for more than 20 years.

Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up. –Lynwood L. Giacomini

A gardener may believe that what goes down must come up, but a yogi believes that what goes down, and how decisively it goes down, determines what comes up, and how high.

Connections between gardening and yoga are, it seems, as plentiful as seeds on a sunflower.

In the garden of our practice, we cultivate our poses. Sometimes we have to pull out weedy bad habits. Always we have to till, prune and water. Neglect usually results in decay, but sometimes, as with a perennial tucked away in a far corner, poses bloom when we least expect them to.

And then there’s patience: in a garden, as in a yoga practice, nothing happens overnight.

But of all the links from your mat to your garden, nothing is more fundamental than understanding that what goes down must come up.

Learning to root down will revolutionize your yoga practice because it gives you the ability to lift up and create space in your body.

In essence, whatever body part is in contact with the floor presses down.

In standing poses the rooting is in your feet. In downward dog, your hands and feet, in headstand, your forearms and the crown of your head, in straight-leg seated poses, your sitting bones and legs.

Why does rooting work?

Think about a tennis ball. Drop it and it will bounce, a little. Hurl it to the ground and it will fly back up again, the size of the rebound a mirror image of the force that sent it to the ground.

The next time you take a pose, first find the root. Take your mind to the place that goes down. Press it down for a long moment, and see what lifts.

Do you have a favorite, not-so-obvious way to root in a particular pose? The upper leg foot in Ardha Matsyendrasana, perhaps? (Although if you clicked to see the picture, you’ll have to imagine the bottom foot turned sideways, and supporting the buttocks, not out to the side. Please share.

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The first two, very related, the third, not so obvious.

Bite-sized Random Acts of Yoga continue to amuse and delight me every morning.

This morning’s poses had some obvious links – the long side ribs in each, for example, and the inward rotation of the upper thighs in both Dwi Pada Viparita Dandasana (over a chair, feet to the floor for the Jr. I syllabus) and Urdhva Dhanurasana (also over a chair in this syllabus).

Lately I’ve been working to keep my feet from turning out when I push up into Urdhva Dhanurasana by holding a wood brick between my upper thighs. With the brick, it’s hellishly difficult to lift off the floor in the full pose. Clearly, I’ve been compensating. But in the chair, as long as I take time to position the brick so its top edge is just at the top of my thighs, I can feel the inner thigh work strongly.

How pleasant, then, to come t0 Supta Konasana, and feel the same sensation of the upper thighs, active, rolling towards each other and pulling back toward the hip socket.

True balance is always delicate.

All of the standing balance poses have a counterbalance – a spot where it’s easy to stay upright because you’ve fallen away from the centre line.

Most often it involves the standing leg thighbone, high in the hip socket. Let it drop out to the side, and the balance is easier.

The problem is, you’re stuck. From a counterbalance, all you can do is stay upright.

Before you can expand into the fullness of the pose, you need to draw close to the median line.

This week’s Five-Minute Yoga Challenge is to notice your counterbalance in a standing balance pose, and correct it.

If you’re just beginning a yoga practice, work with Vrksasana, tree pose.

Use the wall if balance is an issue. Focus on pulling the top of your standing leg thigh deep into your hip socket, even before you raise your other foot from the floor.

Take a good look at the standing leg hip

If Ardha Chandrasana, half-moon pose, is already part of your practice, then try this method for losing the counterbalance. (I learned it from Gabriella Giubilaro, a senior Iyengar teacher from Florence, who teaches frequently in Vancouver.

First, take the balance out of the equation.

Stand facing the wall, feet parallel, toes about four inches from the wall, with a yoga brick about 18 inches in front of your right foot on the little toe side.

Rotate your feet to the right, and come into triangle pose.

Now bend your right knee, and bring your right hand to the floor. Step your left foot in, so your stride is shorter. Transfer your weight to your right foot.

Reach your right hand forward to the brick and come up into Ardha Chandrasana.

Bend the knee deeply and align the knee with your centre three toes.

Bring your left toes to rest on the wall, with your left leg in line with your spine. Bend your left elbow, and bring your hand to the wall.

Bend your right knee again. With your knee deeply bent, rotate it away from the wall, so it lines up over your middle three toes.

You will feel a strong sensation of work in your right hip.

Slowly, carefully, straighten your right leg, keeping the alignment of your knee. (Compare the first and third photos to see the difference in the hip crease.)

Check out the hip crease, and compare it to the first photo

Notice what has happened in the rest of your pose. Gently draw your pubic bone towards your navel. Take your shoulder blades down your back. Take your chin away from your chest.

Press out through the ball of your left big toe and from your lower right abdomen, and rotate toward the ceiling.

To come down, bend your right knee. Lower your left leg to about six inches from the floor, then stretch it back to return to your original wide stride. Repeat to the left side.

Benefits: Ardha Chandrasana improves balance, strengthens the legs, belly and lower back, and stretches the legs, shoulders, chest and spine.

But that’s not all that stretches and strengthens. Find your true balance in Ardha Chandrasana, and you may feel like you’re flying. It sure beats hanging out in a counterbalance.

Sequence: If five minutes is all you have, then warm up with triangle pose to each side. If there’s more time, try: lying down leg stretches, child’s pose and dog pose. Do Utthita Trikonasana (triangle pose), preferably twice to each side. Once you’ve worked with Ardha Chandrasana at the wall, try the pose again in the middle of the room.

Ouch: Our first experience of Ardha Chandrasana is often one of strong sensation in the standing leg and hip. Think of it as strengthening work, and go slowly. With regular practice, you’ll soon find the sweetness of the pose. If you have existing neck or back pain, check with your teacher before doing this pose.

Sanskrit Corner: Say: are-dah chan-DRAH-sanna. Ardha means half. Chandra means moon. Asana means pose.

Photo: Mark Robinson, me’nthedogs

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Five-Minute Yoga Challenges

No time in your day for your regular practice? It's a yoga emergency.

If you’ve ever wanted an inside look at a  yoga teacher’s practice, you won’t want to miss Sandy Blaine’s account, titled How Last Week Went.

Sandy has been teaching for 20 years in the Bay area. She studies with Donald Moyer and has had two books published by Rodmell Press, one on Yoga for Computer Users and another on Yoga for Healthy Knees. She teaches corporate classes for Pixar animation.

Would you expect a daily schedule stunning in its regularity? An orderly progression of poses through days? A sacred, never to be violated morning practice time?

Me too.

Instead, as she writes, “there were days that worked, days that didn’t, and in betweens.”

There was, for example, a practice-free day Tuesday, brought on by sitting down at her desk to look at the schedule and to-do list.

Ah, so familiar. Once the computer is on, and you’re just going to do one brief thing, that’s it for practice. Breaking away is next to impossible.

The full piece is well worth reading. But here’s one part that stood out for me.

Wednesday I had a full schedule and knew from the outset that there wouldn’t be time for a full practice session, so I realistically planned for a shorter practice, using what I think of as my go-to practice sequence.  This is an assignment I give in my class on developing a personal practice; it’s what one apprentice referred to as an “emergency practice,” a great concept. The idea is that, as with vegetables, any amount is infinitely better than none, so having a practice or two in your back pocket for busy days helps to ensure that practice doesn’t fall by the wayside altogether. Even ten minutes is better than nothing. (my emphasis)

I love the idea of an emergency practice. I suspect every long-time practitioner has one, even if that’s not what they call it.

I’ve always called my emergency practice “my minimum,” somewhat inaccurately since some days slip by without it: a chest opening on wooden bricks, Paryankasana, Supta Virasana, dog pose, arm balance, elbow balance, headstand, shoulder stand, Marichyasana III and Malasana.

I can do it in an hour, with no lollygagging about, and still have time for five minutes in Savasana.

Sometimes the elbow balance gets dropped. Sometimes the shoulder stand has fewer variations than I’d like. But those few poses at least leave me feeling that I have touched the most important bases, kept the faith, no matter how imperfectly, and am at least not sliding backwards.

In a three-alarm practice emergency, I’m very tired, there’s lots more to do in my day, and I don’t have much time. Then I will do 15 minutes of Viparita Karani, ending with cross-legged variations.

Do you have an emergency practice that you pull out when time is short? A set of poses that you do every day no matter what? Do tell.

Image courtesy of Susie T Flickr Creative Commons

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Other fabulous yoga on the Internet this week:

YogaSpy sparked an impassioned discussion of what constitutes a meditative experience in a yoga class. Should you be losing yourself in movement? Or finding yourself in stillness? Yogi Interrupted let out a heart-felt wail on the subject of round sticky mats. Best of all, especially if you like horses, Yoga Dork gave a roundup of horse-related yoga videos. Most of them are about people doing yoga on horses. The last one,  with April Battles, is yoga for horses. It’s riveting – she analyses a client’s horse’s posture, shows where the tight spots are, and releases them. Magic.

Bite-sized Random Acts of Yoga continue to unfold daily at the dining room table.

Here’s today’s set. Seems like there could be several sequencing options – and you’d have to fit at least plow pose, if not shoulder stand in there just to have Karnapidasana make sense.

The Five-Minute Yoga Challenge started as a response to two of Gretchen Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood: “What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE,” and “By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.” That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of My Five Minute Yoga Practice. If you have time, of course you can practice other poses. But if five minutes a day is all you have, choose a Five-Minute Yoga Challenge that works for you, do it, and see what happens.

Find your working place and your practice will blossom.

This week’s five minute yoga challenge is to stretch your hamstrings once a day, every day – unless, of course, you’re already happily working with a different challenge, in which case you’re golden.

If you love hamstring stretches, go ahead, knock yourself out:
Supta Padangusthasana with a strap. Downward Dog, one leg up the wall, Uttanasana, Paschimottanasana, Utthita Hasta Pandangusthasana with your foot on a chair back or independent.

If you loathe hamstring stretches, here’s my top pick.

It has three big advantages:

• you get to lie down
• you can’t hurt your back
• there’s a good chance you might find that magical spot known as your working place, and come to love stretching your hamstrings.

If this seems unlikely, may I suggest that’s because most people with tight hamstrings have never found their working place in a hamstring stretch and don’t know how it feels.

In your working place, you can breathe, keep your face soft, keep your eyes soft, and stay, observing without reacting.

In a yoga class, if your hamstrings are tight, you are already in pain long before you look anything like the classic pose. Finding the beginning of your stretch means backing off, a lot, and staying there. As you remain in a position that gives you some stretch, but keeps you out of pain, you’ll finally experience the sweetness of a moderate hamstring stretch.
The tightest hamstrings in the world can’t resist that.

Your buttocks could easily be two feet away from the wall as a starting point

Find a column or a doorway that allows you to lie on your back and have one foot resting on the column.
Place a folded blanket under the back of your head to relax your neck and shoulders.
To find the right distance from the wall, look for the spot where your pelvis rests evenly on the floor. Check the outer hip of your lifted leg. If it rolls up and in, you’re too close to the wall.
Your buttocks might easily be as far as two feet from the wall.

First activate the leg that’s on the floor. Press out through the ball of your big toe. Pull your kneecap toward your upper thigh. Firm your front thigh muscle and press your thighbone down to the floor.

The leg that’s up the wall does exactly the same thing, only in a different relationship to gravity.
Press through your big-toe mound. Pull the front thigh muscles toward your hip crease. Press your thighbone toward the wall.
The more you contract your front thigh muscles, the more your hamstring will stretch.

Relax your neck and shoulders. Soften your face. Soften your eyes. Maintain a steady, friendly awareness of the sensations in your raised leg. When the feeling of stretch diminishes – perhaps over a period of days or weeks – move your buttocks closer to the wall.
Stay for two minutes on each side.

Have you overcome tight hamstrings at some point in your yoga career? Do you have a favorite pose or preparation? Do tell.

Shovel photo by Alan Levine at coydogblog

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A vision of humanity united in one breath at Do As One

The uneasy marriage of yoga and technology continues to unfold online.

Just this week I found Do As One, a website that invites us to log on and breathe together, chant Om together or laugh together.

The non-profit Beverley Hills based organization has a vision: “1 billion people will breathe together synchronously by November 11, 2012.”

This is part of a larger goal, “to raise the awareness of healthy, conscious breathing and to create the opportunity for humanity to experience its own inherent Oneness through the power of breath.”

When you log into Do As One, you choose a room, Universal Breathing, Universal Om, Universal Laughter, or Full Spectrum Breathing.

Once inside, you can set the color of the background, choose the duration of your breath cycles, choose from several pranayamas, including alternate nostril breathing and Kapalabhati, set a timer and choose the chime you want to ring at the end. In the laughter room, you can also pick a laugh track: Woody, cartoony, Ha Ha Ha, Squeaky Giggle, Witch Giggle, Baby Laugh, Mousey Lady, and more.

Of all of them, I found the Full Spectrum Breathing Room the most engaging, the screen changing color as you breath your way up the chakras, all the way to violet.

There’s a counter at the entry  to each room, which lets you know how many other people are simultaneously breathing or laughing. (Eight in the Universal Om room at 9:45 this morning, six in the Full Spectrum Breathing Room, and one in each in the Universal Breathing Room and the Universal Laughter room.)

As far away as it might now be, Do As One invites us to consider the grand vision: “For just one moment, think of what might happen if one billion people on the earth were to be breathing in and out in perfect unison, creating one Universal breath flow. What impact could this have on humanity and the entire living Universe?

Um, hard to say.
Wouldn’t it still be one billion people, each alone in a room, interacting with a screen?

E.M. Forster is much more famous for his novels and their film adaptations than for his sci-fi story, The Machine Stops

Something about that vision reminded me of an E.M. Forster story, The Machine Stops.

In this future civilization, people live underground, each in a separate room, serviced by The Machine. Seated in a chair that moves them around the room, they push buttons to summon music, food, communication with friends, a bed for whenever they want to sleep.

I read it in the late ‘60s, when it seemed like a cautionary tale from 1909 about letting machines do our work. In 1968, the only computers I knew of were giant sorting machines that pushed rods through perforated file cards.

Now it seems eerily prescient.

The main character, Vashti, has left her room only a handful of times in her life, yet she “knew several thousand people.”
Her room is almost empty, but gives her everything she needs. She has one book, The Book Of The Machine, left over from “the age of litter.”

When her son calls her from his own underground room across the world, she sees and hears him through a round plate that she holds in her hands, which, apart from the roundness, sounds a lot like a new iphone.

To talk with him, she goes into “isolation.” When she comes out, “all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?–say this day month.”

Twitter, anyone?

Then, tellingly: “To most of these questions she replied with irritation–a growing quality in that accelerated age.”

I didn’t remember these quotes, and I don’t own a copy of the book.

Due to the magic of the internet, I was able to Google the title, and download a free copy within minutes.

When I first read this book, if you wanted information, you went to the library to get it, and carried it home, like a bucket of water.
Now our homes have hot and cold running information, piped in.

And we might, if we like, go to a Universal Breathing Room, and do our pranayama, or our chanting “together” with recorded voices.

The implications? Too much for me on a sunny day when I could go for a walk. What do you think?

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Oh lovely!

After several days of having the random pose selector come up with puzzling combinations, (Swastikasana and Supta Swastikasana, Paripurna Navasana and Karnapidasana, anyone?) this morning’s poses are a pleasant little song, easy to sequence, easy to link.

When I try them out in practice, I plan to try Kelly’s suggestion of linking soft and receding groins.

A grafitti artist who undertands soft eyes

As a species, we humans are always on the lookout.

Sight dominates all of our other senses and is largely responsible for the way we perceive the world – that aggregate of impressions which we tellingly call our “point of view.

As long as we’re gathering visual information, our brains are busy. So it stands to reason that if you can quiet your eyes, you can begin to quiet your mind.

You could, of course, just shut your eyes. But in practicing yoga poses, we need our sight to help us align our bodies, and to keep our minds alert. Eyes closed is usually a signal for sleep.
In between the two states of eyes actively gathering sense impressions and eyes shut, there’s a third alternative: we can withdraw our awareness from the surface of the eyes. Once you master this action, you’ll find that it brings a quiet inward focus to your asana work.

With your eyes open, stand in Tadasana (mountain pose) or sit in a comfortable seated position – a chair is fine as long as your spine is straight.
Inhale and softly draw your eyes back into their sockets. Imagine that you are looking out from three feet inside a cave.

Not sure if it’s working?
Try the opposite: move your awareness to the front of your eyes and stare out from the surface. Withdraw your eyes again, and notice the difference between the two feelings.
Keep your eyes open, but soft.

Benefits: Withdrawing your eyes is a small first step toward withdrawing all of your senses. This yogic practice, known as pratyahara, is the fifth of Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga.
The ultimate objective is to find the shut-off switch for sensory input and use it at will. Just learning to soften your eyes will help you turn down the volume on your mental chatter and connect with your body.

Sequence: As a stand-alone practice, commit to withdrawing your eyes every time you stand in a line, wait at a bus stop, or pause for a moment at the kitchen sink to regain good alignment.
No matter what other Five-Minute Yoga Challenge you may be practicing this week, try withdrawing your eyes while you do it,  especially if it truly is a challenge.

Ouch: If you catch yourself flattened against the front of your eyeballs, straining to see into the world, resist the urge to criticize. Soften your eyes and start again.

Sanskrit Corner: Say: PRAT-ee-ya HAH-ra. Pratyahara means “withdrawal.”  Pratyahara is derived from two Sanskrit words: prati and ahara. Ahara means food, or anything we ingest, physically or metaphorically, and prati means away, or against.

Do you have a pratyahara practice? Any favorite way of stilling your mind while doing asana practice? I’d love to hear from you.

Photo by Stuart, silverfox09

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Previous Five-Minute Yoga Challenges

My timer, and constant practice companion

I love my timer.

It’s no longer handsome. I dropped it once, and the face came off and had to be glued back on, and the glue shows. But that’s  just the aging face of a friend, who is no less lovable for a few wrinkles.

It has the excellent capacity for continually repeating any interval of time, from seconds to hours. In backbends, with the timer set at a doable 20 seconds, I tell myself I can hold on until the next beep, and then maybe the one after that.

In shoulder stand, leg stretches and seated forward bends, I program 59 seconds, the longest period you can enter that still ends with a soft beep. (At a full minute, you get three piercing blasts.)

It was given to me by my friend Terri, which makes me love it more.

And it’s the same timer Gioia Irwin used back in the days when she taught in the common room at Helen’s Court Co-op. That soft beep was the soundscape for some of the most magical moments of my yoga life so far.

So yes,  I’m biased. But I can think of at least five good reasons to add a timer to your pile of yoga props:

1. The beep becomes an incentive. When you’re working on endurance in strength poses, you can set it for a small increment, mere seconds, depending on the pose, and give yourself more encouragement to hang in.
2. It allows for objectively equal time in two-sided poses. Because we are all physically unbalanced, time will always move at a quicker pace on one side. You might choose to stay an unequal length of time on each side, but it ought to be a choice.
3. It knocks out a distraction when you’re trying to concentrate. Like the pomodoro, the timer sets up a fence around your time. If in sitting meditation, or in a 10-minute stint of sun salutations, you feel an urge to confirm that time is, indeed, passing, you can see through the distraction more easily when you know the timer is on.
4. It gives objective feedback for timings in poses. How long was that shoulder stand, anyway? I am sometimes surprised that what felt like 15 minutes was really nine, and vice versa.
5. Most important of all, setting a timer allows you to surrender control in restorative poses. Usually it’s the teacher you depend on to get you up off the floor after Savasana. At home, the timer lets you settle into your 20-minute Savasana, simultaneously being timed, in the outer world, and floating free of time inside.

I’ve talked with people who say they’d rather not use a timer. It’s mechanical. It’s a crutch. You have a perfectly good internal timer that will get more accurate as you use it.

Those arguments always remind me of the years my mother spent resisting getting a clothes dryer because she loved the smell of laundry that had dried outside. Thing is, it rains a lot here. And when it’s raining, it’s nice to have a dryer. When it’s sunny, you don’t have to use it.

For me, and I think for many of us, the prevailing climate is distraction. When I turn on the timer, I have one more defense against the monkey mind. So I’ll keep listening for the beep.

Have you used a timer? Found it useful? Do you have other strategies to keep you focused in your practice time? I’d love to know about them.

If you liked this post, you might also like:

How to Keep Going When You’re Practicing on a Plateau

10 Tips for Building a Home Yoga Practice

It’s Not All Bliss: How to Work with Poses You Don’t Like, Part One

It’s Not All Bliss: How to Work with Poses You Don’t Like, Part Two

Ubaya Padangusthasana will feel good at the end, I'd say

Bite-Sized Random Acts of Yoga continue to occur daily on my dining room table.

Lots to link here. The straight legs – or straight leg in Marichyasana I – will do the same work in all three poses.

The lower back will be lifting  in all three as well.  Check this photo of Parsva Halasana (it’s the 5th photo in the article) to see a beautifully elongated pose.

Click here to see an image of  Ubaya Padangusthasana, (scroll down the page of yoga-cuties in poses to find it).