Phonga

Definition: Verb. The art of practicing yoga while on the phone.

Many poses lend themselves to phonga. Seated poses, leg stretches and reclining inversions are great. Below you will find two of my Phonga suggestions.

Phonga lesson #1: Next time you are on the phone for a call lasting more than a few minutes, drop and put your legs up the wall! This will be especially effective if you are on hold with an insurance agent or talking to family. Listen to the sweet sounds of the hold-music, or calmly catch up on family business. Namast-éééééép…

Phonga lesson #2: Try kapotasana or upavistha konasana while returning calls. You may want to clear your office, add a soft rug and use a low table instead of a desk and chair.

Hot Apple Pie

I use a metaphor in my classes to explain the purpose of savasana.  A student will ask “what is the point of resting for ten minutes at the end of class?” and I tell them “It’s just like hot apple pie”.  When a pie has been cooking on a fall afternoon, filling the house with spicy sweetness, everyone who enters the home slows their step to savor the aromas, filling their lungs with pure pleasure.  The pie, when done to perfection, is lifted from the hot oven to a cool counter, and as it sits on a rack steam rises like a heavenly fog floating up until it disappears.  Eventually the pie is cooled and a slice is carefully made as the mouth waters, already tasting the buttery apple with anticipation.

If we were to take this same pie out of the oven and cut into it immediately all of the juices would run out, taking the heat and moisture with it, leaving dry and flavorless apple slices sagging in a lifeless, dry crust.

When doing savasana you are letting the pie rest, the juices gel, and the flavors mingle to perfection.  You are allowing your practice to gel, distributing your pranic energies to all of the tissues and cells, and thus increasing your life force.  In this way you are gleaning the benefits long after the class is over, bringing healing, strength, calm, and all of the other benefits right along with you into the rest of your day and even into your sleep – further even, into the rest of your life.  As it turns out savasana isn’t just laying on the floor while you wait to roll up your mat and get on with it.  Savasana is the dessert and the sweetness of practice.  So let the pie rest, and you will be rewarded with a delicious, blue ribbon slice.

Dear Yogi, I love my butt, but, my back hurts? Signed, Bringing up tight tush

Dear Butt, The glutes (butt muscles) are really important for the health of your back. If they are contracted without being toned however, the reverse can happen. The sciatic nerve could be pinched and you can experience back or leg pain called sciatica. Yoga has the miraculous quality of strengthening and stretching this important muscle group. Standing poses and back bends, done properly, are some of the poses that tone the glutes. And a toned butt is a happy butt!

Snake Charmer

Snake medicine is powerful and transformational.  Shedding the old and bringing in the new can be a trial by fire.  Yoga by nature improves flexibility in body, but the rigidity of the mind can hold body hostage.  Snake can set body free, with fluidity and willingness to let loose and move in unexpected ways.  We lay on our bellies like a snake, then starting with a baby cobra begin to sway and shimmy, ripple and fluidly move as if hypnotized by our own inner music.  We listen for  impulses and find ourselves becoming snake.

From downward dog come through plank to resting on your belly on the floor.  Feel your long tail grow down your legs as you place your hands along side your shoulders.  Come up a little moving the pubic bone into the earth if you feel any pressure in the lower back.  Then begin to sway from side to side, rolling the shoulders and moving up and down as you listen inwardly to your breath and impulses.  Allow the flow to evolve and feel the pranic energy, your life force, move up and down the spine as you inhale and exhale.  Enjoy the freedom of being newly born, baby snake with beautiful spine.  When you are ready, after a few minutes or more, come to rest again on your belly.  Bask in the glow of prana.

Yoga for Lyme

I have been healing lyme disease for over two years now, I may have been carrying it since 1997, when I first moved to the valley.  When the lyme became active my yoga practice and process training were invaluable tools.  Coming out of denial that I was not well, and also having full belief that I would get better has been the most powerful healing of all.  Some of the yoga techniques I recommend compliment a lyme literate doctors protocol, but are not meant to replace the medicines, antibiotics, and supplements used to treat lyme.  Yoga moves lymph material which filters the neurotoxins associated with lyme. Some powerful ways to do this are with the breath, use Ujjiyi, “victorious breath”  in an active or reclining practice.  Use twists to “squeeze and soak the organs”.  If you can do an active practice, perform some flowing movements as well as strengthening ones to maintain muscle tone.    Supine leg lifts can move lymph and help maintain muscles.  Even a little goes a long way, practice for a few minutes to start and build up to as long as is comfortable. Restore often by putting your legs up the wall, and end with savasana.

Mother’s Pose

Doing uttanasana – standing forward bend:  Bending from the crease at the tops of your thighs, soften and bend your knees if you have tight hamstrings so you can release the spine.  Place your hands on the floor next to your feet and feel her, Mother Earth.  Feel your gratitude flowing from your hands, crown, feet, and heart into the Mother and exhale over and over your love for her.  Feel her love for you, breathing and being.  When you are ready to come up bend your knees, take your hands to your hips, letting your heart float you up to standing as you feel your feet moving even deeper and rooting even more into the earth.   Notice that you are fully connected to earth,  an integral part of her living and breathing, a being fully connected, part of the whole.  Continue to feel her, and whenever you want to, bend down and touch her warm skin.  Thank you Mother.

Yoga Lila

There have been some misconceptions about yoga.  Misunderstood ideas perpetuated through the filter of consumer culture and the preferred image of youth and beauty.  These purports resonate internally something like “I should be more fit, more flexible, younger, healthier, stronger…”_ etc., as if the way you are right now is not okay.  As a collective we have twisted the teachings of yoga to further the self judgement.  Models doing yoga, yoga fashions, and more subtly, spiritual perfection put forth as a goal of yoga. Somehow if we take the right class, wear the right outfit, and find the right yoga method, we will stop disliking ourselves and our bodies.  We have internalized this judging voice and have used the platform of yoga, meaning literally “union” with the divine in self, to evolve non-acceptance of what is, and thus separation from presence, self and our true natures as perfect and divine just as we are!  

So what then is the real yoga, if not a thought that we must to have better bodies and be happy all of the time?  I would like to suggest that it is the territory of play.  In sanskrit the word for this is lila, the “sport, pastime, or play” of life.  It is the present time enjoyment of having a body and a presence in which to explore.  On or off the mat, feel down all the way, as deeply as you want into all of the sensations and feelings that come with our home in body. This, yogis, is exactly how the postures and movements we know today as yoga, were developed.  By people playing with the shapes, energies, sensations and feelings that evolve as explorations happen, in body, in present time.  There is no yoga other than what is happening in real time.  There is no magazine that contains the yoga, no outfit, no image in a photo of someone.  Yoga is happening right now as you sit in the chair and read these words.   As you realize that you have yoga with you, right now, right here, your divine self present, you can clear up the misunderstanding by asking yourself something, how does it feel?  To find out: play.

“Take the Picture!”

“Take the picture!” yells Coco as he holds still in her handstand, proud and happy.  She loves to be upside down.  It’s always the same, seconds after her tutor leaves the Grange where she has a weekly lesson and I teach yoga, Coco grabs a yoga mat and says “Help me do a handstand.”  We are waiting for Chris to pick her up, and my yoga class will start in about 45 minutes, so we have this yoga time together.  I can remember loving going upside down too, hoisting my legs up into the sky in a goofy version of shoulder stand.  Is it the memory of being in the womb, cradled and warm and standing on our heads? Is it the sheer silliness of seeing things from this turned view?  Perhaps it just feels good when the pressure on our tissues and bones changes from one direction to another like the feeling when an elevator first drops and that weightlessness is felt, for an instant, inside of our bodies, the floating memory of space.  There is a joy or glee that comes from inverting that is often, in adults, proceeded by fear.  In class when I suggest that we go to the walls to practice handstand I always feel the rush (excitement!) then the hush (fear–) of energy as the childlike excitement busts forth and previously hidden fear fills the room like a pulsing cloud of aliveness.  Some students easily pop up into the inversion and play with balancing.  Others lovingly hold space for the fear, and over time, first doing a preparitiory version like kicking just a few inches off the ground, then as time passes, a little higher.  Maybe I eventually help them by standing at the wall and holding them up in handstand.  There might be a trembling, or when they come down they say “I couldn’t have done that without you holding me”,  and I assure them that I was a piece, but not the whole that brought them up and held them upside down.  And at this point, we can both feel it, the bubble of excitement returning from long ago, a body memory of

Coco does a handstand

 

 play and the fun of turning upside down.  It’s in their eyes and hearts: I did it, wow, I did a hand stand.

Life on Earth

Hello Yogis, Travelers and Accidental Visitors, welcome aboard the mother ship.  We are headed for inner-space, vast and unlimited.  For this, my first post, I want to point us south, to the feet and the floor of the pelvis.  Here we connect to earth, vibrating with her at the same speed.  Stand up and close your eyes (after reading this paragraph first, of course).  Bend your knees slightly and drop your weight down into your feet.  Move your feet into the mat or carpet or whatever you are standing on, as if your are pushing them into warm clay. Feel the full weight of your body here and let yourself be heavy.  Bring your hands to the tops of your thighs, where your hips meet them and push back gently so that you are balanced over your ankles.  It might feel like you are sticking your butt out a bit, that’s okay!  You will feel your belly relax and the lower lotus of the pelvic floor open, widening and broadening.  Now feel your energy dropping down into the earth, like a grounding rod coming from your pelvic floor moving down through your legs, heading deep into the earth.  Now you are grounded, earthy and vibrating with earth. Allow this earth energy to rebound back up through you, all of the way through the crown of your head.  This can be done within the space of a few breaths at the beginning of your day or yoga practice, or, take your time, explore your inner-space, open to above and below, receptive, grounded, and fully feeling part of earth.  Bon Voyage!