I'll hazard a guess that a yoga teacher has said to you, "lift and spread your toes." It's also likely that you've been told to pay attention to where your weight is on your foot or to ground through a particular part of your foot. Maybe you've even been told to keep your toes lifted for a significant portion of an asana class. Good, there's awareness in the feet. In my asana practice I look for energies that move in opposing directions and work with them, whether that's using directional breath and bandha that balances Prana and Apana Vayus, or extending the spine in a back bend then holding a forward fold. In the feet there is a grounding and reaching, and there is also a lift, most specifically of the arches. The lift of the arches is called Pada Bandha. Take a yoga field trip down to Santa Cruz sometime and check out Mark Stephens. He's a wonderful and very experienced yoga teacher who loves to talk about Pada Bandha.
Further, in asymmetrical standing poses we're often told to stand with the feet at a 90 degree or a 45 degree angle from one another. That placement as well as where the heels are in relation to one another play a crucial role in how we're able to construct a pose over the point below which gravity pulls. So think about that for moment, it's pretty simple: the feet are the foundation over which any standing or standing balancing pose is built. Where the feet are, how they're placed relative to one another can help or hinder what's intended to happen above.
This, as all the Yoga Labs thus far, is the maiden voyage for me of teaching with this particular emphasis. On the one hand some of the specific grounding I do in parts of my feet when I practice seems like a subtle, potentially advanced part of practicing asana. On the other, it seems strikingly straightforward and, um, pedestrian, though while how we place the feet in standing poses very basic I don't know that I ever got a good breakdown or explanation of how the foot placement assists the building of different poses. Thus my motivation to do this class.
In class on Saturday we'll be taking the attention down there for the grounding, the lift and the intelligent placement. I hope to see you there.
Further reading about Pada Bandha from Tias Little.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Yoga Lab May 7: Come do some shoulder stuff and maybe end up upside down on your forearms.
The next Yoga Lab is gonna be about the shoulders. We'll be trying to make a habit of moving the shoulder blades away from the midline. We'll stretch the shoulders in a smorgasbord of ways, and we'll eventually move toward working with forearm balance, or Pincha Mayarasana.
So really the class will be about one particular way of moving the shoulders. That's the particular. Let's move to the general for a moment. When I practice asana, I want the totality of my physical body involved in a pose or a movement. That means being aware of the most important aspects of a pose (for example how my feet are hands are set to bear weight and set the foundation of the pose, being certain that I'm not doing something that could cause injury, seeing that my breath is moving as openly as possible, etc.) but then also being aware of what the less critical parts of the body are doing. So I have specific things that I do with my shoulders when they're not really a very critical part of a posture, like the raised or lifted arm in triangle or side angle pose. Part of what I'm doing is trying to be aware of the whole body, and the specific movement is intended to habituate a pattern of movement that will lead to a healthy opening when in a posture that asks for either weight bearing or greater flexibility.
That last idea is important, that in more basic postures one is laying a certain groundwork that will be called upon in more advanced postures. That's another part of the bigger, general picture. Whether you think it's a week, a year, several years, or several lifetimes down the road, I think it's beneficial to develop movement habits in asana that would be used in advanced postures. And the example of that relevant to this class would be how the shoulder is safely used to bind pigeon 1:
This yogini's shoulders aren't even that involved in this binding. Must be nice to have such a bendy lower back, huh? How about something with a higher "whoa!" factor:
Kinda funny how Valakhilyasana makes the first photo of bound pigeon look like a restorative. The point being that whether or not you ever even want to go anywhere near there or not, it's never a bad idea to get a grasp on the awareness of the movement that is a step down that path.
While we're not going to try Valakhilyasana, who knows, maybe we'll do bound pigeon with a strap, or, if you have the shoulder (and hip and spine) mobility, perhaps without a strap. What we will for sure practice is some work on the shoulders, some stretching, some breathing and perhaps the planting or nurturing of a seed that can grow into a powerful idea with practice.
So really the class will be about one particular way of moving the shoulders. That's the particular. Let's move to the general for a moment. When I practice asana, I want the totality of my physical body involved in a pose or a movement. That means being aware of the most important aspects of a pose (for example how my feet are hands are set to bear weight and set the foundation of the pose, being certain that I'm not doing something that could cause injury, seeing that my breath is moving as openly as possible, etc.) but then also being aware of what the less critical parts of the body are doing. So I have specific things that I do with my shoulders when they're not really a very critical part of a posture, like the raised or lifted arm in triangle or side angle pose. Part of what I'm doing is trying to be aware of the whole body, and the specific movement is intended to habituate a pattern of movement that will lead to a healthy opening when in a posture that asks for either weight bearing or greater flexibility.
That last idea is important, that in more basic postures one is laying a certain groundwork that will be called upon in more advanced postures. That's another part of the bigger, general picture. Whether you think it's a week, a year, several years, or several lifetimes down the road, I think it's beneficial to develop movement habits in asana that would be used in advanced postures. And the example of that relevant to this class would be how the shoulder is safely used to bind pigeon 1:
While we're not going to try Valakhilyasana, who knows, maybe we'll do bound pigeon with a strap, or, if you have the shoulder (and hip and spine) mobility, perhaps without a strap. What we will for sure practice is some work on the shoulders, some stretching, some breathing and perhaps the planting or nurturing of a seed that can grow into a powerful idea with practice.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Yoga Lab April 16: starting at the bottom and opening in the front
I love backbends. And there are a lot of them to love. Extending the spine from standing, from seated, from asymmetrical lunges, from the hands and from inversions...bring it, I say. Well we've gotta start somewhere. The next yoga lab is a back bending class, and I believe we'll start toward the bottom.
The term front opener is used in the write up for good reason (and credit for that term should be given to Alice Joanou). The spine is pretty far back in your torso, right? I mean, it's not right against the skin. That's the spinous process you're feeling back there:
To be clear, this is a side view with the back side of the body to the left, front to the right. And what you can see then is that a back bend is going to both open up the front of the vertabrae, but also require all that stuff that's in front of the spine to open up too.
Oh, but it's not that simple, right? If it were we'd just lay back over a bolster, the couch, a friend standing in a forward bend and just open up. Hm, perhaps we'll do the latter as a partner pose. It's quite nice. But a lot of the practice is active and the spine needs support, grounding. So what we'll work on is opening, energizing and bringing awareness to the lower support structure through the pelvis, hips and legs, and doing the same with the core.
And just to carry over the ideas presented in the first two yoga labs: At the first class (yoga for athletes) I talked a lot about using asana practice to strengthen that which is weak (or, perhaps underutilized by your particular athleticism, be that your amateur archery on roller skates league or professional dog walking), and doing a lot of work with the "overworked" muscles to get them to open up. For front opening: work the legs, hips, core > get at the lower back. Then, what was talked a lot about in the arm balance class: draw energy to the midline and support the pose with awareness and strength in the core (particularly by utilizing Uddiyana Bandha) is *huge* when it comes to creating the support structure for back bends. It's very noticeable in simpler back bends but is absolutely crucial when more weight of the body is supported over the lower back.
If you click on that, pretend my forehead isn't wrinkled.
The next yoga lab will move things up the spine. We'll do forearm balance and a lot of shoulder stuff that will hopefully make clear the pathway toward how the shoulders are utilized in bound back bends (meaning hand and foot are connected) like the 4 pigeons, Natarajasana....
The term front opener is used in the write up for good reason (and credit for that term should be given to Alice Joanou). The spine is pretty far back in your torso, right? I mean, it's not right against the skin. That's the spinous process you're feeling back there:
Oh, but it's not that simple, right? If it were we'd just lay back over a bolster, the couch, a friend standing in a forward bend and just open up. Hm, perhaps we'll do the latter as a partner pose. It's quite nice. But a lot of the practice is active and the spine needs support, grounding. So what we'll work on is opening, energizing and bringing awareness to the lower support structure through the pelvis, hips and legs, and doing the same with the core.
And just to carry over the ideas presented in the first two yoga labs: At the first class (yoga for athletes) I talked a lot about using asana practice to strengthen that which is weak (or, perhaps underutilized by your particular athleticism, be that your amateur archery on roller skates league or professional dog walking), and doing a lot of work with the "overworked" muscles to get them to open up. For front opening: work the legs, hips, core > get at the lower back. Then, what was talked a lot about in the arm balance class: draw energy to the midline and support the pose with awareness and strength in the core (particularly by utilizing Uddiyana Bandha) is *huge* when it comes to creating the support structure for back bends. It's very noticeable in simpler back bends but is absolutely crucial when more weight of the body is supported over the lower back.
If you click on that, pretend my forehead isn't wrinkled.
The next yoga lab will move things up the spine. We'll do forearm balance and a lot of shoulder stuff that will hopefully make clear the pathway toward how the shoulders are utilized in bound back bends (meaning hand and foot are connected) like the 4 pigeons, Natarajasana....
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Yoga Lab: Arm Balances, or, erm, hand balancing...
At some point in time I had to think about why one does the hand balancing poses. I mean, of the groupings of poses (i.e. standing poses, standing balancing poses, seated poses, etc.) it has at times seemed to me that you could wipe away a majority of the hand balances and you wouldn't do a disservice to that many practitioners. You can get a lot of the shoulder strengthening and opening initially from using the holding of the arms in the standing poses, to the poses where weight is on the hands (plank, chatturanga, up-dog, down dog...) and the way the arms are used in backbends and inversions. So what's going on when you're just on the hands? (Though it's important to note that I think of the one hand/one foot poses, Vasisthasana, Visvamitrasana, and, if you can get your leg behind your head comfortably, Chakorasana as hand balances too.)
Yeah, what's going on there? The hands heal. The gateway to the hands is through the heart, and, if you think about playing most musical instruments, it's also in a sense through the throat. As in the voice expressed through the hands. Have you ever listened to the Errol Garner live album "Concert by the Sea?" Virtuosic improvised piano playing on a level I would call transcendent. To connect the dots, yes, I'm saying Errol Garner is doing arm balances (or I'm saying there's a 4th and 5th chakra relationship to this sort of expression with the hands). Have I ever told you about my pet peeve of yoga instructors who say things that don't make sense? Hmm. So chew on that for a few.
In other news, once we've gotten to the stage in practice that balancing on the hands is fairly normal, the poses bring a lot of strength and mobility to the shoulders and chest, they require the use of the core and integrity through the core when something relatively heavy, i.e. the legs (even if you have little stick legs they're still a significant proportion of your body weight), are hanging off it. And some of the poses are great places to work openings in the hips.
What else? Arm balances pretty much force you to have awareness of the whole body in the practice. I think that's one of the goals in asana practice anyway, so it's nice to be able to step into a place where it's pretty much necessary.
What to expect at Yoga Lab: Enough vinyasa practice to warm up, some key points to focus on internally to help with the balance and the lift, some experimenting, some encouragement. And if you're bringing fear, because let's face it, that's what's holding as many people back as are strength or mobility limitations, we'll try and turn the corner to exhilaration...in a way that's way more empowering and healthy than, for example, driving your car 80 m.p.h. down the freeway.
Yeah, what's going on there? The hands heal. The gateway to the hands is through the heart, and, if you think about playing most musical instruments, it's also in a sense through the throat. As in the voice expressed through the hands. Have you ever listened to the Errol Garner live album "Concert by the Sea?" Virtuosic improvised piano playing on a level I would call transcendent. To connect the dots, yes, I'm saying Errol Garner is doing arm balances (or I'm saying there's a 4th and 5th chakra relationship to this sort of expression with the hands). Have I ever told you about my pet peeve of yoga instructors who say things that don't make sense? Hmm. So chew on that for a few.
In other news, once we've gotten to the stage in practice that balancing on the hands is fairly normal, the poses bring a lot of strength and mobility to the shoulders and chest, they require the use of the core and integrity through the core when something relatively heavy, i.e. the legs (even if you have little stick legs they're still a significant proportion of your body weight), are hanging off it. And some of the poses are great places to work openings in the hips.
What else? Arm balances pretty much force you to have awareness of the whole body in the practice. I think that's one of the goals in asana practice anyway, so it's nice to be able to step into a place where it's pretty much necessary.
What to expect at Yoga Lab: Enough vinyasa practice to warm up, some key points to focus on internally to help with the balance and the lift, some experimenting, some encouragement. And if you're bringing fear, because let's face it, that's what's holding as many people back as are strength or mobility limitations, we'll try and turn the corner to exhilaration...in a way that's way more empowering and healthy than, for example, driving your car 80 m.p.h. down the freeway.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Yoga Lab: Yoga for Athletes, March 12
A shift is taking place in my teaching schedule. At Bernal Yoga I'll no longer be teaching a Tuesday evening class, and I'll be instead teaching every other Saturday afternoon. The first class will be March 12th, and starting in April it'll be the 1st and 3rd Saturday of each month. And each Saturday class will have a theme publicized in advance. If you can come to these classes and have something you'd like me to work on, please suggest it.
The Saturday classes, while themed, will provide a well rounded overall practice. Within that practice will reside an emphasis or a possibility to workshop whatever the theme of the class is.
The March 12 class will be pretty general: Yoga for Athletes. For me this is a good place to start because the time in my life when I really dove into yoga is when I quit bicycle racing. So I can relate to having parts of my body very developed and seemingly immovably rigid (hamstrings, quads, hips); parts of my body accustomed to being held in positions not so healthy (consider the natural curves of the spine and then go look at a photo of a pack of road cyclists); and parts of the body that were not so strong and suffered from tensing into the same position for hours and hours at a time (upper back, shoulders, arms, neck). If you participate in an athletic activity on a regular basis you can probably also make a quick list of places you are very strong v. places that are weak, places your activity has a destabilizing effect on the joints, places you are chronically stressed that need some stretching and toning. A well rounded vinyasa practice should work the strong areas of the body because then they will open up, and work the weak areas of the body because then they will strengthen and bring balance to the body. Attention to alignment will stabilize the joints and lead to more balanced energy flow in the body.
And we haven't even gotten to the good part: breathing. Fundamental to vinyasa practice is steady attention to the breath. Attention to the breath develops focus, mental alertness, and cultivates the inner awareness that helps you find your edge. Cultivating that inner focus, the beginning of being your own teacher, can be a very powerful tool to use in any aspect of life.
Finally, the beautiful thing about the yoga practice is that it's just that: practice. You're just there to be present for yourself and work on you. No race to the finish line, no points awarded for longest hamstrings or bendiest spine. With any luck this attitude might bleed over into other areas of your life, i.e. focusing on the present moment in a non-judgmental manner without distraction of expectation.
The Saturday classes, while themed, will provide a well rounded overall practice. Within that practice will reside an emphasis or a possibility to workshop whatever the theme of the class is.
The March 12 class will be pretty general: Yoga for Athletes. For me this is a good place to start because the time in my life when I really dove into yoga is when I quit bicycle racing. So I can relate to having parts of my body very developed and seemingly immovably rigid (hamstrings, quads, hips); parts of my body accustomed to being held in positions not so healthy (consider the natural curves of the spine and then go look at a photo of a pack of road cyclists); and parts of the body that were not so strong and suffered from tensing into the same position for hours and hours at a time (upper back, shoulders, arms, neck). If you participate in an athletic activity on a regular basis you can probably also make a quick list of places you are very strong v. places that are weak, places your activity has a destabilizing effect on the joints, places you are chronically stressed that need some stretching and toning. A well rounded vinyasa practice should work the strong areas of the body because then they will open up, and work the weak areas of the body because then they will strengthen and bring balance to the body. Attention to alignment will stabilize the joints and lead to more balanced energy flow in the body.
And we haven't even gotten to the good part: breathing. Fundamental to vinyasa practice is steady attention to the breath. Attention to the breath develops focus, mental alertness, and cultivates the inner awareness that helps you find your edge. Cultivating that inner focus, the beginning of being your own teacher, can be a very powerful tool to use in any aspect of life.
Finally, the beautiful thing about the yoga practice is that it's just that: practice. You're just there to be present for yourself and work on you. No race to the finish line, no points awarded for longest hamstrings or bendiest spine. With any luck this attitude might bleed over into other areas of your life, i.e. focusing on the present moment in a non-judgmental manner without distraction of expectation.
Friday, January 28, 2011
WE JAM ECONO
The history lesson. Is it necessary? I mean, Be Here Now, right?
My first exposure to yoga practice was when living in Berlin in 1994. I was doing a little bit of English conversation, some for money, some for trade. A yoga teacher traded me conversation and I went to her yoga classes. Ok, I got by just fine in German, but there's a big difference between "where's the bathroom?" and "lift and spread your upper, inner arm bones" when it comes to foreign language vocabulary. It was kind of a crack up, me, the young bike messenger, in a little studio in west Berlin doing physical imitations of people practicing yoga and then sitting around with the teacher for an hour correcting her (really pretty horrible if I recall correctly) English.
Then, fast forward about 5 years, and perhaps you've heard this story before. Boy meets girl, girl drags boy to Bikram Yoga class. I was a bicycle racer at the time. I had heard Mike Sayers say he did Bikram in the off season. Mike Sayers raced professionally, mostly on domestic teams, and was based in Santa Rosa. (You probably haven't heard of him. Domestic pros jam econo.) But when a professional bike racer says "I practice yoga," an aspiring amateur listens.
Then a couple of years later I burnt out hard on the bike racing. Leesville Gap Road Race, 2001. Overraced and experiencing bad allergies I got dropped on the main climb, and while toiling away for the next 40-ish miles to the finish there was a revelation: You don't have to suffer like this. I didn't know it at the time but that was it for road racing.
Pretty quickly I turned a corner and started going to a nearby yoga studio. I figured it was a practice that I could grow into and do for the rest of my life. And after being a bike racer, giving 90 minutes of my day to a yoga class was really nothing. Most racers at the level I was at will easily log 10-15 hours of riding during the race season, and that's when you're doing races every weekend. Over the winter you may ramp up to at least 20 or even 30 hours/week. 90 minutes a day: no prob, bob.
That last road race was on July 1, and by September I was enrolled at the teacher training at the Yoga Source in north Berkeley. That's also a story you may have heard before: the student who dives head first into yoga, starts practicing at the closest studio to their house, and without ever going to another studio commits to a 200 hour teacher training. This is probably less common now in the inner bay area since most people have 3 or 4 yoga studios near their house. The main teacher was Jazz Poitier and there were a handful of other teachers. One of the more notable was Chris Hoskins. You should check him out; he teaches at his own little space called Studio Yoga 6 in Berkeley. Sure, I could say in hindsight I wish I would have practiced for a few years so I would have understood what I was doing more, but I also can't say that doing a training that quickly has been a disservice to me. Jazz was an intense and talented teacher and it got me going to this place I'm at today. No complaints.
But while I was too much of a n00b to understand a bigger picture of yoga and asana I was exposed to a lot of different teachers and then began exploring on my own. Weekends with John Friend and Ana Forrest, checking out some of the deep, rich resources around the bay like (then bay area resident) Rod Yee or Richard Rosen. And I ended up spending a lot of time in Alice Joanou's classes when she taught at 7th Heaven. If you haven't been to Alice, she has her own studio in Oakland called Loka Yoga. Alice jams econo.
My first exposure to yoga practice was when living in Berlin in 1994. I was doing a little bit of English conversation, some for money, some for trade. A yoga teacher traded me conversation and I went to her yoga classes. Ok, I got by just fine in German, but there's a big difference between "where's the bathroom?" and "lift and spread your upper, inner arm bones" when it comes to foreign language vocabulary. It was kind of a crack up, me, the young bike messenger, in a little studio in west Berlin doing physical imitations of people practicing yoga and then sitting around with the teacher for an hour correcting her (really pretty horrible if I recall correctly) English.
Then, fast forward about 5 years, and perhaps you've heard this story before. Boy meets girl, girl drags boy to Bikram Yoga class. I was a bicycle racer at the time. I had heard Mike Sayers say he did Bikram in the off season. Mike Sayers raced professionally, mostly on domestic teams, and was based in Santa Rosa. (You probably haven't heard of him. Domestic pros jam econo.) But when a professional bike racer says "I practice yoga," an aspiring amateur listens.
Then a couple of years later I burnt out hard on the bike racing. Leesville Gap Road Race, 2001. Overraced and experiencing bad allergies I got dropped on the main climb, and while toiling away for the next 40-ish miles to the finish there was a revelation: You don't have to suffer like this. I didn't know it at the time but that was it for road racing.
Pretty quickly I turned a corner and started going to a nearby yoga studio. I figured it was a practice that I could grow into and do for the rest of my life. And after being a bike racer, giving 90 minutes of my day to a yoga class was really nothing. Most racers at the level I was at will easily log 10-15 hours of riding during the race season, and that's when you're doing races every weekend. Over the winter you may ramp up to at least 20 or even 30 hours/week. 90 minutes a day: no prob, bob.
That last road race was on July 1, and by September I was enrolled at the teacher training at the Yoga Source in north Berkeley. That's also a story you may have heard before: the student who dives head first into yoga, starts practicing at the closest studio to their house, and without ever going to another studio commits to a 200 hour teacher training. This is probably less common now in the inner bay area since most people have 3 or 4 yoga studios near their house. The main teacher was Jazz Poitier and there were a handful of other teachers. One of the more notable was Chris Hoskins. You should check him out; he teaches at his own little space called Studio Yoga 6 in Berkeley. Sure, I could say in hindsight I wish I would have practiced for a few years so I would have understood what I was doing more, but I also can't say that doing a training that quickly has been a disservice to me. Jazz was an intense and talented teacher and it got me going to this place I'm at today. No complaints.
But while I was too much of a n00b to understand a bigger picture of yoga and asana I was exposed to a lot of different teachers and then began exploring on my own. Weekends with John Friend and Ana Forrest, checking out some of the deep, rich resources around the bay like (then bay area resident) Rod Yee or Richard Rosen. And I ended up spending a lot of time in Alice Joanou's classes when she taught at 7th Heaven. If you haven't been to Alice, she has her own studio in Oakland called Loka Yoga. Alice jams econo.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Shit or get off the pot
Newsflash: this is gonna be my yoga blog/site.
When I'm driving around the bay area that's one of the sayings I refer to. This place is a bit crowded and we have to keep things moving. I've also realized that if I don't do some self promotion as a yoga teacher I may as well not bother with it, just enjoy my own practice, spend more time with my family or direct my energies elsewhere. So this is it: shit it or quit it.
I should probably choose a different analogy, but instead I'll just not continue with it.
What I plan to do here: For me, learning yoga is not a 'start at step one and proceed methodically' process. Yoga is far too dynamic for that, rather it is more like the onion from which one can peel layers, or, differently, a flower to which one continuously adds petals (aw, how pretty!). So should be a blog about yoga, huh? Like a session on the mat, the postings add up to a dynamic picture over time. We'll see. Guess I should post a few times before I have such grand ambitions.
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