Breath Easy Through The Season: And above all dance flamenco!

Thanksgiving is surely a time to be thankful for all the good graces that are in our lives, but truth be told it can also be a stressful time. All ages, kids to adult, have to combat overeating, stress, sadness, lack of exercise and imbalance.

I like to make sure my students have a few good things  in their tool box of way to cope with these feelings.

Remember if things do get stressful:

1. Breath: inhale though your nose and out through your nose. Try to elongate the exhale to calm you.

2. Do a simple inversion: forward bends, which can be done leaning forward onto a chair if the floor is just too far away. Yoga poses like forward bend and downward facing dog raise your blood pressure enough to trigger the body's natural calming mechanisms (do not do inversions if you have high blood pressure-the best thing here to do would be to sit and rest your head on a table).

3. Do heart opening poses to combat depression: cobra, bridge, bow, wheel, locust, fish, camel. Simply you can sit on a chair, place your hands by your sides, lift up your chest and feel you back arching up.

4. You can tame feelings of fear and instability by doing twists, hip openers and side bends. These will help balance your emotions: butterfly, child's pose, 1/2 lord of the fishes, simple lying twist and dimple seated twist (on the floor or in a chair).

5. DANCE FLAMENCO! Above all let your hearts be free, it will help you digest your food and you will feel great!

Here is a past post of mine called "Smell The Roses In Your Poses" 

http://alwaysbdancing.blogspot.com/2012/11/smell-roses-in-your-poses-thanksgiving.html

Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

¡Ole! ¡Namaste!

Yoga with Anthony

Today when I went to Barbara Benagh's yoga class at Down Under Yoga, Anthony was tagging along. A good friend of mine asked him if he was taking class too and he looked at me and said, "Yes!" He insisted on waiting for Barbara to see if it was OK for him to join in and when she gave him the OK, he settled onto a mat between Carolyn and I and there started his yoga journey.

It was a wonderful , blissful experience taking yoga with Antony and although the class was a deep, internally based class, he stuck it out and I could tell he felt so much.

No he may not go every time, but maybe he will...it is addicting and I know he enjoyed Barbara's teaching.

After class, he said to me that yoga was kind of like starting a church. If you felt you wanted to teach people about the type of yoga that you liked, that you could open your own studio and then people could come to you and you could tech them how to feel yoga the way you wanted them to feel it.

It was a very enlightening  and spiritual thing for him to say. He gets it!

The Balanced Body: Tap Into Sensation

For the past two months, I have been teaching yoga at a the Longfellow Sports Club in Natick, MA. My class is at 9AM Monday mornings and is listed as a Hot Room Vinyasa style class. I am working hard to create the right blend in this class, to make it the perfect gym-style yoga. Teaching in a gym, especially one with a room right next to the weight room, is different than teaching in a yoga studio, where yoga is the main focus. Now don't get me wrong! The gym clientele is definitely savvy to yoga, but they are often running in sweating from the treadmill or running out to go to zumba next. I want my class to be perceived as a part of a lifestyle routine, not just as part of a workout. I want people to know how to align their bodies for safety and support, to build themselves from the ground up. As my teacher pointed out the other day that "You cannot learn how to do a handstand if you cannot even stand on your own two feet."

How to keep the essence of what I believe is yoga in this class? How to create the perfect balance of yoga and "workout", so the clientele sees it as fitting into their workout regime but at the same time being able to deliver yoga-effort and release-not just effort, effort, effort, ooomph! The word Vinyasa means "breath-synchronized movement". In a Vinyasa yoga class each pose is connected to the next through breath creating a smooth way for the poses  to run together, becoming like a dance. But the dance is not solely the external asanas (poses), it is also the internal effort of the practitioner to allow for effort and surrender. Moving from one pose into  the next and feeling like you have attained your goal as you "arrive" in your pose, is not a dance. That is a statue. Poses must have life in them, breath, and growth. No pose ends at the external shape of the pose just because you have arrived there, the real has just begun.

I decided to call my class "Tap Into Sensation", because I hear this phrase loud and clear in my own practice. We use yoga to tap into the sensations in our own bodies, our lives, making us aware of how we feel, why we do what we do, how to release our creative imagination to allow for change and growth....shave and a hair cut, two bits! By becoming more aware on our mat, we will become more aware off it; allowing us to balance our lives. By using an even breath effort, our asnasa practice will be more even, therefore allowing us to have a more even mind.

I study earnestly with my mentor, Barbara Benagh and will be joining her Deeper into the Art of Teaching program this coming October. It is an intense 15-month teacher training program and I am so excited and eager to participate. For the past 10 months, I have been taking her class at Down Under Yoga in Newton, Highlands, and I take notes and write comments to myself throughout the class. This does detract from the initial experience of the session, but as I dissect it throughout the week, I find I can attain a much deeper understating of the practice in my own body, allowing me to adapt sections to my own needs and for the classes that I teach. I follow Barbara's model, where I create one class (with a specific anatomical focus or root idea) at the beginning of the week and then I keep teaching that class throughout the week, adapting and refining it. I read something that Shiva Rhea had written about Vinyasa yoga and it sat very well with me. She wrote that it is not only a flow of the poses but there has to be a flow between the beginning, middle and end of the class.

So I am building my yoga program to flow from beginning to end, to allow my students time to focus on themselves, to allow them to stretch their bodies and to allow them to discover their own personal dance between effort and surrender.