Archive for the ‘Yoga’ Category
Yoga may seem like a young woman’s activity, but seniors actually have a lot to gain from the practice. Many of the physical improvements that result from yoga directly address the health concerns of older individuals. Getting involved in the exercise may lead to a number of important benefits.
Most experts agree that maintaining flexibility is an important part of growing older. Few things hamper a person’s mobility and ability to live independently than muscle and joint stiffness. This can make a person feel much older than they actually are.
Few practices improve a person’s flexibility quite like yoga. The exercise regimen basically amounts to specialized stretches targeted to certain areas of the body. By practicing yoga on a regular basis, older individuals can ensure that they maintain their flexibility and avoid many of the health problems that come from musculoskeletal stiffness.
Osteoarthritis is one of the most common age-related health problems. Millions of U.S. adults suffer from the painful joint condition. It is caused by the cartilage of the joints wearing down over time. Once the cartilage is completely broken down, there is no cure for the pain short of joint replacement surgery.
The Arthritis Foundation states that exercise is one of the best ways to prevent the joint damage that characterizes osteoarthritis. However, the irony is that because the condition causes pain, few people stay as active as they should. Studies have shown that very few people with osteoarthritis get any kind of physical activity in their everyday life.
Yoga may offer these individuals a solution to the problem. Because the practices is low-impact, it may not bother the joints of a person with osteoarthritis the way more traditional exercises like running or riding a bike can.
A large percentage of seniors also suffer from cardiovascular problems. High cholesterol, elevated blood pressure and poor blood flow are very common problems. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.
However, yoga may be able to counter many of these problems. The exercise routine has been shown to lower the heart rate and improve circulation. This may benefit individuals who have multiple cardiovascular risk factors.
Furthermore, yoga can get the heart pumping more than a person would think, which may provide the cardiovascular workout seniors need to maintain the condition of their heart and reduce their chances of complications.
For some reason, practicing yoga has become very popular among young females, with very few men and older individuals trying out the practice. This is a shame because just about everyone has something to gain from yoga. This is particularly true for seniors, who may be among the least likely to sign up for a class.
However, this perception should not stop older people from trying it out. There are many classes that are specifically geared to the ability and needs of seniors. Getting involved in one of these classes may be among the best things aging individuals can do for their health.
Dahn Yoga is one of the largest yoga and tai chi companies in the world with its own unique style and brand of yoga. Dahn Yoga is rooted in the rich history of an ancient Asian mind-body practice, Sun Do, and in the wisdom of the Chun Bu Kyung.
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1. Make enough room for a mat. You don’t need a lot of space to do yoga at home. Just enough room for your yoga mat, and a foot or two around all sides. Once you get your practice going, you’ll feel as much calm stepping onto your mat as you would stepping into a studio. State dependent memory—our tendency to adopt the same physiological state we remember being in at other times we did the activity—works in our favor here. We become calm and energized during our yoga practice and soon enough, after a number of sessions on the mat, we begin to feel calm and energized as soon as we step on it.
2. Give yourself permission. Friends, family, work—everything and anything can become a reason to feel guilty about taking the time to do yoga at home. The bottom line is this: we can’t take care of others unless we take care of ourselves.
3. Listen to your body. Your body knows what’s good for you and what’s not. Before you begin your practice, take a few minutes to sit or stand in stillness. Scan your body from your toes, up your legs to your knees and into your hips and lower back. Then scan up to your upper back, shoulders, arms, stomach and chest. Notice any sensations anywhere, ranging from simple sensations of energy to stronger ones of discomfort or pain. Stay tuned into those areas as you do your practice. If you feel increased pain or new pain be sure to back off and choose a different variation of the movement. Rest if you need it.
4. Feel energized? On days when you feel energized, it can be great to do power vinyasa or Kundalini yoga at home. These are more dynamic, flowing, energetic styles of yoga.
5. Feel like you want to build energy? Kundalini yoga and power vinyasa flow are also great for building energy. If you’re looking for something less strenuous, try a Hatha practice.
6. Feel like you need rest? Meditation, or yin yoga, are both very nourishing.
7. Feel free to rest. Feel like you don’t have enough energy to do anything at all? Simply practicing Savasana, where you lie flat on your back in corpse pose and simply let go, can be enough of a yoga at home practice some days.
8. Feel free to meditate. On other days, you might just want to sit in meditation. Yoga Asanas, or physical postures, are actually geared towards enabling us to sit comfortably in meditation. So sit still and rest in the rhythm of your breath—no guilt required!
9. Give yourself permission to make it short and sweet. So a regular class is 75 minutes? What feels right for you? Your yoga at home practice can be as short or as long as you need it to be. Honor what’s right for you. Feeling like you need an Asana practice, but can’t convince yourself to get going? Just remember that getting started is the hardest part. Try committing to doing “just seven minutes” but give yourself time for more in case you feel like it.
10. Just do it. Bottom line: When you do yoga at home, even five minutes can bring in the stress-relieving, muscle toning and lengthening
~Lindsey Lewis, MyYogaOnline.com
MyYogaOnline.com is the global leader for mind-body health and wellness and holistic living. My Yoga offers an extensive and always growing library of videos: yoga, Pilates, meditation and more. Plus tailored wellness programs, expert advice, workplace wellness, green living, health, and recipes.
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Retreat with Shiva Rea at Esalen in Big Sur fueled my heart fire and fed my soul with nature, yummy organic food grown on the land, community of dear friends and new friends, rejuvenation in the hot spring baths, and entrainment to my inner rhythm. Radio Devi (Vir McCoy and Evan Fraser of Hamsa Lila) guided our experience with infectious instrumentals weaving thru electronic beats DJ’d by Shiva. They were right with us every step of the way in a dance with our collective energy leading us into epic moments of trance, flow, and quiet heart reflection.
I made the journey with my friend Michelle Bouvier of Hoop Nectar; we arrived at Esalen in the afternoon when the light was golden, shimmering on the land illuminating the gardens and inviting us to explore. Within moments we were adventuring and engaged in Bodacious Play. Michelle was spiraling in her hoops as I was loving nature yoga and cartwheels. We explored the gardens smelling the healing herbs, checking out the variety of colorful veggies, and tasting the yummy apples right from the trees.
On this first night together Shiva shared some valuable information and visual slides that outlined the importance of “Tending the Sacred Fire”. She explained that studies show that stress has a rhythmic brain wave state that creates a dissonant energy field often resulting in dis-ease in the body and in life. Dr. Sue Mortor also talks about this in her recent TEDx NASA segment. By learning to tend the fire within on all levels, physical, creative, emotional, and mental in varying degrees we contain the fire making it fully available to us. The reward is access to and expression of our innate creativity.
Primed with this new knowledge we proceeded to move into the experience. Shiva shared shaker eggs with us and the room filled with the entrancing rhythmic sound. Shiva and Radio Devi took us on a musical journey that morphed into a movement alchemy. Soon we were guided into deep rest and silence. Inspired by the brilliance of the stars a few of us went to the hot baths and settled into our new rhthym as it entrained to the crashing waves below.
Celebrating the last new moon of the solstice year we met the next morning to sit in inquiry and process composting the essence of the year. We composted these emotions and energies while riding the waves of prana flow asana that offered both strengthening structure and gentle freedom. Our afternoon and evening were free for connecting with nature and nurturing the soul. We met again under the new moon for a fire ceremony and celebration of the seeds we were planting for this next season. Soon we were moved again by an entrancing musical journey inspiring ecstatic free form movement.
Sunday morning, while most of our group was at the baths, I enjoyed the opportunity to practice Tai Ji with master Al Huang. Shiva, her dad, step-mom and I gathered with the Tai Ji group on the deck open to receive the fresh morning sunlight rising over the mountain. Al has been teaching on that deck for 50 years and happens to be one of Shiva’s cherished teachers. His teachings are simple and humorous yet packed with power. It was beautiful to witness Shiva’s connection with her family and deep affection for this teacher of hers. I caught a glimpse of the little girl inside and could see this beautiful affinity for spirituality and truth had grown from seeds planted by her father. Curious, I asked her dad what he had wanted Shiva to be when she grew up. He said with a smile on his face “ a warrior” of the light, a yoga master 
After welcoming the sun and connecting with the earth we met for our last session together. This was an energized prana flow vinyasa and upbeat musical journey. Through the full range of yoga asana into free form movement we synched our breath, heart, and brain waves into a coherent field. We ventured out into nature for our final savasana meeting at the river to send gratitude and dreams into the flow of rushing water.
Thank you Shiva for leading the way on this journey to an experience in life that is full of creativity and vitality!
~Heather Keely, Bodacious Living Yoga and Lightworks Creative
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As Surfers we are constantly rotating our shoulders forward paddling and slouching over our board sitting for waves. In today’s day with cell phones and sitting on the computer, this also has a similar effect to too much forward rotation in our structure. The long term result is chronic pain in the shoulders, upper back and neck.
Being active in releasing pressure in the tension in the neck and shoulders will allow us to stabilize the shoulder’s and begin to correct slouching.
1. Interlace your fingers behind your shoulders, starting with the pinky fingers, with your palms facing the body to keep the chest and shoulders open. Make sure you are comfortable and keep your shoulder blades pulling down to protect your rotator cuff from over-stretching. Keep your thumbs and index fingers open and down and away from the body.
2. If clasping your fingers is uncomfortable and you are not able to keep your shoulders from lifting or coming forward, you can hold a strap between your hands. The ideal way is to make a loop with a yoga strap or belt that is the width of your shoulders. Place your wrists in the loop of the strap and keep your fingers wide open during the stretch as this will facilitate a deeper connection to your core. Use the breathing movements to open the connective tissue in the front body, strengthen the rotator cuff muscles that stabilize the scapula, and stretch the muscles in your chest. Lightly hold the strap behind you with the same intentions of opening the shoulders and chest and contracting your shoulder blades and rhomboids.
3. Take a deep breath in and allow your pelvic floor to open as you feel the breath initiating from the movement of your rib cage and oblique muscles. Imagine a balloon is in your ribs and you are blowing up the balloon with your breath. As you inhale rise up on your toes and contract your back muscles to strengthen your back extensors at the same time you pull back to stretch your chest. Visualize energy rising up the spine allowing your head to be as if floating on top of your spine.
4. On the exhale lower with control and return your heels onto the ground keeping your weight evenly distributed on your feet at the same time maintaining a feeling of keeping length in your trunk. Keep your hands reaching down towards the ground and bring your chin level as the top of the crown on your head lifts towards the sky. Imagine a string at the top of the head lengthening the neck.
5. During exhalation, accentuate the contraction of your muscles of exhalation in the rib and trunk area. Lengthen your waist as you exhale to train your core muscles to stabilize your core rather than flexing the spine which shortens and compresses the natural curves. When we do exhalation movements that cause spinal flexion, it leads to forward head and shoulder carriage than can inhibit our paddling strength and efficiency. The key to the exercise is to work with the breathing muscles in a way that creates a lengthening of the spine whether inhaling or exhaling.
Repeat a few times
Benefits:
The active breath movement on the inhale and squeezing the muscles in contraction, awakens the body, through breath, blood flow, muscles, nervous system, and quick muscle response with control.
Balance and control of movement
Strength
Flexibility with stability
Structural alignment begins to be established and awakened.
~Rochelle Ballard, Yogi, Former Professional Surfer and Founder of Surf Into Yoga
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There wasn’t much time for reading lately — it’s been a 6:30 am alarm clock and a 1 am “off duty” each day while I’ve been at Outdoor Retailer in Salt Lake City. So, no new resources for you this week, but in the absence of great articles to read, here’s an alternative update. One of the delights of this week’s Outdoor Retailer show was an invitation from the apparel brand, prAna, to attend a one-hour “mindfulness session” on Saturday afternoon of the show. The session was led by author and meditation teacher Mark Coleman. After a one-minute silent meditation and discussion, we did a longer guided meditation and then discussed our individual experiences. At one point in the conversation, Mark reached for a water bottle to illustrate a point he was making, and gently picked it up with one hand. “You can pick up the water bottle,” he said, “or you can strangle the water bottle,” he added, tightening his grip around the bottle until the plastic crackled and the bottle was crushed inside his grip.
I am a total bottle strangler.
One of my greatest challenges is figuring out how to exert just the right amount of effort. Take this week, for example. I was supposed to work Wednesday through Friday, then take the weekend off to ski. Instead, I worked past midnight every night this week (and that includes both days of the weekend). And even while I was doing it, I thought to myself, “Why?” WHY do I work so hard? It’s not external pressure — I could have stopped work at 5pm on Friday and skied all weekend, and nobody would have noticed. The painful flip side to that is the knowledge that nobody but me is going to notice that I worked all weekend! I strangled the shit out of OR (like I always do), and I’d like to learn how not to do that.
I learned — after much effort — how to not strangle law school. I felt intense pressure and anxiety during law school. I felt like if I didn’t study every minute, I’d flunk out. So I overcompensated, and performed above the level I needed to during my first two years of school. It wasn’t until my last semester of law school that I actually achieved my goal of “picking up” law school instead of “strangling” it, and was delighted by my first straight B’s report card. Those straight B’s meant that I passed all my classes, but they also meant that I’d taken care of more than just my schoolwork that semester. I’d climbed, I’d spent time with friends outside of school and family, I’d taken care of myself. Instead of an A in school and a D in living, I was stoked to score straight B’s across the board.
So now, I am home, and it’s a day where my deadline is not yet met, I am at the place of tired where I feel as if my eyes are going to water. Today will roll into tomorrow, which was full to a convex meniscus even before I roll today’s missed deadline into tomorrow morning’s workload. And it’s unmistakable that I do this to myself. I overpromise. I set expectations too high (for myself, and when communicating expectations to others). I put accommodating other peoples’ timelines ahead of taking care of myself (or honoring my own boundaries) and try to juggle more balls than I have the skill or temperament to juggle.
So what do I do to loosen my stranglehold on these facets of my life? I did it once — during law school — and I can do it again, right?
What I learned then was to take time to climb; to make a schedule and stick to it even when the work wasn’t “done;” and to make a point of spending time with friends that weren’t a part of my “work” life, with whom I could talk about anything but law school. Now, in the years that have passed, I’ve learned about meditation and flow and — a concept that I’ve spent precious little time indulging in lately, and which probably deserves more of my effort — lightness. In times of stress, I actually close my eyes and think of a feather. It’s white, like the one in Forest Gump. It hangs in midair, floating gently from side to side. When I feel serious, I feel heavy. Attached to the ground. I feel the gravity of being pulled down; the inertia of not moving; I feel anchored. When I think of a feather, I’m reminded that lightness enables movement. Lightness leads to flow.
I learned this same lesson through climbing. If you overgrip — if you hang on harder than the minimum amount of effort that it takes to keep yourself on the wall, you pump out, your endurance fails, and you can’t hold on anymore. Worst case scenario, you feel your fingers actually peel one by one off the grip you were holding; the force on the remaining straining fingers increased because of the additional weight they now have to bear because of the failures that have occurred, this process repeating until you fall. That lesson is so familiar to my cells, that just typing those words made my hands sweat.
And I’ve learned strategies through meditation. If I gently return my attention again and again to what is here before me, rather than spinning off about consequences or what happens next, then I can be more present. What is the purpose, in this context, for strangling the shit out of a bottle (or a writing project, or a proposal, or a speaking engagement, or a rock climb)? If I’m present, and mindful, then I can pick up the bottle deliberately, with just the necessary amount of effort to achieve the goal.
This is one area where I’m in the awareness stage, not the “I have the answers” stage. How about you? What are your tips and strategies for lightening the stranglehold on life and work and exerting only the necessary amount of force?
~Sara Lingafelter, Social Media Specialist at REI
(She is not speaking for REI in this post. The views she’s sharing are her own, and do not necessarily reflect REI’s views).
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A winter yoga festival right in the heart of the Elk Mountains in Crested Butte, Colorado. Come join us! Yoga, Music, Family, Meditation, classes, clinics, celebration, and more! Yoga Rocks the Butte benefits Yoga World Reach, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing yoga outreach to third world countries and underdeveloped areas.
“We are enthusiastic about hosting this inaugural event,” commented Ethan Mueller, vice president, general manager of CBMR. “With its natural beauty, peaceful atmosphere and welcoming spirit, Crested Butte is the perfect location to host a festival of this caliber.”
Yoga Presenters, Workshop Gurus & Musicians For more information visit www.yogarocksthebutte.com.
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In 2011, I had the great fortune to experience the space-holding power of prAna ambassador Shiva Rea at three yoga festivals. Each event held its own unique audience and each event required it’s own unique leadership to uplift, open, and heal the yogis in attendance. Whether the venue required teary-eyed intimacy and tenderness, or full-blown shakti celebration, Shiva rose to the divine occasion and WOKE US UP!
The model of Shiva Rea’s teaching is complex, drawing not only from most of Yoga’s traditions including Bhakti, Hatha, Tantra, and Raja Yoga, but also from a wide-variety of world traditions ranging from Tribalism and Shamanism to Paganism and Christianity, all the way to ecstatic dance and western science. She has a way of teaching the primal human spiritual experience that links all traditions while simultaneously transcending them.
After witnessing her variety of teaching styles at Bhakti Fest, Wanderlust, and Burning Man, I am excited to see how the Rocky Mountains will influence Shiva Rea’s creative teachings this February at Yoga Rocks the Butte Winterfest in Crested Butte, Colorado, especially since the festival will be hosting a list teachers, musicians, and students who are already open to and experienced in Shiva’s ways.
~Ryan Nadlonek, Prana Flow® Energetic Vinyasa instructor, kirtan musician, rock climber, surfer, and blogger.
For prAna blog readers, use the code PRANAYRB for a $250 festival pass. Yoga Rocks the Butte is also a benefit for Yoga World Reach. 10% of profits will be donated to this non-profit which brings yoga outreach to people around the world. For more info email yogarocksthebutte@gmail.com and join them on Facebook!
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