Let two chairs be your umbrella on a rainy, rainy day
When you come back up, even a dark, gray day looks brighter.Here on the wet West Coast, where winter closes in with endless clouds, rain, and steadily diminishing daylight, we take seasonal depression seriously. I have a “happy light” glowing on my desk as I write this. So there’s nothing I’d like to recommend more […]
Break out of your computer body while there’s still time
Do you ever find yourself hunched over your keyboard, shoulders up around your ears and a dull ache taking hold in your upper back? Yeah, me too. That’s why this simple chest opening is one of my favorite five-minute yoga breaks, and also one of my favorite ways to ease into a practice. The older […]
What’s locked in your ribcage?
On the day my yoga life officially began, sometime in June, 1987, I took a private class from Wende Davis. She taught me spinal stretch, with my hands resting on her upright piano. Then she tapped her fingers along my spine and asked me to notice the different qualities of the flesh. My lumbar spine […]
Savasana: a new use for an eye bag
(Need more sleeping cat pictures?) Relaxation pose is the name we give Savasana (shah-VAH-sah-nah) in English. In Sanskrit, it means corpse – a pose that mimics death. But if you have a rounded upper back you can easily become one of the undead: not quite able to settle without something to prop up your head. […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: stretch your arms in a doorway
The most yogic use for a doorway, real or metaphorical, would surely be to come and go mindfully, knowing when you’re on one side, when you’re in the middle, and when you’ve passed through. But doorways also have yogic uses that are far more physical. You can, for instance, use a doorway to get a […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: stretch your shoulders with an imaginary sticky mat
One of the conundrums we face as beginning yoga students is that we can’t know what the pose is supposed to feel like until we’re doing it. But if you start with the standard issue collapsed chest and tight shoulders of a 21st century desk worker, how can you even begin to know how large […]