Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: reverse the curve
A normal curve and a hyper-kyphotic curve of the spineWe all have a kyphosis, or at least we ought to – it’s the natural outward curve of the upper back, which balances the inward curves of the neck and the low back. Hyper-kyphosis is different. The outward curve becomes exaggerated, and we lose our ability […]
Five-minute yoga challenge: ease your shoulders in gomukhasana
When I’m not practicing or teaching, I’m often sitting at my laptop, writing, answering emails, doing everything that studio administration, blog posts and finishing the instruction manual for building a bear proof composter demands. So I’m well acquainted with the feeling of popping out of a period of concentration – really, that was an hour? […]
Five Minute Yoga Challenge: can you let yourself relax and breathe?
As much as we may think we come to yoga for relaxation, in my own experience, it’s easier to get up and do a vigorous morning practice than it is to break the momentum of the day’s to-do list and come to a complete halt. This week’s yoga challenge asks you to do just that. […]
Take the five-minute Malasana challenge
I’m a big fan of Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog, and her book, The Happiness Project. She writes beautifully and does a lot of interesting research. (My latest find, thanks to Gretchen, was a link to Paul Bloom’s article First Person Plural in the November 2008 Atlantic Monthly, a fascinating look at our multiple selves.) […]
Set a Timer and Stand in Tadasana (Mountain Pose)
Nothing exposes our minds for the busy monkeys they are quite as well as standing in Tadasana. After all, most of us have been standing since we were a year old. We already know how to stand, in a way that we don’t know how to do triangle pose, or warrior II. That’s why setting […]