Five-minute yoga challenge: add a roll in Virasana to loosen your hamstrings and heal your feet
Thirty years ago, when I first started taking yoga classes, Virasana (hero pose) was a 50/50 proposition. Some days it was fine. Sitting up on three chip foam blocks, I could feel a pleasant stretch in the fronts of my feet. My knees didn’t bother me, my front thighs weren’t tight and life was good. […]
Five things I learned after I sprained my little toe
Looks innocent, doesn’t it? Fold it in four, leave it lying around, and you’ll see the damage it can do.I learned that if you’re walking barefoot, and your little toe gets caught in something and you keep walking, your little toe will hurt, for a long, long time. A month ago last Tuesday night, just […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: Stretch Your Feet on a Wood Brick
This just in: sitting in chairs is lethal. Yogis already know that sitting leads to tight hips and shortened psoas muscles. Now, a comprehensive new study shows that prolonged sitting doubles your chances of diabetes, heart disease and death. To come up with this finding, Dr Emma Wilmot, a research fellow in the Diabetes Research […]
Squat on: deepen Malasana with straps at your hip creases
Yes, my fascination with hip creases continues, and only grows deeper. I just came back from a short road trip. When I got out of the car after several hours of sitting, I noticed that while I was a little stiff in my hips, I didn’t have the pain I used to get, deep in […]
Five Minute Yoga Challenge: press your outer arches down to lift your inner ankles
Words are important, and what we say when we teach matters. So kudos to yoga teacher and blogger Michelle Myhre, who wrote a thoughtful essay this week in Elephant Journal on cleaning up the language of yoga teaching by getting rid of verbal filler. I’m so much in agreement that I’m considering putting an elastic […]
Interpenetrate Your Fingers and Toes: Five-Minute Yoga Challenge
If setting down roots is the fundamental act in a yoga practice, then we’d best pay attention to our feet, the primary roots for all standing poses and for much of our life off the mat. The more time we spend increasing the liveliness and connectedness of our feet, the more we can, both literally […]