Strengthen your abdominals in seated forward bends: Five-Minute Yoga Challenge
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, “Wow, I’m really going to feel my abs tomorrow,” after taking a yoga class that concentrated on seated forward bends. And that’s a shame, because they can be great abdominal poses. When I first started to take classes, I loved seated forward bends and practiced them at […]
Sweet Sorrow? A yoga fix for Christmas baking back pain
Cute mice, and very Christmasy, but making them can be a pain in the back. I love to make Christmas cookies, the more intricate the better. This means long periods of standing on a tile floor, leaning forward to perform the delicate, focused work of creating mushrooms out of meringue, painting chocolate eyes on sugar-cookie […]
Five minute yoga challenge: strap your thigh bones and explore a forward bend
In a forward bend with the legs parallel, the front thighs roll toward each other, the skin and muscles of the back thighs spread away from each other, and the sitting bones widen. But while all this widening occurs, the tops of the thighbones, deep in the hip sockets, pull toward each other. This should […]
Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: hang your head to free your neck.
Almost every time Wende, my first teacher, looked at my downward dog, she would say: “Eve, let go of your head.” Time after time, it came as a surprise. I was so used to gripping my neck that I no longer knew I was doing it. Head-forward posture, the kind we adopt when we stare […]
Sadhana: the practice for day six
One of the interesting things about this lotus is that it was photographed in New Jersey.Day five, Friday, was a day for experimental standing poses. In this case, what happens if you create a shoulder brace out of a long strap, hold the ends of the strap, and do your standing poses without taking weight […]
Sadhana: practice for day five
If you’re going to commit to a yoga practice, one that is “cultivated skillfully and continuously for a long time,” as Sutra 1.14 specifies, then there’s a question you have to answer. If your body isn’t ready for arm balance, headstand and shoulder stand every day, what do you do while waiting for it to […]