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-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 […]
Cool it: rest your head on a chair, then put your feet up
A few weeks ago I promised to fill in the blanks of the cooling yoga sequence I’d suggested – the poses that hadn’t already made it onto this blog in the form of a Five-Minute Yoga Challenge. I meant to do it, really I did. Then we lost our summer, temporarily. At about the same […]
Sadhana: the practice for day three
Tuesday, day two, was shoulder stand variations and forward bends. It was interesting to see which standing poses were echoed in the variations. For some reason I had never seen quite so clearly before how Eka Pada Sarvangasana (shoulder stand with one leg descending) relates to Parsvottanasana (intense side stretch pose) – with a concave […]
Where Do You Find Your Inner Teacher?
I went to Saskatoon at the end of May, to the Iyengar Yoga Association of Canada’s conference and AGM. What I found there, along with the aforementioned magpies, gophers and lilacs, was friendly people, good conversation, and something more: another piece of the Inner Teacher puzzle. The Inner Teacher is the innate intelligence that, among […]
Use a strap around your hip crease to free your groins: Five Minute Yoga Challenge
Anatomically speaking, the groins are the folds that mark the meeting of the lower abdomen and the inner thigh. In Iyengar yoga, those would be the inner groins. Iyengar yoga also identifies middle groins, outer groins and back groins, making a circle of awareness all around the meeting place between legs and torso. Lately I’ve […]