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 […]
How does the impossible become possible?
How does the impossible become possible? I don’t really know the answer to that. But I do know that in yoga it happens all the time. Take rope Sukhasana, for example, or Shirley’s rope trick – as I think of it. I first saw it two years ago, in an intensive workshop preparing for Junior […]
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 […]
Rest your cow to ease tight hips: five-minute yoga challenge
Wouldn’t it be great if all of life’s problems could be solved by lying down and taking it easy? The good news is that some of them can. Take tight outer hips, for example. This might be one of your problems if you cycle, run, do weight training, spend a lot of time sitting, or […]
Learn to do a full back bend, one step at a time
“The body is the bow, asana is the arrow, the soul is the target” – B.K.S. IyengarIn my first dance class, I clung to my mother’s knee, three years old and already deeply suspicious of group activities. Then Miss Goddard announced “London Bridges” – the full back bend that Iyengar yogis call “upward bow.” I […]
Four ways the Brahma Viharas can keep you clear
I want to have a lucid old age, but the odds aren’t looking good. Start with a family strain of dementia, add growing up in the toxic-chemicals-friendly 1950s, then stir in a rear-end collision that smacked my forehead into the windshield when I was 10, and really, all bets are off. I’d like to believe […]