Five-Minute Yoga Challenge: half a headstand with 3 blocks and a wall
The Five-Minute Yoga Challenge started as a response to two of Gretchen Rubin’s Rules for Adulthood: “What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE,” and “By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.” That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of My Five […]
5 reasons to love your imbalances
We are all out of balance to some degree. Triangle pose to the right may be a luxurious journey over smoothly oiled joints and long muscles. Turn to the left, and it feels like there’s sand in your joints and your hamstrings have, inexplicably, snapped an inch shorter. There’s the one wobbly standing leg in […]
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? […]
Meet your I-maker, and feel less alone
In January, after several months of not taking a weekly yoga class, I started again, in a different space, with a different teacher. One of the great benefits of taking a break and changing routines is that everything looks fresh, and emotions you’d forgotten come back to the surface, ripe for examination. Somewhat to my […]
Why Hitting the Wall is a Good Idea
Among beginning yoga students, one of the most difficult props to acquire is a yoga wall, wide enough to spread your arms out wide without hitting anything, and blank. Most walls are already in use. Couches rest against them, pictures hang from them. And if your living space is small, the need to sit down […]