MONDAYS – CHI Studio, near Fair Park in Dallas, TX

5:15-6:30pm Yoga Tune-Up: A beginner level class that covers that basics. All levels welcome. $10 Drop in.

7:00-8:30pm Vinyasa Flow: A breath-synchronized class that builds heat and challenges you in deeper hip openers, arm balances and inversions. $5 Donation.

On Tuesdays I teach a class to my Mother and one of her dearest friends. It’s private. Sorry!

On Wednesdays I’m teaching to my favorite teachers and staff at the Winston School in north Dallas. We’ve been practicing together now for almost three years. I am most proud of this group of women and what they’ve accomplished.

On Thursdays I’m currently teaching two kids’ yoga classes. Talk about a challenge.

I’m also about to start subbing up at the Gold’s Gym in Garland the next several Saturday mornings from 11-12pm, and Thursdays in November from 7:15-8:15pm. I love this class. They are the friendliest bunch of dedicated gym-yogis I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.

I like it that my regular classes leave me the flexibility to sub teach a lot when I can. Let me know if you’re interested in starting your own private class! Either at CHI Studio or a location you have available.

Finally, here’s an upcoming event you might be interested in:

Dirt Cheap Yoga’s Chandra Namaskar: Moon Salutations

Maybe I’ll see you there…

The 6-week series will start April 21st, and run for 6 consecutive Wednesday evenings, from 7-8:15pm.

Go to my Beginner’s Yoga Series page for more information and to register.

I will be teaching my regularly scheduled Restorative Yoga class at CHI Studio from 12-1:15pm. We have 2 other free classes at CHI on Monday as well, from 10:15-11:45am, a Vinyasa Flow-style class with my dear friend Mary Armstrong, and from 7-8:30pm, an invigorating Vinyasa-Flow class with my Teacher Training Instructor, Ro Chapa.

First-time CHI clients can attend any class the rest of next week for $5 (regular $10 Drop-in).

Just like school teachers, yoga teachers get to have “staff development” days, too. Termed “Continuing Education Units” or “CEU’s”, these hours for yoga teachers are required in order to keep the teaching cert. For a 200-hour Certification for example, you get to complete 30 hours of CEUs over two years.

Since receiving my 200-hour cert, I’ve been teaching quite a lot of hours, but have tallied far too few CEUs. I suspect this is the case for many teachers. Your teaching hours far outweigh your hours as a student attending classes, while simultaneously, your income takes a pretty serious dip. An expensive weekend workshop seems out of the question.

I bit the bullet (a very nicely priced bullet) last weekend and returned to Tsada Yoga in Dallas (the studio I still consider my “Yoga Home”) for four classes with Kelly Haas. Kelly has been teaching workshops at Tsada a couple of times a year for going on five years now. This was my first experience as a student with Kelly and I want to share some of the amazing things I learned and re-learned over the weekend.

First things first: Kelly teaches from the Anusara Yoga tradition which emphasizes healthy, safe alignment and with that alignment a focus on balance and movement from the heart. Kelly welcomed us with an infectious smile and laughing and an invitation to think about our practice in terms of the four elements – the lower body as “earthy”, the upper body as “sky”, “movement,” or an “airy lightness” and of bringing those elements into balance in every pose. In the first ten minutes I learned a new Sanskrit word: mudya or, “center line” and when we drew our palms together to open or close our practice it was always “to the center line” of our hearts. She reminded us to think of the line that separates yin from yang, earth from sky, upper body/lower body, work and rest, soft and hard, and what it symbolizes: again, that place of balance, the place between two forces where peace and calm reside.

That first evening we worked on “Opening the Lotus Flower of the Hips” and focused on the lower body with lunges, warrior twos, and pigeon pose with strong assists. Kelly reinforced the instruction I see more and more often to allow the natural curve of the lower back to remain soft, not to sharply tuck the pelvis under because that movement hardens the fronts of the hips and the groins. In order for the hips to broaden, to stretch the groins need to remain soft, pliable. The leg muscles do the work, not the groin muscles.

The second day worked the upper body with a lot of emphasis on lengthening the side body. How did Kelly instruct us to do this? “Lift your shoulders up towards your ears.” Really?! Don’t I always and everyday instruct my students to lower their shoulders away from their ears?! Yes, I do. And softening the shoulders away from the ears has the effect of lengthening the spine up through the neck and reducing as much tension as possible in the trapezius muscles on the tops of the shoulders. But following the instruction to lift our shoulders was the instruction to lengthen through the side ribs. That really worked. Then, Kelly instructed us to take our shoulder bones back and press the shoulder blades in toward our spines, engaging the infraspinatus muscles between the spine and the scapulae. We applied this movement to downward facing dog (adho mukha svanasana), mountain pose (tadasana), high plank to chattaranga dandasana, crescent lunge (ajanyasana) and frankly, every other pose for the rest of the weekend.

Another important alignment principle affecting me personally recently is the placement and flexion happening in the hand and forearm muscles. Teaching Sun Salutations (surya namaskar) involves a lot of weight on the hands, wrists and forearms. When we’re moving quickly through a sequence it’s often easy to sacrifice alignment for consistency and a consistent pace in the flow without our even realizing it (until our wrist aches or we have to ice the shoulder a few days later).

Such was the case with my right wrist and shoulder at the beginning of the workshop weekend. By Sunday I felt healed. Strong muscles working in the hands (palms and fingers) and the forearms (the soft-skinned underside of the forearm, not the top) take pressure off the wrist joint.

The same principle applies in the hip joint, where Kelly reminded us again and again to soften our groins and make the leg muscles work more. I went deeper in my standing poses guided by this fundamental re-alignment.

Kelly’s workshop really took me back to my “yoga home,” in more ways than one. From my early days practicing Iyengar Yoga I recall being firmly grounded in a strong emphasis on alignment, and breaking down a pose into its minute, constituent parts so that in every pose I felt the work. From the first pose of Kelly’s workshop, I felt at once like a brand new student, and like I was deepening what I know with new tools and new ways of looking at yoga poses. It was the infusion of yoga heart and soul I needed!

Friday – Sunday, June 12-14th, 2009.

Kelly Haas is an Anusara Yoga instructor and assistant to John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga. Her Anusara-Inspired workshop, “Creating a Life of Beauty” is open to all levels of yoga student and will work all areas of the body in 4 separate sessions. Visit the Tsada Yoga website for more information.

For information on Anusara Yoga go here.

My 2009 is about keeping my 200-hour certification which means I need to attend workshops and earn CEUs (Continuing Education Units).

As a yoga teacher I earn very little money, and $75 just for the Sunday Master Class hit my AMEX pretty hard after the holidays. But that $75 was money well-spent. As a Yoga Therapist Judith Lasater knows anatomy and physiology. (With a PhD in East-West Psychology she obviously knows a lot more.) She explained not only the gender differences but also the cultural differences in the anatomy of the hip joint, differences which turn out to be East-West. In cultures where most of us sit in chairs all day, our hip joints assume a movement and stasis that becomes fairly patterned and is different from that of cultures where many folks squat or sit on the floor (or just walk a lot more). Judith explained how when she was a girl, her family sat on the floor all the time, so sitting in padmasana or lotus pose has always been quite easy for her. Many Western yoga students will never sit comfortably in lotus pose because our hips are habituated (read “tight and underdeveloped”) to sit in chairs.

She pulled out a handy 3-D scale model of the human spine and pelvis (gets her in trouble in airports), together with a model of the top end of the human thigh bone or femur. Are you a visual learner? Me too. Getting to see how the femur sits in the hip socket (or acetabulum to be anatomically correct) made the results of our asana or posture work much more immediate and valuable. Knowing the relative angle (and it differs between men and women) at which that thigh bone inserts into the hip, and then being able to visualize that insertion as we moved in and out of seated and standing poses, brought my understanding as a teacher to a new level. You know when you grasp the essence of a piece of knowledge almost immediately, understand its value and can then repeat and share that essence with full confidence? That’s what I got.

How many times do I tell my students to “broaden your hips”? This, I learned (or was reminded?) is anatomically impossible. Or how about “tuck your pelvis under”? Judith explained why she thinks the latter instruction is unhelpful, particularly if you are also instructing your students to flatten their lower backs at the same time. True, we don’t want to over-arch the lumbar spine, but we also don’t want to “under arch” it. There is a neutral position for the spine that keeps the natural curve in the lower back intact and we do a disservice by instructing our students to flatten that arch. When we point the tailbone down, tucking the pelvis, we restrict movement in the thigh/hip joint when what we want is more movement, more freedom there.

Which doesn’t mean I can’t continue to give these instructions if they are helpful visualizations for some students. But the additional lesson seemed to be to become more aware of each student’s unique anatomy. Only a handful will have the tendency to overarch the lumbar spine, just as only a few will hyper-extend the limbs. Give those instructions only to those who will benefit and at the same time, encourage the neutral, natural curve of the spine.

You are invited to come and experience the unfolding of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras directly from a master who is living and radiating the ultimate state of Yoga.

Details:
Talk on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
Wednesday, April 15th
7:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Dinner prasad will be served.
(Individual Blessings and Healing for all)
at
DFW Hindu Temple
Cultural Hall
1605 N Britain Rd
Irving, TX- 75061

“I am not here to prove I am God. I am here to prove YOU are God” ~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda

www.Yogam4You.org

888-YOGAM-09

Watch over 500 Nithyanandaji’s discourses at (The most watched person on Spirituality)

http://www.Youtube.com/LifeBlissFoundation