This is a deep restorative, donation-based, all levels class. Lots of breathwork and supported postures, with time for short meditation at the end.

This is a reflective, slow-moving, low-impact practice perfect for closing a busy, hectic, high energy week. You will leave feeling relaxed, but energized and opened up!

Doctors who treat Fibromyalgia and who want to offer their patients something other than pharmaceuticals often agree that Yoga, specifically the kindler, gentler approach of Restorative Yoga, offers several benefits:

*Restores healthy blood circulation

*Builds healthy muscle tissue

*Reduces stress & anxiety

A Yoga practice that combines bodywork (asana or postures), breathwork and meditation, along with healthy changes to diet and perhaps other forms of bodywork such as chiropractic and/or rolfing, can produce much sought-after relief from symptoms and can in many cases replace traditional pharmaceutical remedies (which often mask the root causes of muscle dysfunction and can lead to unhealthy addiction).

Always check with your doctor or other health care provider before beginning a Yoga practice. Special precautions should be taken if you are pregnant or have specific blood-related disorders. Some poses are contra-indicated for conditions such as high blood pressure and glaucoma. Always maintain a slow, even breath cycle throughout your posture work. If the breath becomes labored or short, stop and rest or modify your posture to a level that lets you correct your breath.

Restorative Yoga is meant to help quiet the mind while also gently opening space in the body. Feel free to stay in these poses for as long as you feel comfortable and can focus the mind inwardly. Here are some Restorative or gentle Yoga postures recommended to treat the symptoms of Fibromyalgia:

Balasana or Child’s Pose – From a seated position on the knees, take your knees wide and bring your toes together behind you. Fold your torso to the floor, letting your arms fold back over your thighs. This pose stretches the back and hips, and releases tension in the neck and shoulders.

Viparita Karani or Legs Up The Wall Pose – A supported “inversion”, where the heart is below the head. Sit close to a wall on a couple of narrowly folded yoga blankets or thick towels. Turn your torso first to face the wall, then leaning over and back towards the floor, bring the base of your pelvis to the wall, and take your legs up to rest against the wall. The entire back of your torso, arms and head then rests on the floor. This pose reverses blood flow, improving circulation, and gently stretches the backs of the legs.

Halasana or Plow Pose – Lying on your back, kick your legs up and over your head, bringing your toes to or toward the floor behind you. Bring your hands up to support your back, letting weight fall firmly into your elbows, upper arms and shoulders. This is a good stretch for the back and neck.

Savasana or Corpse Pose – Lie in a full resting pose on your back. Use blankets or towels to support your head and knees (which releases the hips and lower back). Close your eyes, relax your entire body from your feet to your head, then let your mind focus gently on the cycle of your breath.

Standing poses simultaneously strengthen the legs, back and shoulders while also opening space in the hips and joints of the legs. Hold each pose for 8-10 breaths each. Specific strength building Yoga postures that are recommended include but are not limited to:

Adho Mukha Svanasana or Downward Facing Dog Pose – Come to your hands and knees, aligning your wrists under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Spread your fingers wide and fully press your palms into the floor. Turn your toes under and gently lift your knees up, pressing into your palms to lengthen your arms as you brings your heels toward the floor and your legs to straight. Keep a micro bend in your knees to allow your hips to lift and spread. Feel your back stretch as you reach your tailbone to the sky. This pose stretches and strengthens the entire body.

Trikonasana or Triangle Pose – Step your feet wide and turn your right toes forward and your left toes in to about 45 degrees. Keep both legs straight as you engage the leg muscles. Take a strong breath in as you lengthen your torso and extend your arms out in both directions. On your exhalation, reach the right arm forward, angling your torso in the same direction. Once you feel a strong (not painful) stretch in your right inner thigh, bring your right hand down to rest on your shin or an upturned block. Your left arm extends skyward, and your gaze turns to your left fingers. Hold for several breaths then repeat after switching your legs.

Parsvakonasana or Extended Side Angle Pose - Step your feet wide and turn your right toes forward and your left toes in to about 45 degrees. Bend your front knee, keeping it aligned over your heel and bring your right elbow to rest on the top of your right thigh. Press strongly into your left foot, lengthening and firming the entire leg. Lift your left arm first to the sky, then to an angle over your left ear. The right hand can also be lowered onto the floor or to a block. Hold for several breaths then repeat after switching your legs.

These two poses in particular strengthen not only the legs, but the muscles of the back. Try to keep the chest stretching open in these poses by pulling the shoulder blades together towards the spine. This action also reduces strain in the shoulders by consciously lowering or “de-hunching” them away from the ears.

For more poses and pose sequences that are helpful in treating Fibromyalgia or other specific ailments, please feel free to email me.

Join us from 12-1:15pm Monday, 12.21.09 at CHI Studio for a special Winter Solstice Yoga class.

We’ll begin with low lights and more restorative (yin) asana including supine postures and forward bends. We’ll move gradually toward opening the front body, releasing the light of the heart center through chest openers, back bends and slow-moving Sun Salutations (yang). After savasana we’ll end our practice with a seated meditation honoring both the seasonal and personal transformation and balance of the Solstice, surrounded by glowing candlelight.

This class is suitable for all levels of yoga practitioner. Beginners are warmly welcomed. Come join us for the perfect, no-stress opportunity to honor the spirit of the season.

It’s autumn and soon enough the holidays are upon us again. What’s the first sign for you? Changes in the weather? The first leaves turning on the trees? Scary jack o’ lanterns and bonfires? Changing seasons cause us to pay attention to what our senses are registering in us, perhaps more at this time of the year than any other. Why is it that so many people love the seasons of spring and fall so much? The senses are fully, actively engaged; almost overwhelmed.

One of the surest signs for me (and my husband) is in what we want to cook and eat at home. Big bowls or plates of warm, comforting stewed things; or an impulse to bake rises up. I begin tagging recipes in the holiday issues of my food magazines.

One thing that’s different for me this year though is a deepening awareness of how my body reacts to food. I was born thin and have been blessed with a very high-functioning metabolism for most of life. My body literally burned with digestive energy at night and my weight hasn’t fluctuated more than 3-4 pounds over the past 20 years. I’ve always been very conscious about what I eat and have for years leaned much more toward a whole foods diet, but have been able to eat pretty much what I want without worrying about calorie-counting. Classic pitta constitution.

Manipura Chakra

Then I turned 40 and almost immediately I noticed changes. Many of them were normal, natural, but some have noticeably altered the way I feel and move. My digestive system is becoming more sensitively attuned to what I’m feeding it and in some instances has strongly resisted my desires to keep giving it the strong, spicy, acidic diet I’ve always loved. It’s as if the fires of digestion have smoldered to the point where they create only acrid smoke that has nowhere to go but back up the digestive tract! When I pull out my Ayurvedic cookbook and start actively reducing the pitta elements in my diet, I feel so much better, and not just in my belly!

Let’s look, too  for a moment, at the belly in psychological terms. In Kundalini yoga (the most psychically [i.e., psyche]-oriented of all of the schools of yoga), the belly is the location of the manipura chakra, the center of transformative fires. At least symbolically, engaging a strong manipura energy (through the practice of Kundalini Yoga) is a positive force and necessary for continued growth and transformation. In Carl Jung’s interpretation, manipura is where we burn through our passions and desires in order to begin to realize our individual nature. In the wisdom of the chakras, manipura is where we put forth ambition, where we exercise power and is sometimes associated with the years when we are forging (to use another heat-related metaphor) our careers and defining who we want to be.

Around the time of my most recent bout with these uncomfortable changes to my system, I dreamt intensely for two or three nights in a row, twice a recurring dream where I was trying to teach yoga in my studio but was constantly thwarted, interrupted or otherwise distracted by people and things and activity. I’ve decided to work with the imagery in these dreams in terms of who I am in the scheme of my own life at this moment. What is it that I think I want and what’s still in the way that I have ignored or repressed? In other words, it’s perhaps not enough that I changed my life to pursue a path I felt would bring me a deeper sense of satisfaction along with the opportunity to really give something of value to people (and that desire came relatively late in my life). That alone will not bring me to a fuller realization of myself. There are still boxes full, rooms full of stuff and relationships to unpack that in my dreams, are literally, in my way.

Following the course of kundalini, I might consider that becoming a yoga teacher is still (unconsciously) bound up with the ego’s desires and “burning through” that want could create the space to more deeply connect with what my yoga practice means to me, and how I can take that deepening awareness – that more genuine relationship of my self to myself – to my students. Through yoga we become more real to ourselves. It follows necessarily that we become more real to those around us.

Which is all to say I’m very focused on the mid-region, in my own practice, but in my teaching too; especially at a time when we’ll feel compelled to overindulge a bit here and there. I always assumed my yoga practice alone would keep me fit physically and mentally but as I get older I want to bring more practices into my life that benefit the whole person: Ayurveda, restorative yoga, pranayama and meditation. These practices enhance the equanimity, the sense of balance and calm I get from yoga and give me the energy, the joy to pursue all the things in my life that keep me sane and present and help me to grow and stay creative: my teaching, music, art, food, home, family and friends.

Be extra aware of and nice to your “belly” this season – both with what you put in it that will help keep your agni, your digestive fires, balanced and active, but also, give some thought to the psychic force of the manipura chakra. What’s vivid, burning, and intensely alive for you right now and what does it mean for your own, unique sense of personhood? What’s the fire in your belly?

I continued my class with my private school teachers over the summer as well, which brought a level of continuity and deepening of their commitment to their practice. We continue on through the new school term with a weekly class that meets in the school’s new dance studio. The school is offering yoga classes for students this year too and the demand is high!

If you’d like more information about forming a group class of your own (either one-off or ongoing) send me an email! I especially love working with new students and those looking to transition from Beginner to Intermediate and Advanced work. A one-off class for a special occasion can be fast-paced or slow and restorative. There are as many options for classes as there are interested students!

Pranam~

Shannon

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).

This class is my favorite in winter, when we start just as the sun is starting to dip, and end the class almost in darkness.

Private Yoga Classes are an excellent (and fun!) way to begin a yoga practice in a more intimate environment, surrounded by a few like-minded friends, colleagues or family members.

They’re also a smart way to get private yoga lesson attention from your instructor, as a single private lesson fee can be split among 4, 5 or 6 students.

Private classes can be held at the location of your choice, for convenience and comfort.

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.