“My research has shown me that when emotions are expressed–which is to say that the biochemicals that are the substrate of emotion are flowing freely–all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.”
- Dr. Candace B. Pert
with christina hatgisMom’s deserve more than just Sunday. Make it Mother’s Day weekend in your house!
Join Christina for a 2-hour, all levels workshop, especially for moms. If you’re a mom looking for some extra me-time, an opportunity to have your kid come to class with you (13 and older please), a kid stumped for a Mother’s Day present, or just looking for a really fun 2-hour class with Christina, look no further!
HYPEREXTENSION
by Janna Leyde
A few months ago I hyperextended the ring finger of my left hand. I was warned about this—hyperextending my fingers. Did I listen to my teacher? Apparently not. Who actually hyperextends their finger? Those wide-spread fingers were strong, holding me up in balances and inversions, so I just plowed through my practice. Then came the day it hurt like hell to type. Something in my hand felt crooked. The typing was doable, yet painful.
That same evening, two breaths into Eka Pada Koundiyanasana (this crazy thing), my body decided to call the shots. Clunk. My left hand gave out and I face-planted on my mat in Jen Whitney’s Thursday flow class. Embarrassing… yeah, kind of. But that was that. My body was telling the super-duper, overachieving brain of mine to back off. The next few weeks became a practice of learning to strengthen my wrists, staying out of my arm balances and giving handstands a rest. I grumbled about it at first, but I had no choice. Pain or yoga? I utilized different muscles. I discovered a little bit more of how my hands work—on my keyboard, in life, in yoga. By the time the tension had healed, I’d forgotten I cared so much about what I was missing, those poses I wasn’t practicing.
Today the left hand is back to good and my brain is much more in tune with how hands support a practice and how fingers don’t. Curiously enough, after that four-week break, my handstand has advanced out of nowhere. That hyperextended finger was exactly what I needed. Now, the poses I’d been striving for come with more ease, yet I’m less addicted to them. I quit being—as my mother puts it best—pushy with my practice.
And here we have yoga serving as my metaphor for life—again. In the last two months, I’ve marketed, pitched, spread the word, and pushed my book. It was as if some measure of book success had become the equivalent to nailing a peak pose. I could feel a crash coming. It was time to quit hyperextending before the face-plant.
Last week I took a break. After all, I did enjoy one heck of a book party (thank you, Book Court!), so a break was warranted. I wrote less. I pitched less. I emailed less. I quit monitoring and quit checking up on all things book-related. Last week it was my dad that did the writing and the reaching out.
So, what the heck, why not share his words? Below is a grant letter he wrote. This is his straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth words on his yoga practice, a practice I learn so very much from.
I would like to offer my support for your proposal for your grant for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute entitled “The Application of Yoga for Individuals with TBI”.
I suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in 1996. My injuries are to the frontal lobe, which makes it difficult for me to make good decisions and interact appropriately. I also have trouble with self-awareness. I think part of having a brain injury is your mind disconnecting from your body, but that is hard to figure out how to fix. I would like to participate in this research because yoga has made positive changes in my life.
I recently started a basic routine yoga practice with my daughter. I do things haphazardly because of my brain injury, and I learned that you cannot do yoga that way. It’s a discipline. You have to do the poses a certain way, and what you are doing is tying your mind to your body. They really start to interconnect, whereas on a treadmill you can turn off your brain and watch the news or listen to music. Or if you do a puzzle, you are just sitting in a chair. Yoga is physical, but it makes me think constantly.
My wife says that yoga gets me to focus and to pay more attention to my surroundings. She says that I am less impulsive, which is a good thing. For me, it is hard to explain how yoga makes me feel better, but it just does. Physically it makes me walk better and have good posture, but it also helps me be normal. I got away from being normal, way off track. The yoga gets my mind and body to talk back and forth. It helps me exercise my brain, and I think that’s a good thing.
Yoga can help other people with injuries like mine, but it is hard to go to a yoga class if you have a brain injury. I think that if yoga became recognized as a treatment or a therapy then more people with brain injuries could participate. I hope we can make that happen.
Sincerely,
John Leyde
If we’re being entirely honest, I did do the typing for him.
Janna Leyde is a yogi and writer living in Brooklyn and the author of He Never Liked Cake, a coming of age memoir that tells the story of growing up with her father’s traumatic brain injury. Oscillations: A Yogic Exploration of the Brain offers her perspective on the practice through the lens of the complex human brain. When she’s not on her mat or at the front of the room teaching, she is working on her second book about yoga for brain injury. You can buy her first novel, He Never Liked Cake, here.
by Steph Creaturo
A few Fridays ago, this happened in my home. While playing with my son, Beckett, I smelled burning. A crackle pierced the apartment, then a huge splash of orange light reflected off the silver backsplash in my kitchen. There was a fire, a real fire, in my home. As I watched one of the walls in my bathroom burn, I called 911 for the first time in my life.
Have you ever seen a fire burn? I hope you haven’t. I never had. And now that I have, I have a new healthy respect for speed. A new understanding of just how fast fire moves. In that moment, my thoughts moved faster and my heart beat even faster than the fire climbing the wall of my bathroom.
While I was talking to the 911 operator, and my son kept screaming “stop, drop, roll Mommy!”, and the fire’s flames started to flirt with the ceiling – everything paused. What pierced my reality at that moment were these words: Be present in this moment.
And I really did not want to be present. But, this is ultimately what practice is for: To be present when I don’t want to be. On Friday afternoon, the only thing I could control was how I responded to the decidedly sucky situation in front of me.
This is exactly why I get up at 5:30am to run. Why I roll out my yoga mat to count inhales and exhales again and again. There’s a daily practice so when the life-kicks-your-ass practice happens, I can do my best to stay present in the moment. As I scooped up Beckett and ran downstairs, my foundational thought loop was, “be present in this moment”, even as the tendrils of my mind leapfrogged into between the “what ifs” and “oh gods”.
So, I narrated each moment in my head and out loud to Beckett. It was the only thing I could think of to do. This moment we are closing the bathroom door. We are now leaving our apartment. This moment we are knocking on our neighbor’s doors to tell them to get out. Now we are going downstairs to let the fire department in. And so on and so forth until 25 very short (but eternally long) minutes later, we were back in our apartment, alone and safe. Thanks to the quick response of FDNY, and the 911 operator who told me exactly what to do, we have no bathroom, but there was no other damage. We inhaled no smoke. Our sprinklers did not go off. We are completely and totally fine.
This all happened on the Friday after the Monday filled with sadness and tragedy in Boston. I was running on Sunday. I had signed up for a four-mile race months ago. So, what was supposed to be a small race on a random Sunday all of a sudden became part of a weekend of hope and solidarity at running events.
Along the run, there was a guy, and wow, was he fast. Like, should-have-had-a-low-bib-number kind of fast. Around mile three, he passed me. He was wearing the BAA 2013 jacket, which meant he ran on Monday. He was saying really positive stuff to runners, but it was his super positive energy I noticed. It just streaked behind him like a fluffy shiny unicorn tail. But one thing he said resonated in my bones: Every mile matters.
Every mile matters. Be present in the moment. No matter if you use yoga language or running language or some other metaphor, the mantra is the same. This is the life you’re in and be in the life you’ve got; not the wanna-be life or wanna-was life. Sure, we all have those moments, what I call the “this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife” moments. Alignment occurs when we accept, with grace and from the strong skills that a daily practice builds, that indeed, this is my life. No matter how glorious or hideous the moment may be. Because the only thing that’s sure is that the moment will change and the only thing you can control is your response to it. Every moment matters. And every mile counts. And it all happens in the now.
by Steph Creaturo
Improving our posture is a great way to improve running form. By tapping into the power of physical alignment, we can better access our core, be lighter on our feet, and improve the feedback loop between our feet and the rest of the body. All of which are super important in a repetitive stress sport like running.
Mountain pose is yoga’s blueprint. All other poses and work start from the mental and physical strength cultivated in standing tall. This basic, but fundamental, standing pose organizes our bodies, working to and from the spine. It prepares our bodies to find symmetry, strength, and grace in all other postures, no matter how simple or complicated they may be.
We’ll explore mountain pose, starting from our feet. Which, for runners, are often tired, cranky, achy, and the cause of many aches and pains.
1. Place the feet hip distance apart and parallel your inner feet like the yellow lines on the street. The feet aren’t flat (even if you have flat feet!), so make sure not to flatten out the inner arches! Stack your pelvis over your ankles, your shoulders over your pelvis, and lift the crown of the head to the sky like you’re balancing a teacup on the top of it. Draw the spine tall and you press your feet down into the floor. Imagine you’re dropping anchors from the bottom of each heel and draw the spine up from that grounding.
2. Now, maintaining that work, lift all ten of your toes off the ground. Spread your toes wide, like you have a yellow pencil between each one. While keeping the toes spread, place each toe back on the floor without wrinkling the toes up. Do this 3 – 5 times to wake up the toes.
3. Let’s repeat these actions. This time, let’s focus on evenly distributing your weight between the four corners of the feet: the mound of the big toe, the mound of the little toe, and either side of your heel. Notice if you collapse to the inner or outer foot, or the front or back of your foot – and is that the exact same place your shoes wear out? And how does this shift the arrangement throughout the rest of your body? If you’re thinking too hard about this, or are straining to feel it, then close your eyes, focus on the breath, and see what happens when you take the sense of sight out of the driver’s seat.
4. To finish up, lift and spread your toes. Keep the weight on the four corners of your feet. Gently place the toes back on the floor while maintaining the even weight distribution throughout the bottom of your feet. Hold this for 30 seconds, working up to a minute. When you release the pose, see if and how your feet feel different.
Consistent practice of this subtle work can build strong feet and toes over time. It also provides better support for the body during running. In my next post, we’ll look at how mountain pose builds strength in the inner arches of the feet and the ankles, which can help prevent sprains and strains in your ankles.
Practice Camp started yesterday! We’re super impressed with the Mala yogi’s who are showing up at 6:45am every morning. They’re going to have a great week focusing on arm balances with Angela and Christina.
For those of you unable to make Practice Camp (6:45am can be a tough pill to swallow), here’s a taste of what’s going on in the early morning hours at the studio. Christina put together a great sequence of all the prep work necessary for tackling arm balances. Core work, shoulder-opening, and more core work should get you ready to head into Bakasana, Eka Pada Koundiyanasana, or wherever you’re working today.
Click here to watch:
“Acceptance does not mean inaction. We may need to respond, strongly at times…From a peaceful center we can respond instead of react. Unconscious reactions create problems. Considered responses bring peace. With a peaceful heart whatever happens can be met with wisdom…Peace is not weak; it is unshakable.”
- Jack Kornfield
I CAN’T BEND THAT WAY
by Janna Leyde
Way back when I had my nine-to-five (ahem, eight-to-eight) job at Harper’s Bazaar, I used to take yoga breaks in the bathroom. Ten seconds of Uttanasana in 4.5-inch heels, and damn, it felt good. Felt ridiculous, too, and kind of cramped. Try folding yourself and whatever ridiculous, constricting fashion statement (pencil skirts were in) you are wearing over in the space of a bathroom stall. Still, I credit my somewhat happy hamstrings for those bends in those heels—and some of my sanity.
I wanted a way to reverse the flow of my blood and to revitalize. Had I a choice, I would have done a Handstand or a Headstand, but this was a corporate environment. Standing Forward Bend it was, a pose that is not as always as comfortable—mentally and physically—as we would like it to be. Folding over, people get dizzy, anxious, emotional, breathless, and those hammies can scream at you. Most all of those things happened to me in the Hearst bathroom, but I was at that place where I was just beginning to dive headfirst into my yoga practice, promising myself that whatever came up I would trust the process. Dip your head below your heart and you won’t need that ninth cup of instant coffee from the kitchenette. It worked.
Nowadays, if you take class with me, you will find yourself folding over pretty much every time. There are complexities and intricacies to this pose that I am still learning from. And, as always, I’m learning from my father. He did not want to, felt he was incapable of, doing Uttanasana. This surprised me, because we tend to like the same stuff: Sanskrit, Rock ‘N Roll, breakfast foods, watersports, eating the food before my mother sets it on the table… Nope, not forward folding. As soon as his head dipped below his heart, he panicked. His face went crimson. He stopped breathing.
Forget the clichéd I can’t touch my toes. Up until last fall my father couldn’t tie his shoes. Stretch the foot up, the arms down. No way. No how. No can do. “I can’t bend that way,” he’d tell me, tell my mother. “I don’t go down.” And he couldn’t. His body held a legitimate fear of bending over. I had to wonder when the last time he had actually put his head below his heart, reversed his blood flow? He needed this pose, and it wasn’t about tying shoes.
I’m rarely one to give up, in some cases to my detriment. I discover motivation in innovation. I had to approach Uttanasana differently. So we started from Tadasana, and I asked him to bend his knees, a lot. He did. I asked for a lot more and to let his arms hang forward, like a monkey. He bent more. Slowly his front body started to tip toward the earth, and before the fear set in I grabbed a little wooden chest that sits under his fish tank that holds extension cords and slid it under his hands (we didn’t have blocks back then). I never uttered the words fold or Uttanasana or bend. The pose he was in gave him no choice but to look down, to let his head drop. He was sweating, and the skin at the base of his skull was pinkish, but he was breathing. And he was folding.
“You okay?”
“My back is stretching,” he said, rather labored. “It’s hard, but it feels good.”
“Well that’s the plan, Dad. Three more breaths.”
And that was the plan. For my dad, for anyone, Uttansana isn’t all about hamstrings and thighs and touching your fingers to the mat or your toes. It certainly isn’t all about looking like a Japanese ham and cheese sandwich—thank you, Bikram. It can be about lengthening the spine. All that prana flowing in and around your vertebrae and spinal column, releasing stress, easing tension, and letting the blood flow to your brain. Damn, now that does feel good.
Needless to say, these days the man can lace up his own sneakers.
Uttanasana (Standing Forward Fold):
Basics:
Starting from Urdhva Hastasana:
Inhale: Lift you finger tips to the sky, palms facing each other, and ground down through both feet. This will lengthen your spine.
Exhale: Activate your thigh muscles. Hinge at your hips and reach your arms out so that they are parallel to the yoga mat. Then, bend your knees (a lot! especially if those hamstrings are tight), let the belly rest on the thighs, and and let the fingertips reach for the mat or your yoga blocks.
Inhale: Reconnect with your feet.
Exhale: Let the crown of the head drop towards the earth (shake your head yes. shake your head no). Keep the muscles of the neck and face loose.
Inhale: Draw your navel back to the spine.
Exhale: Push down through your feet to lift your tailbone to the ceiling. You might find you fold over a little more.
Stay in the pose for three to seven more breaths.
EXTRA: Rock the weight into the balls of the feet, then the heels of the feet. Rock the weight to the left, then to the right. Do this a few more times to play with balance.
PROP: Place a block underneath each palm.
* Cautions: back injury, lower back pain. Spread feet wide. Rest your forehead and arms on a chair, rather than lowering hands down to blocks or to your mat.
Benefits:
Cognitive:
Emotional:
Behavioral:
Physical:
Janna Leyde is a yogi and writer living in Brooklyn and the author of He Never Liked Cake, a coming of age memoir that tells the story of growing up with her father’s traumatic brain injury. Oscillations: A Yogic Exploration of the Brain offers her perspective on the practice through the lens of the complex human brain. When she’s not on her mat or at the front of the room teaching, she is working on her second book about yoga for brain injury. You can buy her first novel, He Never Liked Cake, here.
with jennifer whitneyFor students who are working with binding, inverting in the middle of the room, and toward the “full” variations of poses. Students who are comfortable and knowledgeable in modifying these are welcome.
Requirements: 1+ year in All Levels classes, or with instructor approval.
Students will be led through an intelligently sequenced advanced asana practice. Modifications and breakdowns will not be included. As we flow with the breath through a delicious extended 2 hour vinyasa class, we will work toward an “advanced peak pose”. Students will cultivate endurance and challenge their boundaries as they sink into the rhythm of a strict vinyasa practice.
Expect chanting, music, dharma, fun vinyasa, a long savasana, and closing meditation — all the components you love in one of Jen’s classes.
sign up now!
