The Yoga Blog

kelly on 4:44 pm July 15th, 2011 / Be the first to comment! »

everyone!

i am so super excited bc i just figured out how to play a Bb bar chord on my guitar. i credit this to Leah Barr and Michael Vetter’s yoga classes which I went to this week! they totally shifted my awareness into my fingertips. i am telling you – i could not play this chord last week, and i haven’t practiced ANY guitar since my last failed attempt. yayeeee for fingertips and yoga. yay for bar chords! leah and michael are so awesome!

also i wanted to share my fave quote so far from poser which members – you should find it and start reading it for book club. it’s so awesome!!

from “Prologue: Camel”

I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: “Uh Fran? When I’m doing the pose, I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary tight feeling.”

Fear. I hadn’t even known it was there.

interested in becoming a teacher? comment, and i’ll reply to you. it will change your world!!
interested in membership, ditto, above.

sign up for leah and michael’s classes! and
p.s. pls come see my band play at velvet lounge on august 8th.

Fold as naturally as the sun

kim on 3:08 pm July 4th, 2011 / 1 Comment »

The thing with pachimottanasana, or seated forward fold, is that it takes almost as much stability as paripurna navasana, or boat pose. I wrote about boat pose last month. Take a minute to look at both poses in the links to Yoga Journal, especially the legs. We could accurately say that the stability in the legs is quite the same in both poses, but the (re)pose in the spine is different.

In the spine especially, we are looking for a non-doing-ness as much as we’re looking for doing. Seated forward fold shows this perhaps this best of all yoga poses other than savasana, or corpse pose. The concept in Taoism is called wu-wei, or the natural timing of any action. Inasmuch as we are lifting the breastbone and calming the breath down in boat pose, we are doing the same actions in seated forward fold. Except we do this as we elongate the torso over the legs rather than away from it into space.

Seated forward fold is about letting go, about letting your own psychology of action be revealed to you in the minute or two you hang out in this pose. Most people find seated forward fold challenging, because it’s a shape — like navasana — that we hardly ever do. Sitting in chairs, oops, is our main daily action that makes extending the legs out on the floor and folding over so hard!

I recommend spending the hotter moments in July cooling down with this ultimately nourishing, calming, and (yet) spinally challenging pose. When you hit a wall, i.e., when you feel like the only way you could go “further” in the pose is by forcing the body into more “length”, relax. Seriously, observe any tension in your shoulders (and therefore) your spine, and relax. R-E-L-A-X. Spell the word out to yourself and by the time you hit “X” notice that you’re in a different pose.

Let your body forward fold this month as naturally as the sun comes up to roast you every day.