If you are looking for a good way to practice and enhance your standing poses, please check out this video by John Friend. If the link doesn’t work for you, go to Yoga Journal on-line and go to their videos section.
I never cease to marvel at the wonders of technology. I never cease to be grateful for my teacher and the teachings. Don’t take anything for granted.
Every once and a while, I find myself restless at bedtime or wakeful in the night. The following series serves to make it easier for me to go to sleep and for me to feel fully rested as if I had not been short sleep:
1. Vipariti karani (legs up the wall). Start with legs up the wall for five minutes or longer, then move legs into baddha konasana (butterfly) for several breaths, then put them back up the wall. While your legs are up the wall, first just watch the breath. Then concentrate on the breath, inviting the exhales to be twice the length of the inhales.
2. Twisted forward bend. Using a bolster and a folded blanket (or two or three folded blankets) lengthwise on your mat, place the left thigh next to the edge of the blanket pile, allow yourself to sit heavily. Staying sweetly grounded, hug your hips together to embrace your core and then draw the left waist back as you bow forward onto the support of the blanket. You can allow your forearms and hands to rest on the floor or you can bend your elbows a little more and tuck your hands between the blankets under your forehead. Keeping the attention on the breath, inhaling lovingly draw in, exhaling more fully accept the support of the blanket. Hold for a few minutes and then repeat on the other side.
3. Supported balasana (child’s pose). With your knees wide apart and the big toes together, draw the blanket pile between your knees up to mid-thigh. Place another blanket (or a pillow) across your calves. Bow forward onto the support of the blankets. Half way through, turn your head to the other side. If your thoughts are still active, just let them be and turn your attention back to the breath.
4. When you are ready to come out of balasana, tuck your toes under and lift your hips into adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog). If you’d like, you can stay here for several breaths with your head supported by the blankets. When you are ready, walk your hands back to uttanasana (standing forward bend). Quietly and mindfully get back into bed and lie in savasana.
Sweet dreams!
A regular brought a friend to this week’s group house practice. When I asked whether there was anything about her health or practice I should know to enhance her experience in the class, she advised me that she had been having trouble sleeping for the past few months in response to an event in her life. I did not ask about the event, but offered some of my favorite practices when I am not easily falling asleep:
1. gentle ujayi breathing with the exhale twice the length of the inhale. We were sitting up, but this is great to do in vipariti karani (legs up the wall pose).
2. chandra bhedana (the moon breath). This is similar to nadi shodana (alternate nostril breathing) except that for every breath, the inhale is through the left (ida or chandra nostril and the exhale through the right (pinga or surya) nostril.
3. This one I learned from work place yoga teacher Kathy Rowley with whom I took lunch time classes at the Department of Labor for a couple of years. I am not sure I remember it exactly the way she taught it, but it works:
Start lying on one side. Take sixteen deep breaths, keeping count of the breaths, with the exhales longer than the inhales. Quietly roll to your other side and take another sixteen breaths. Continue switching sides, slowly and without disturbing growing sleepiness, each set of two doubling the number of breaths you take. After 16 on both sides, then 32 on both sides, then 64, and so on (though so on is unlikely). Let the breaths get slower and deeper and when you get to the point where it does not seem right to switch sides, then you let yourself sink into deep relaxed sleep.
It is my intention to write a newsletter talking about the shift in my life that is leading me, effective this week, to take a partial sabbatical from teaching yoga. I will still have my Tuesday night class at William Penn House and hope to see many on at least an occasional basis. I will also be available for single and group privates and expect to teach a workshop or two in the Fall. But after eight years, I will no longer be traveling up to Takoma Park every weekend, currently on Friday nights and before that Saturdays, to teach. In this shifting, I have much to say about Kali–goddess of sequencing–and moving within the limits of time and space and some other things beside.
In the meantime, while I am wrestling with how to say what I believe are among the things I want to express and as I deal with a bout of being very busy at work and spending far too much time at the computer to want to spend more time writing in the evening, I just want to mention that it is indeed possible to make decent granola in the slow cooker. I experimented with that today, in between conference calls and emails and document reviews (slow cooking, after all, takes very little consistent attention). The cooking reached its conclusion while students and I gathered for Wednesday night practice. More important than requiring little attention after the initial preparation stage, the slow cooker doesn’t heat up the kitchen, and I refuse to turn on the oven if it is going to be 80F or above. Slow cooker granola is an excellent compromise between no homemade granola in the hot months and turning on the oven.
When I’ve experimented some more, perhaps I’ll create a recipe, adding to the many dozens on the internet. My first attempt was relatively low fat and no refined sugar. Yum. And if you’re a local, do come join me this Friday for a sweetly nostalgic and celebratory evening of restoratives. 5:45pm-7:15pm, Willow Street Takoma Park. Drop-ins and make-ups welcome.
I have not much been one for hand sanitizer, though I have long washed my hands well and frequently and avoided touching directly door knobs and elevator buttons, etc, and appropriate social isolation when I am sick.
In the present moment, it seemed like a nice idea to try and make hand sanitizer at home and then share it. I already had the alcohol for making tinctures and the tea tree oil, but mixing this combination of things all together will be a new thing. I would have done better with aloe vera gel than juice and a good deal less, but this was the smallest size. As long as it’s more than 60%alcohol, it should both sanitize and keep.
The remaining ingredients are meant to add moisturizing and/or antiseptic properties. Both tea tree and lemongrass oil can be irritating, so that will only be a few drops.
