I’ve begun the master cleanse today and hope to go the full ten days. This will be double my previous 5 days but I suspect I can make it. I never do a cleanse with the goal of losing weight. My primary goal is to look at my attachments to food and delve inside myself using regular yoga and meditation along the way.
Nothing makes roast chicken better than brining it first. Trust me on this one. This can also be used on other poultry as well as pork and shrimp. Video quality is improving as I learn to work with my video equipment. Thanks Blake.
A client had me work on him for 30 minutes and when we finished he lamented that he hadn’t scheduled a full hour. He said that the work we do makes him feel younger.
I’m always amazed at what I’m doing these days. I can’t really say it’s yoga, can’t really say it’s bodywork and can’t say it’s just education. It’s just where I connect with others and go, I think this will help the most, let’s do this. When a client is willing to take the plunge with me I dare say it’s tantamount to when Peter walked on water with Jesus. Unbelieveable things happen.
That sounds like a tall order but when clients report a 7 on a pain scale out of 10 and walk out telling you they’re at a 1 I start to wonder. When doctors call because their patients went through my yoga therapy class and say that they feel 70% overall improvement in unhealed, ongoing neck conditions what do I do? I allow clients to have their own experience, I help apply what I think will work and most importantly I tell the clients, “It’s You. Has very little to do with me.” I’m just a guide, the journey is yours.
In mentioning youth I told the client that at 34 I feel better than I did at 22 just before my car accident. I’m older, far wiser and honestly more healthy. Age does change things but my yoga practice removes cobwebbs in a way that most seem to consider a nearly mystical conversation with me. Scientifically I honestly don’t know how it does exactly what it does. I just feel better. Pain doesn’t just go away but I work with it. I make my pain scale 4 days go to a 2. Day after day, regular practice and it continues to lower. My posture improves, my breathing is clear and my nervous system is alive. Life sometimes has a sparkle to it.
He’s hoping to do the same and I tell him he can go as far as he wants. The way is yoga. No dogma, no rules. Just honest opinion from someone in the trenches of life. Mentioning how he felt more youthful after our sessions I told him of my grandmother.
Growing up my grandmother was my closest grandparent. She lived with us and I always remember her as crabby. I ran into the kitchen one day as a child and smelling food excitedly asked my grandma what was for dinner. Her face turned into a light scowl and she looked over at me and with a sneer said, “food!” in the same way that an old man tells the neighborhood kids to get off of his lawn. I wondered why grandma was being what I considered mean but I ran off to play.
Grandma was often this way. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand. She’d had 3 husbands and divorces, four children and by the time she was old the fallen arches in her feet, a dowagers hump, a slumped upper back and arthritis plagued her. She hurt constantly. It’s a low level ache that crept up on her day after day in the same way the sun and moon rise a set. Before you know it those constant 7 out of 10 days get to you.
When I finished massage school I came home and remember my grandma got her first massage from her grandson at 72 years of age. I loved running my hands over her undernourished skin. She was still solid, skin thick enough to not worry about a tear. I’d press on her upper back and she’d tell me she could feel it in her toes. Small nuances that I couldn’t understand at the time. I just took note and kept working. There were lots of vascular flushes, pushing blood and lymph around and this old woman had some love given to her. Her husbands were long gone. How much quality touch did she receive?
When we finished my grandmothers whole demeanor changed. She was light, bright and full of chatter. She was asking questions about massage, questions about complementary medical practices wondering what else she could do to help herself feel better. I realized at five minutes or so that she was free of pain. Wherever she’d been, the massage lifted her out of the doldrums. Her vision had been changed in the way that an airplane comes through the clouds into the brightness and light of the sun. For a short time, things were clear. Her nervous system wasn’t drowning her in the signals of discomfort and pain. She was happy.
A year or so later grandma passed. I often think of her and am so happy that I had the ability to connect with her in this way. I can think of little as appropriate in the expression of care than helping her as I did. Occasionally and only occasionally I wonder what could have happened if she were around now with what I know. The ideas of grandma doing my lazy yoga in a chair give me slight tears knowing I could have helped her even more. I could have empowered her to know she could change not just by someone else touching her but by harnessing her own healing capacity with yoga.
You’re never too old.
A student in my nursing home class asked me one day, “How far can we go with yoga?” I looked him clearly in the eye and told him that, “You can go as far as you can. Just depends on how much focus, energy and time you put in.” I meant it then and I mean it now.
Your injuries, physical limitations, psychological set, and lifestyle have little to do with whether you’ll succeed. You must only water the seed within yourself that says healing and growth is better than sickness and withering. Come to class here, go slow, breathe and focus. The best breath to start with is the one you’re taking now.
It is your birthright to thrive. To feel younger you must embrace the ebb and flow of life not fight it. Be a cork. Float. I’ll see you soon at Ebb and Flow Yoga studio. We help people feel younger.
We now show hamstring stretches in a chair for both legs simultaneously. Opening your hamstrings will make a large improvement in low back pain and overall posture. Office workers are chronically tight in this area. When people start yoga classes they often comment on how tight their hips and hamstrings are. Take your time. Breathe.
Hamstring tightness is the bane of most office workers. Shortened hamstrings add to low back pain and strain so it’s important to stretch them regularly. These stretches allow you to do this where they often shorten, in an office chair.
This continues the piriformis stretch from the previous video. More nuances working with the femur and hip socket are added for variety. Open hips help allow the low back to relax into a neutral position. Long term this leads to less low back pain. This version adds a neck stretch at the end.
Piriformis is latin for pear shaped. The muscle connects from the greater trochanter of your femur to the border of your sacrum. It’s often tight in cases of low back pain and people find greater ease of movement in their legs when both sides are released.
Additional foam roll exercises that add the low back. If you have any questions feel free to contact me. I’d love more interaction to answer questions in video or written format.
I’ve had some turbulent ups and downs in my life and they’ve added to my wisdom. The older I get the more I take things in stride. Being 34 and no longer 18 means that I’m able to recognize what’s a big deal and what’s a temporary situation that will change. The more cycles you’ve seen come and go the easier it is to let go and breathe.
Working with a client this morning I realized that it’s not lack of knowledge that’s slowing me down, it’s access to people who understand what I’m doing. The work I do is so rudimentary most people miss it. Bodywork and yoga are so simple most people just pass it by. Breathing? Are you kidding me? Most people if asked if we should be taught to breathe would give you an odd stare.
So who understands what I do? What’s my target market? Anyone can use what I’m teaching but in particular I’m good at working with those in chronic pain. Musculoskeletal pain has been a part of my life for so long it’s rewired my brain. I’ve learned to work with it, manage it and make it go away. Giving me back control over my body lessens anxiety, fear of the unknown and aging.
Chronic pain sufferers like what I do because I can help. When you’re at a 6 out of 10 on a pain scale and I can help you take yourself to a 4 within an hour, we become fast friends. Pain gets you to pay attention. The reason my yoga has progressed and continues to is aches and pains make me focus. I can do the yoga or I can hurt. Those are the options.
Knowledge from a book is good. I learn more from working with other teachers, taking diverse yoga classes but nothing beats my own practice. I’ve continued regularly for years and hope that I can deepen my practice more in the future. It allows me to have an understanding of yoga in my own nervous systems that allows communication of a nuance that’s not obtained through books. Experience trumps all.
After working with a client this morning he was floating. His eyes were relaxed and the most bare minimum educational help allowed him to work on himself. I spend hours each week pressing on people and have only recently realized that my frustration with bodywork comes from my inability to get In anothers nervous system. Only they can do that. Yoga, allows me to help them access themselves. That healing is far more profound and long lasting than anything I can do for you. I’m not disparaging bodywork. It’s a dual edge sword, yoga and massage. One is active, one is passive. I choose both. I’ve no reason not to. I’ll work and work on myself then I surrender and allow someone to help me.
After working on the client I noticed my shoulder bothering me. My left shoulder is misaligned and has been an issue for years now. I work with it regularly and decided to do a pose I show students in the clinic. I call it half downward dog and I placed my hands on the wall and began. I breathed, pushed into the wall, spread my finger tips, pressing the shoulders out through the joint. Then I sank deeper backbending my upper spine then lifted my head to look towards my hands and felt a line running from my spine, to my shoulderblade then down my arm into my hands and out my fingertips. Hello yoga. Hello alignment. Hello healing. Hello momentary bliss.
I always try to thank my students and clients for teaching me. They teach me to continue taking my own medicine. It’s of no benefit to be enlightened and serene on a mountaintop while living in a monastery. My desire is to be enlightened and serene in rush hour traffic at 100F. Then we’ve discovered the value of yoga and taking our own medicine.
This continues our series of videos using a foam roll for upper back and cervical relief. The bolsters are used to soften the pressure exerted on your spine and allow one to sit in the posture longer. If you have any questions feel free to pass them along.
Here’s a short video about how to use a foam roll for upper back and neck pain. Try this out if you have not, they’re worth every penny. I’ll post another video soon with more advanced use of the foam roll on the same area.
To purchase: http://www.optp.com/Foam-Roller-Therapy.aspx
Quick video where I discuss sitting posture and how it affects upper back and neck pain. I see lots of office workers who have these problems and want to educate. An ounce of prevention…
