Energizing Yourself: Overcoming Styana and Alasya

by Nina

I don’t know about you, but Ram’s post yesterday The Dangers of Being Sedentary scared me a bit.

Findings from a recent study showed that individuals who sat for more than 11 hours daily were 40 percent more likely to die within the next three years than those who sat for four hours or less daily—even when people’s physical activity at other times of the day was accounted for. Studies have also indicated that sitting daily for less than 3 hours and watching TV for less than 2 hours extends life expectancy by an estimated 1 to 2 years. Studies reported in the prestigious journals Lancet and the British Medical Journal suggest that a sedentary lifestyle is the cause of one in 10 deaths worldwide. It’s now known that Americans are working less (26 minutes a day less compared to Y2007) and idling off more. Adults in the U.S. spend an average of 55 percent of their day engaged in some kind of sedentary behavior (see Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis).

In his post, Ram identified two obstacles that cause us to be sedentary: styana (inefficiency, idleness, procrastination, dullness) and alasya (laziness, sloth). The problem is, how do we overcome these obstacles? I mean, we all basically know that sitting around all day isn’t a good thing, but after hours of doing it—so many of us sit at desks all day or have long commutes—inertia tends to set in. And this can create a lot of resistance to the idea of getting up to practice yoga, even if you know it will be good for you and that you’ll feel better afterward. You think: Oh, I just don’t feel like it today—maybe tomorrow.

"Old man, stiff man, weak man, sick man, they can all take practice but only a lazy man can't take practice." — Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

I know this because even after years of practicing yoga at home on my own, I sometimes notice that tendency in myself. I do have some tricks up my sleeve, however. And I thought today would be a good day to share them, so you’d have some new ideas for fighting both styana and alysya.

My first trick is a mental one: I tell myself that I don’t need to do a full practice, that I can just do one single pose, you know, like Downward-Facing Dog. But I might want to warm up a bit before that one, so, let’s see, maybe a Half Downward-Facing Dog at the wall followed by a full Downward-Facing Dog on my mat. And guess what, by that time, my energy starts flowing and my momentum starts to build, and I end up doing a full-length practice.

My second trick is to pick a pose to start that will energize me, even just a bit. I know that moving with your breath is a good way to fire up your energy. So standing in Mountain pose and raising arms overhead on the inhalation and down by your sides on the exhalation is a good way to energize yourself, maybe even shake off a feeling of depression, and that can lead to some other vinyasas or who knows where.

But if you don’t feel like standing up—yeah, I know, sometimes you just don’t—you can get on your hands and knees and do the Cat-Cow pose, inhaling as you come into the Cow position (the sway back position) and exhaling as you come into the Cat pose (the arching position). That leads very nicely into Downward-Facing Dog pose, and then maybe Standing Forward Bend, by which time you might feel ready to stand up on your mat!

My third trick is that when I’m feeling particularly tired or lazy, I tell myself that I can start lying down. Ah, yes, lying down sounds real good.

Often I start with Reclined Leg Stretch and other reclined hip openers, and even just moving my legs around gets me in the mood for a Downward-Facing Dog pose (and helps make that pose easier), which in turn leads....

Another way to energize yourself is to open your chest, and that’s also a good way to counteract all the forward bending you’ve been doing by sitting down for hours. Good news is this is also something you can do lying down. Try a passive backbend over a blanket roll or a bolster for three or more minutes. Then roll over and see what you might feel like doing next. Lately I’ve been starting by doing a reclined shoulder opener that my teacher often has us do in the middle of class: lying on your back, with a strap just above your elbows, bring your arms up and overhead (if they don’t reach the floor, try holding a block between your hands). Three minutes of that, and if I’m not ready for Downward-Facing Dog pose, I might procrastinate a bit with some reclined hip stretches. It’s all good.

And if this strategy doesn’t work? What if you only end up doing just the one or two poses? Well, that’s much better than nothing. It might even start a new habit that will allow you to gradually grow into a longer practice over time—my own home practice started with me practicing just a few poses. And, besides, you can always try again in a couple of hours....

Of course, what I’ve mentioned here are just a few of many possibilities. Readers, how do you shake off your lethargy and start moving? I’d love to hear your recommendations.

Fast Exercise vs. Slow Yoga

by Nina 

Image "Borrowed" from The New York Times

The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done. —New York Times

Did anyone else happen to see the recent New York Times seven-minute exercise routine? Well, I did. And my first response was irritation. Something seemed so wrong to me about the routine. At first, I thought it was the seven minutes part. That seemed to me a crazy amount of time for doing twelve exercises, and I thought it would be healthier and more effective to divide up the routine into, say, three or four different routines, and cycle between them on different days. That way, you could spend more time on each exercise and not do the same thing every day (which could lead to boredom or even injury).

But even after I had my private little rant about the subject, every time I saw that picture I continued to feel irritated; it was like a grain of sand in the soft belly of an oyster (not that this rant is going to turn out to be pearl, mind you). But it wasn’t until a few days later that I realized what was really bothering me: it was the phrase “seven minutes of steady discomfort.”

“In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.” — Gretchen Reynolds

It seems to me if exercise is something so unpleasant that you do just to get it over with, you’re never going to be able to incorporate it into your life on a regular basis, something people in our exercise-averse culture desperately need to do. I mean, why would you want to add seven unpleasant minutes to your life every day? I can’t help but feel that half an hour of enjoyable exercise has got to be better for you than seven minutes of “steady discomfort.” It’s kind of like the difference between fast food and slow food. For me, yoga asana practice is truly an enjoyable, sensual experience, where I'm present in my body and appreciating what it can do and how it feels. Why would I ever want to trade that for fast, efficient, and unpleasant? (Actually the phrase “all of it based on science” irritated me a bit, too. I’ve had food concocted by nutrition scientists and food made by with love by friends and family members, and, of course, no contest there.)

Granted, sometimes it’s a bit hard for me to get started with my yoga practice—there’s a certain mental inertia that makes me reluctant to switch to that activity—but once I begin, I almost always enjoy myself. Of course, there are moments of unpleasantness (the mild painfulness of a stretch, the frustration of falling out of a balance pose, the feeling of mild fatigue after holding a strenuous pose for an extended period of time), but these are interspersed with moments of pleasure and even joyfulness. (I’m thinking now of a fellow student in my weekly class, who, when we do her favorite pose, now always says to me with a twinkle in her eye, “Oh, boy!”) Then, there’s the huge bonus that a mindful asana practice confers in addition to strength, flexibility, balance, and agility: stress reduction.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but for our physical and emotional health (not to mention healthy aging), we each need to find a form of exercise that is a life-affirming experience rather than a form of torture that we must submit to. And it’s worth the extra time, even just, say, 20 minutes rather than 7, to make that kind of practice a part of your life. Of course, I love yoga, so I’m always here singing its praises. But if you hate every minute of the yoga you’re currently practicing, try some different styles. And if you hate all the styles, maybe it’s not for you. Walk, run, cycle, swim, work out in a gym, dance, play golf, tennis, basketball or soccer, ski—get out there and live!

Mixed Feelings About Yoga Poses

by Nina

Crying Girl by Roy Lichtenstein

When I first started practicing yoga at home, I had no idea how to sequence poses. I mean, I had a basic idea that there was a warm up pose or two, then some standing poses, and then some seated poses (or backbends). But within those larger categories, I didn’t really know how to put the poses in order. So for my standing poses, what I would do—ssshh! true confession!—is alternate between poses that were difficult for me (I had some intuition that I should practice them so they would become easier for me—befriending them, you might say) and “treat” poses, the poses I always looked forward to and enjoyed doing. So there I was telling myself, okay, if you do a pose that’s hard for you (let’s say Extended Side Angle pose), then you get a little reward by doing a pose you really enjoy (let’s say Triangle pose).

These days, having completed a three-year teacher training program, not to mention having more than 20 years of practice under my belt, I know a lot more about how to sequence poses. However, I still find that I have a similar mix of feelings about the poses I practice. Various thoughts go through my mind as I move to the next one (or, if I’m in class, when my teacher announces the next one) from "uh-oh, not this one", to "oh, boy, my favorite!" As my practice has matured and my body has changed (there’s that bit of arthritis in my right hip), some of my attitudes toward particular poses have evolved, but there are still some poses I love, some I feel neutral about, and some that, well, are just not my favorites. Then, because our minds are a little quirky sometimes, I have other thoughts, too. One of the thoughts I often catch myself having always amuses me, and it goes something like “Whoa, I haven’t done that pose in so long it’s going to be so—wait—I think I actually did it yesterday!” Then I smile and think, “What’s that about?”

I’m telling you all of this because yesterday in her post When to Stop Practicing Yoga, Shari made reference to the “flurry of self-judgments and criticisms” we experience when doing yoga poses:

Each time we move into a yoga pose there are a flurry of self-judgments and criticisms—”Oh no, not this pose again, I can’t ever do this, I hate this…”—the internal psychological dialogue can be unending. It takes a lot of mental discipline to quiet the mind to be fully in the asana. But then the actual physical body starts its own chorus of complaints—“This is making my knee hurt, or my back or my shoulder.” The mind can and does ignore a lot of this noise, “strong arming” the body into submission. But that cranky joint knows when to strike back and it often does. So, when should we listen to the body over the noise of the mind?

I don’t know about you, but this experience that Shari describes is one that I have had before. And I think she was writing this in the spirit of compassion for those who are struggling with chronic pain or fear of movement. However, I think it’s important to emphasize that there probably isn’t a flurry of self-judgments of and criticisms every time we move into every pose. Sometimes there is contentment and pleasure, maybe even joy. Some days practice is easier than it is on other days. And whether it’s a challenging pose like Headstand or a delicious restorative pose like Reclined Cobbler’s pose, just about everyone has some poses that they enjoy—and maybe even love—doing on a regular basis. And in my home practice, I still make sure to include some of my "treat" poses in every sequence that I do. In fact, it’s my love of the asana practice and the pleasure it brings me that has kept me for practicing for all these years. (Sometimes—another confession—I have so much fun during my practice, I dance around a little between the poses.)

So if you’re having negative thoughts about a pose, know you’re not alone. Be compassionate with yourself when you catch yourself doing it and try to be present in the pose. And, as Shari recommended, listen to your body to see if it’s trying to tell you something important. But also take the time to notice your positive thoughts and the enjoyment you take in certain poses (or maybe, at times, in all the poses). This will not only teach you about your mental habits but you’ll be learning about your particular body type and emotional temperament. It might even provide you with the information you need to make some of the poses you find difficult—and, trust me, everyone finds some poses difficult, though the particular poses people find difficult differ widely—easier and more enjoyable to practice.

To Sit or Not To Sit (on the floor)?

by Ram

Getting Married Sitting on the Floor

As a child growing up in India I remember sitting on the floor for all kinds of activities, including eating, writing, reading and playing several indoor games. Growing up in a family of moderate means, owning several furniture items or a dining table or a cot was considered a luxury, and the pleasure of having these items at home was similar to the pleasure one achieves owning a Benz or Lexus. The dining table and its associated cutlery items were used only when there was a guest at home. On a daily basis we sat on the floor to eat, often off of a banana leaf.

Eating off of Banana Leaves

Sitting on the floor and performing all the above mentioned activities required us to lift our backs, arch our spines slightly and fold forward a few inches in order to complete the activity successfully. We could assume any sitting position, including Sukhasana, Siddhasana or Ardha Padmasana (without involving the hand mudras). Full Padmasana posture (Lotus pose) was adopted only when we sat to pray or meditate. My paternal grandfather always extolled the benefits of sitting or squatting on the floor and decried the use of chairs and tables. But peer pressure and being scoffed at by friends for sitting on the floor, often compelled us to use the chairs in the absence of grandfather’s glaring vision.

Now the benefits of sitting on the floor as advocated by my grandfather comes in the form of a published scientific paper that links sitting on the floor to overall health and life span extension. In the December 13, 2012 issue of the journal European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, in the article Ability to sit and rise from the floor as a predictor of all-cause mortality, de Brito, et al strongly suggest that the ability to sit and rise unaided from the floor serves as a predictor of mortality. The Brazilian researchers discovered that subjects who scored poorly on the “SRT score” (sitting-rising score) were at the risk of being 6.5 times more likely to die in the next six years.

The study involved more than 2,000 people ages 51 to 80, who had to sit on the floor and then rise to a standing position using as little support as possible. While the speed with which the subjects sat and stood wasn’t a factor in the scoring system, using a support to rise was a big factor in the scoring system. The more support a person required to rise (for example, placing the hand on the floor or knee or both for support), the lower the score for such action and points were deducted for using support. Rising up with an unsteady gait from a seated position or looking wobbly on the way up or down resulted in deduction of scores. A perfect score of five for each action (sitting and standing) was the goal. The final SRT score varying from 0 to 10 was obtained by adding sitting and rising scores and divided into four categories: 0-3; 3.5-5.5, 6-7.5, and 8-10. More than half the participants with ages from 76 to 80 who scored 0-3 were 6.5 times more likely to die during the course of the study (the study lasted for 6.3 years), compared to people who scored in the higher categories. Thus, during the course of the study 159 of the 2,000 volunteers died, with the majority of the deaths coming from the group that had the most trouble getting up and down. Interestingly, a 1-point increment in the SRT score was related to a 21% reduction in mortality.

The authors believe that muscle wasting and sarcopenia leading to lower limb muscle strength and poor trunk flexibility may influence the ability to sit and rise from the floor. (Baxter has already highlighted this article and mentioned several poses to strengthen the quads, lower back and hamstrings that would help in a smooth sit-rise transition. See From Independence to True Longevity.)

The work and results of the Brazilian researchers were so interesting that the editor of the journal suggested that simple tests like SRT are warranted in general health examinations in order to assess an individual’s mobility, flexibility, functional capabilities, health-related quality of life and outcomes in non-hospitalized aged adults. Meanwhile, I realized that my grandfather, who insisted and inculcated on us the practice of sitting on the floor daily, may just have been a temple priest but he sure possessed unrecognized scientific instincts!

My take home message? Spend more time sitting on the floor! Below are my ten tips for building or maintaining a daily sitting schedule. You can think of adapting one sitting pose and incorporating others gradually, or you can dive into doing most of the activities all the while sitting down. Practice rising up first with a suitable support until you are able to stand up unaided.

10) Sit and watch TV or listen to your favorite music
9) Sit and make all your phone conversations
8) Sit on the floor and do your bills
7) Sit on the floor and read your favorite book
6) Sit and browse the computer or send SMS
5) Sit and do your homework
4) Sit and do the yard work
3) Sit and play some indoor games (Uno, chess, cards, Monopoly, etc)
2) Sit on the floor and start practicing the art of eating (snacks and meals)
1) Sit in the bathtub or shower cubicle and take a shower 

The Groom With His Parents

Note from Nina: If you haven't already spent a lot of time sitting on the floor in a crossed-legs position (or any seated position where your legs are externally rotated), it might be best for you to start with shorter time periods on the floor and work up to longer periods, rather than simply changing all your seated activities to the floor. This is to prevent the possibility of injury due to over-stretching your hip and thigh muscles. Also, consider using a cushion or folded blanket under your sitting bones. And if you have hip, knee, or any other problems that prevent you from being comfortable in a crossed-legs position, feel free to experiment with propping or other seated positions that work for your body (or get some advice from your yoga teacher about alternatives). The important thing is for you to be comfortable!

Wondering What to Practice at Home? Consider a Private Lesson

by Timothy

Door by Brad Gibson

In a recent post Home Practice: The Best Way to Improve Your Health and Well-Being, I wrote about the value of a regular home practice. Practicing at home is particularly important for people with a medical condition who can’t do (or at least probably shouldn’t be doing) most public classes. But medical condition or not, the question remains, which yoga practices should you be doing at home?

One of the best ways to find the answer is to get a private yoga lesson. As it turns out, yoga goes about prescribing home practice in a very different manner than doctors prescribe medications or other treatments. In western medicine, we always try to diagnose the condition first, and then give drugs or other treatments to address that problem. If we can’t diagnose the condition, then all we can do is give treatments to relieve the symptoms.

In yoga therapy, the western medical diagnosis certainly can influence the treatment, but it’s only one of the many factors we consider. Two women, for example, may have the same diagnosis of Stage 1 breast cancer, and would likely get very similar recommendations from their doctors about how to treat it. But the appropriate yoga approach (used as a complement to medical therapy) might vary a lot depending on how fit they are, how much yoga they’ve done (and what styles), how much time they have to dedicate to their practice, how spiritually oriented they are, and so on.

Good yoga teachers always consider the broader context. When I evaluate a student, after interviewing them, I often start out by looking at them structurally. How is their posture? Are their shoulders rounded? Is the head forward of the spine? Are they stiff or flexible? Are there certain joints that are giving them problems, and, if so, how well are the bones on either side of those joints aligned?

After structure, I tend to move onto the nervous system (and breath, since the two are intimately linked). Are they suffering from excessive stress? Agitated? Sleeping poorly? Can’t get out of bed? What’s the balance of the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) vs. the parasympathetic (rest and digest)? Is their breathing smooth and deep or is it shallow and choppy? Is it primarily in the upper chest or does the abdomen move out and in with each breath?

In a similar manner, I evaluate each student’s balance as seen through the lens of Ayurveda, India's indigenous holistic medical system, as well as their psychological functioning and such spiritual matters as their level of joy, compassion and fulfillment. In my Yoga as Medicine workshops, we divide our student assessments into five categories, using the acronym SNAPS: Structural, Nervous system, Ayurveda, Psychological, and Spiritual. Each student winds up with a different constellation of findings, which we then try to address with the yoga routines we recommend.

Although I developed the SNAPS protocol to use on people seeking yoga therapy, the same process can help determine a good routine for someone who is simply interested in using their yoga as preventive maintenance, to build strength and flexibility, or to work off some of life’s inevitable stressors.

Say a student looking for a home practice has a slumping posture, a restless mind, shallow upper chest breathing, and an increase in the Ayurvedic dosha of vata or air (see my post on vata, Autumn, Healthy Aging and the Ayurvedic Dosha Vata). If I considered only structure and breathing in developing her routine, I might think that focusing on backbends would be helpful. But too many backbends, or more intense ones, like full Wheel pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana), could increase her mental agitation and push her vata further out of whack.

Perhaps I would end up settling on some gentle, restorative backbends done over folded blankets to open her shoulders and chest, while simultaneously allowing her to rest physically and mentally. I might also recommend daily alternate nostril breathing to balance her nervous system, and quiet her mind to the point that seated meditation would be more effective. Often, we reach the final recommendations based on trial and error, for example, putting the student in a potentially helpful pose and seeing what it looks like and how it feels. Maybe we change the blankets a bit and look again or try a different pose entirely.

What I am describing is what a good yoga teacher or therapist would do in a private lesson. Not everyone can afford a private lesson (price varies based on the experience of the teacher, the length of the session and the geographical area), though some teachers have a sliding scale, or take on a few cases as karma yoga for those in need. But once you get home, yoga is free, of course, so a lesson could end being cheaper than a series of classes. (If you don’t know a suitable yoga teacher or therapist in your area, check out the database of the International Association of Yoga Therapists at iayt.org.)

Although science has yet to test the idea, it is my belief that a well-designed practice tailored just for you will likely be better than a standardized protocol used in a study or a sequence printed in a magazine. All those approaches, good as they may be, are determined without ever laying eyes on the student—and that’s simply not the best yoga has to offer.

To me, it’s a testament to the power of yoga that so many people are helped by these one-size-fits-all yoga fixes. However, to most of us working in the field, there is little doubt that a tailored approach can be safer, more efficient, and much more effective. As a scientist, I’m all for testing these notions, but yoga research hasn't progressed to the point where such studies are being done (or funded). In the meantime, my advice is, whenever possible, to tailor your practice now, and ask questions later.

Even if you don’t have a medical condition, working one on one with a teacher can help you create the home practice that suits your particular body, needs, and goals. And if such a tailored approach moves you more efficiently in the direction you’d like to go than an off-the-shelf routine, you’ll likely notice the benefits and be more motivated to stick with it. And that, of course, is the key to success in yoga.

Practice As Many As You Can: T. Krishnamacharya's Yoga

T. Krishnamachrya in a "New" Pose

by Nina

In my post last week Authentic Yoga, I mentioned that most of the yoga asana we do these days were invented in the early 20th century. In his book on the origins of modern posture practice Yoga Body, Mark Singleton focuses in particular on the innovations of T. Krishnamacharya, the teacher of three very influential 20th century yoga teachers who had a tremendous impact on yoga in the western word, Iyengar, Jois, and Desikachar. Krishnamacharya was clearly a genius, whose system, as Singleton puts it:

"can be fruitfully considered a synthetic revival of indigenous exercise (comprising yogasana alongside other types) within the context of Westernized curricular physical education in late colonial India."

Because so many people are reluctant to practice yoga at home due to concerns that they might not be doing it “right” or don’t have time to do what they would do in one of their full-length classes, it’s worth taking a little time to look at what Krishnamacharya (who was, for many of us, the original teacher of our teacher, or our teacher’s teacher) was doing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dear readers, he was making stuff up! For details you can see the wonderful book The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N.E. Sjoman. But for now let’s just look at this quote in Yoga Body from T.R.S. Sharma, one of a group of students at the yogasala in Mysyore, which confirms that Krishnamacharya’s teaching was intended to be, and in practice was, experimental:

"was innovating all the time in response to his students. He would make up variations of the postures when he saw that some of his students could do them easily. “Try this, putting this here, and here.” He was inventing and innovating. Krishnmachrya never emphasized a particular order of poses, there was nothing sacrosanct about observing order with him. He would tell me “practice as many as you can.”

The quote as whole really brings home the idea that, regardless of what we may have been told by certain teachers, the practice of yoga asana traditionally was not a rigid system that you have to follow or else it won’t be effective. And it seems to me, if you’ve been reluctant to practice at home due to time restrictions or concerns about doing something wrong, this quote contains a great motto for home practice in general:

Practice as many as you can.

Since it is December already and you may be thinking about New Year’s resolutions, “practice as many as you can” also seems like an excellent resolution for starting or deepening a home practice next year.

P.S. Hey, Krishnamacharya's alignment in Utthita Parsvokasana (Extended Side Angle pose) in the photo above doesn't look the same as what I've been taught is "correct," so that must mean....

Home Practice: The Best Way to Improve Your Health and Well-Being

by Timothy

"If you are taking yoga classes but not practicing at home, you may be missing the best—and potentially most therapeutic—part of yoga. Your personal practice is where the deepest work happens, when you go inward and go at your own pace."—from Yoga As Medicine

This quotation from my book got posted on Facebook the other day and generated quite a bit of interest. But not everyone, particularly those who only take classes, agrees with the statement. A woman came up to me at a yoga conference earlier this year to say she’d heard me make a similar comment at a workshop I taught in Los Angeles a few years ago, and it made her really angry. It’s easy to understand that reaction when your experience in class has been so positive, and even healing.

But now scientific research seems to back up the notion that a regular home practice really is the key to health and well-being, perhaps particularly so as we get older. A study recently published in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine by researchers at the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health found that, among more than 1000 practitioners of Iyengar yoga, the frequency of home practice predicted positive health more than how long you’ve been practicing or how many classes you attend per week. According to the article “Frequency of yoga practice predicts health: results of a national survey of yoga practitioners,”:

“Frequency of home practice favorably predicted (p < .001): mindfulness, subjective well-being, BMI, fruit and vegetable consumption, vegetarian status, sleep, and fatigue.”

In other words, those who practiced at home the most reported better health and well-being, greater awareness of themselves and others, improved sleep, less fatigue, and healthier body weight. They were even more likely to eat their vegetables!

Bed in a Mirror by Nina Zolotow

The study bore out something else I’ve been teaching for years: when you combine the various tools in the yoga toolbox including asana, breathing practices, meditation and even study of yoga philosophy you tend to get even better results. As the authors put it, “an intense practice involving all aspects of yoga practice may be more beneficial to health than a less intense practice that includes only one or two aspects of yoga practice, such as just practicing the physical poses or breath work.”

There also appeared to be additional benefits for combining different types of asana practices, such as standing poses, vigorous practices like Sun Salutations, restorative poses including Savasana, and inversions like Shoulderstand. Different practices appeared to be particularly beneficial for specific conditions. Vigorous asana and inversions seemed to help the most with insomnia and body weight, whereas, according to the authors, “because breath work and meditation appear to influence mindfulness and well-being, they may be particularly useful in treating conditions such as depression and anxiety.”

One finding that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog has to do with fatigue. Overall, older practitioners had less fatigue than younger practitioners, but both groups improved when they did yoga. But it appears to take less practice for older practitioners to experience improvements in energy.

As for the woman who was mad at me for saying that a home practice was more important than going to classes, she went on to say that, almost despite herself, she did try doing her yoga at home. Now she does it regularly and believes it’s the most important part of her practice. She thanked me profusely, though of course most of all she can thank herself!

Creating a Mini Yoga Practice

by Nina

Most of us start doing yoga in a class, and those classes are relatively long, usually ranging from one to two hours. So we often get the idea that practicing at home means doing the equivalent of a full-length class. Finding the time and/or energy to do that can be overwhelming, preventing us from ever getting started.

Practicing with a Friend by Nina Zolotow

But all of us here at Yoga for Healthy Aging believe that even doing a single pose constitutes a yoga practice, and we strongly encourage anyone who wants to get started with a home practice, to go ahead and start small! You’ll probably find that if you’ve bothered to change into your yoga clothes and get out your mat, and you've done your single yoga pose, you’ll feel ready to add on a few more poses. You’re not ready for a full-length practice, but you definitely feel up to a well-rounded “mini” practice that is, say, about 15 or 20 minutes long. But how do you decide what poses, and in which order you should do them for your mini practice?

Of course you could ask your favorite yoga teacher for some suggestions, but, although there is definitely an art to creating a sequence of yoga poses—especially one where you are preparing yourself to take on some challenging pose—you can also start very simply on your own, especially for a short sequence. Here are a few simple guidelines:

1. Ask yourself: what class of poses do I want to today: backbends, twists, forward bends, or inverted poses? Pick one of these general categories to counteract what you’ve been doing lately or what you did yesterday in class, or just because you’re in that kind of mood.

2. Pick an appropriate warm-up pose or two for that category of poses to start the sequence (see Warming Up for information). 

3. Choose a few standing poses or a few Sun Salutations that incorporate elements of the category of poses you’ve chosen. Some ideas:

• For backbends: Sun Salutations, or Warrior 1, 2, and 3, Tree pose, Eagle pose
• For twists: Sun Salutations, or Triangle pose, Extended Side Angle pose, Half Moon pose and the revolved versions of all three
• For forward bends: Downward-Facing Dog, Standing Forward Bend, Wide Angle Standing Forward Bend, Triangle pose, Extended Side Angle pose, Half Moon pose, Pyramid pose (Parsvottanasana)
• For inversions: Downward-Facing Dog, Standing Forward Bend, Wide Angle Standing Forward Bend. 

4. Pick a few of the poses from your category, starting with the easiest first: easy backbends, seated twists, seated forward bends, or Headstand followed by Shoulderstand, Plow pose, Bridge pose, or Legs Up the Wall pose (skip Headstand if you don’t do it).

5. Select a counter pose to balance your practice. After doing backbends, it’s helpful to do a twist, leg stretch or another back releasing pose. After doing forward bends or twists, I recommend doing a gentle back bend to restore the natural curve to your spine. 

6. End with Relaxation pose (Savasana) or another symmetrical restorative pose.

I’ve including standing poses and/or Sun Salutations in all the mini sequences because most of us tend to be sedentary at work, but if you’re on your feet all the time during the day, feel free to skip the standing poses and just add more warm-ups or more poses from your category. Don’t over-think it! Just have fun getting started with your home practice. You’ll be surprised at how rewarding it is. As a matter of fact, Timothy McCall will be writing post for the near future about how much more valuable a home practice is than just going to classes.

What Really Helps Foster Healthy Aging?

by Nina

Leaves Starting to Turn by Brad Gibson

As some of you may have noticed, the Sunday New York Times Magazine had an major article on aging with the rather overly dramatic title The Island Where People Forget to Die  about the island of Greek island Ikaria. A study at the University of Athens concluded that:

“people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. (Ikarian men in particular are nearly four times as likely as their American counterparts to reach 90, often in better health.) But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end.”

As usual with studies of long-lived communities, it was impossible to identify a single factor that was responsible for the long and healthy lives of the individuals within it. As the New York Times article says:

"If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat."

In fact, if you leave out the rather sensationalist aspects of the story (the man who was cured of cancer just by returning to the island, a tale which may or may not be true), the main conclusion of the author had to do with community.

"The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot."

So, what, if anything, does this have to do with yoga? Well, did you know that all of us here at Yoga for Healthy Aging, even those of us who teach, take regular yoga classes? And we certainly do not attend these classes because we don’t know enough to practice on our own home. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we do it for two other main reasons. The first reason is for the wisdom we continue to receive from our teachers, which helps keep our home practice inspired. But the second reason has more to do with the other people in the class than with the teacher: we want to stay connected to the yoga community. Being part of the yoga community is like belonging to a small “ecosystem” within our larger culture. Practicing with other people helps us stay steadfast in the healthy choices we have made, whether that is a having regular asana or meditation practice or even making career, family or other life decisions that we believe will be better for us.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you to all my fellow students in my regular class (you know who you are!). And, dear readers, I hope you, too, find the same sense of community in your yoga class. And if you don’t feel supported and encouraged in your current class, I urge you to get out there and look for one where you do.

Healthy Treats: An Indulgent Yoga Practice

by Nina

Last week I wrote about taking on a yoga challenge (see Taking on a Yoga Challenge). As I said in that post, working on a difficult pose can help you start a home yoga practice or inspire a practice that’s starting to feel a bit stale. But, as fate would have it, the very next day after I wrote that post, taking on a yoga challenge felt like the last thing I wanted to do in my home practice. I was feeling on the anxious side, so I thought that doing poses that made me feel any stress—even in tiny amounts—was probably not such a good idea. Instead, I decided to indulge in a practice just of poses that made me feel good. Some days you need that!

I know from experience, that for me forward bends are soothing and quieting. So I decided to create a sequence that ended with seated forward bends. Usually in my forward bend practice, I warm up for the seated forward bends by doing a sequence of standing poses that stretch my hamstrings, some of which, like Standing Hand to Foot pose (Utthita Hasta Padangusthanana), really challenge my balance. But on that day, I decided to eliminate the stressful poses from my sequence, and just do the standing poses that felt easy and comforting (in my case, Triangle Pose and Pyramid pose). The result? A nice relaxing sequence that felt nurturing in just the right way, for that particular day.

Treat for the Eyes by Brad Gibson

Of course, I had to laugh at myself that the very day after I was recommending to people that they take on a yoga challenge, I was doing the very opposite. But then I realized, of course, sometimes indulging in poses that you love can do the same thing that taking on a yoga challenge does: help you start a home practice or inspire a practice that’s starting to feel a bit stale.

So how would you plan an indulgent yoga sequence? Start by thinking about which poses sound good to you today. These could be a certain class of poses (like my choice of forward bends) or they could just be any poses that sound particularly appealing, like whichever poses are your “favorites.” You could then, of course, make a list of the poses that sound appealing and sequence them according to the traditional Iyengar style of sequencing (see Iyengar-Style Sequencing, Part 1). But you know what? You could also do them in just about any order you feel like. Of course, we are usually taught to warm up for the more challenging poses and cool down afterwards, so you could think about that as you are planning your sequence (see Iyengar-Style Sequencing, Part 2). Your intuition will probably tell you not to start with the most challenging pose in the list, but on the other hand, maybe that’s exactly what you feel like doing. Experiment! On the other hand, you could also start, instead of ending, with a restorative pose. Maybe you need a good rest in Relaxation pose, Legs Up the Wall, or Reclined Cobbler’s pose before you move onto more active poses. Try it!

Go ahead. Sometimes indulging yourself in your practice is exactly the right thing to do.

Practicing Yoga with a Friend

by Nina

In Shari’s post for tomorrow about creating a practice for improving balance, she will recommend some partner work. Of course, many of us have done partner work in class, but have you ever practiced yoga at home with a friend?

When I first started practicing yoga at home, I always practiced alone. My very image of “home practice” was so inextricably tied to the idea of being alone that it never occurred to me to practice with someone else. In fact, it wasn’t until I worked on Moving Toward Balance with Rodney Yee that I started practicing once a week with a friend at Rod’s urging. He wanted me to learn first hand about the benefits you can obtain from practicing with someone else. You see, he himself felt that he wouldn't have much of a home practice if it were not for the friends he practiced with.

So what did I learn from my experiments? It became pretty clear almost immediately that benefits of practicing with a friend included much more than simply being able to do partner yoga. Briefly, I  learned through experience that practicing with a friend allows you to:

• inspire and support each other to practice regularly
• teach each other and learn from each other by taking turns leading the practice
• challenge each other (get each other out of ruts and/or encourage each other to practice poses you tend to avoid)
• observe and adjust each other
• talk to each other about yoga

Your practice partner can be anyone you know. He or she could be someone you know from the yoga world, who takes from the same teacher you do or who you met at a workshop or retreat. Or he or she could be someone in your outside life, whether family member, neighbor or friend. Just try asking!

Baxter Bell: One of My Favorite Yoga Friends

I realized while reading through Shari’s upcoming post that she assumed you would know that you wouldn’t be breaking any rules if you decided to have someone help you with your balance practice. So it seemed like the perfect time to tell you that, no, practicing with a friend is not against the rules. In fact, you’re having trouble beginning a home practice, practicing with a friend is sometimes the very thing that will get you started down the path.

Active vs. Passive Yoga Practice

by Shari

August Flowers by Nina Zolotow

I have been thinking a lot about this topic and how I vary my own practice daily. Common sense would dictate that when you feel energetic you do an energetic practice and when you feel tired or exhausted a restorative or passive asana practice would be appropriate, but it isn’t as clear cut as that. There is this small impediment and it is called your conscious mind.

Now many different disciplines, schools of thought and medical approaches call “your conscious mind” by different names. But I call it that pesky unrelenting little voice in my head that is constantly directing me nonstop. I have noticed though that my pesky little voice has changed from my teens now into my 50’s because of its attention to unending details. What dictated my days then is very different from now. But let me reassure you that my own personal aging process has changed its focus but not its insistence.

Now both Nina and Baxter have very eloquently talked in past posts about meditation, stress reduction, and anxiety management. What I am talking about is different. It is the need or compulsion to be in motion from the time that I wake up till the time I go to bed. I am not the type of person that can “do nothing.” My husband is very good at this activity and often can’t understand why I can’t “just sit down and rest.” This inability to stop motion gets translated too often into my daily asana practice. It is not a frenetic obsession with activity but the time-honored adage: “you don’t rest until all your work is done.” This mind set is very pre-industrial agrarian age when farm work was never done because there always was something more.

But in our computer age with so many technological tools to assist us the busy work really doesn’t stop unless you make yourself stop. It is the same with housework or caring for your family. There never is an end to the work that must be done unless it is your mindset that sets the limit.

So how does one set time aside for a daily practice and then decide what your practice should consist of? It is like do you eat dessert first or dinner? Complicate that with one’s own personality type, the type of yoga that you practice, and your time limitations. If you only have five minutes should you do a quick, one-time abbreviated sun salutation or should it be a Viparita Karani (Legs Up the Wall Pose?) Active vs. Passive. What to pick?

Now here is where the self-introspection comes in and the ability to look critically but without judgment at yourself. What do you feel like doing? Now that is also a very revolutionary question. Our days are filled with doing stuff that we really may not want to do but have to for many various reasons. But when we roll out our mat and give ourselves the gift to make this decision it is very powerful.

There are so many “shoulds” now associated with yoga. Do we do yoga for an external goal? Or is it internally driven? How do we learn to know what we need or what we want? I have learned through my many years of practice that sometimes the decision isn’t obvious and you have to search a little to find the solution.

When I start my practice, I will usually lie on my mat on my back with my knees bent and eyes closed for several breaths as I just check into how I feel that day. I tend to do my practice in the morning (after a 35-minute aerobic treadmill walk and shower), so that is my stiffer time of day even after my own warm up. I might have a vague thought that “oh it is forward bends this week” but that isn’t what I focus on.

I try to listen to how my hips are feeling, or my low back or shoulders, and so on. It always starts on the physical plane. As I start my warm ups (I tend to do a 30-minute practice), I generally try to target those areas in my own body that may be chronically stiff. After my warm up I always do some standing poses. Standing poses can be made challenging by either moving through them quickly or more methodically when one is paying attention to the orchestration of movement. Observing one’s body unfold into and out of an asana is not only mentally engaging but it is a period of immense gratitude.

Then I move onto the main focus of the practice. Is it to be a pose that I love to do, or is it a pose that I struggle to attempt? How hard do I want to work? Is it okay to not want to work? Those are questions that always arise for me in my daily practice. Sometimes if I am sick or getting sick or recovering from some type of cold or flu, it is plainly obvious that a restorative practice is what I need because I literally don’t have the energy or stamina to be vigorous. But it is the other times that are frankly more challenging. I don’t want my yoga practice to fall into the “shoulds” because then I lose the nurturance of the practice.

When I go to a yoga class and the teacher directs my practice it is very different from when I am at home directing my own practice. I don’t have the external guidance of the teacher, but instead I have my own monkey mind that guides me and I have to learn how to acknowledge it but also be a bit firm with. Through the usage of breathing (simple pranayama), I have learned to create my own stress reduction response and I have learned to do it in under five minutes!

The gift of yoga isn’t the complicated poses that I can never accomplish but the ability to work within my own body with the time that I have available. In my practice I try to combine both active and passive asana depending on the day, the room temperature and my own energy level. It is never repetitive and it is always amazing the simple things that you perceive when you give yourself the opportunity to do so.

Friday Q&A: Watching TV While Doing Yoga

Q: Is it possible to distinguish which benefits of hatha yoga arise from (just) the physical activity and which from the practice of paying attention to one’s body in the pose? For example, what if one does a sequence of poses while, say, watching television and not paying much attention to the pose? I would think that would still help develop strength, flexibility and balance.

A: First of all, congratulations for starting—or thinking about starting—a home practice. Practicing a home is the best way to create the yoga practice that’s best for you, rather than just hoping your teacher will happen to give you the right class.

And, believe it or not, you’re not the first person we know who wonders about doing yoga in front of a TV. When I wrote the section on motivating yourself to practice in the book Moving Toward Balance, I interviewed yoga teacher Jason Crandell because I knew that he started his own home practice while watching The Simpsons. Here’s what he said:

Every day for a long, long time, I would get out of the warehouse and get home and watch “The Simpsons,” the 6:00 and 6:30 episodes. So I bartered with myself that for the 6:00 to 7:00 period, I would, no matter what, five days a week, lay my yoga mat out in front of the TV and do as much yoga as I could. It seemed like a perfect trade, and it didn’t seem like it was at cross purposes—it didn’t seem like it was ironic or even funny—it just seemed like it was a reasonable thing to do And it worked beautifully. And then basically what happened was that I started to become more interested in what my body was doing in that period and “The Simpsons” actually became more of a distraction. It was a natural evolution that I turned it off after a few months.

So, yes, you absolutely will still get the benefits of developing strength, flexibility, and balance if you practice in front of TV. As Shari Ser says, “Any movement is better than no movement.”

That being said, you will be missing out on some of yoga’s important benefits:

1. Stress reduction. TV is distracting, not relaxing. If you practice while watching the news or drama, your stress response may be triggered by things you see or hear.
2. Mindfulness. Not paying attention to your body as you practice will prevent you from learning about what works for you and what doesn’t, and you won’t reap the benefits of the asana practice as a moving meditation.

So here’s what I suggest. Try practicing in front of the TV until your habit, like Jason’s, becomes established, and then experiment with turning it off. If practicing in silence is difficult, try playing relaxing music instead. The right kind of music is less distracting and less stimulating for the nervous system, so you’ll be able to be more engaged in your practice and more relaxed as well. (And if you haven’t thought of it yet, perhaps you could try practicing with music now, instead of the TV and see how that goes.)

P. S. There is nothing from The Simpsons on youtube so I went with one of my favorite TV show openings (I  love the song by Massive Attack). I briefly considered including the credits for "True Blood," which is probably my all time favorite opening, but was worried it would be too racy for some people. 

—Nina

Does Home Yoga Practice Make You Healthier?

by Baxter

Over the years, as I have worked with individuals on a variety of health issues using yoga as a therapeutic tool, I have observed that those who do a regular home practice (usually two to four times a week) have more dramatic and sustained improvement in their health. There are always other factors that come into play, but in general, if they do their work regularly, they feel better and function better over time. This has been especially true for the students who have chronic pain conditions. But can what I have observed informally be applied more broadly to our general population of yoga practitioners? And what if you are generally healthy? Does yoga give you an advantage over other things? Well, a new study seems to say yes to that and a few other propositions about yoga’s benefits.

In a recent study entitled “Frequency of Yoga Practice Predicts Health: Results of a National Survey of Yoga Practitioners,”the authors out of the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center  looked at the positive health benefits of yoga, not simply the therapeutic benefits of yoga for those with illness and injury. Their stated purpose was to examine the relationship between yoga practice and health by evaluating such things as subjective well-being, diet, BMI, smoking, alcohol/caffeine consumption, sleep, fatigue, social support, mindfulness, and physical activity. They chose the tool of a survey, administered to practitioners of a specific style of yoga with a strict standardization of teaching that would likely contribute to consistent instruction, Iyengar Yoga, which could lead to a more valid set of results.  Out of a pool of over 18,000 potential students at fifteen Iyengar schools in the US, they sent out a cross-sectional, anonymous internet survey to 4307 randomly selected students. They received back 1045 (24.3%) surveys completed and ready for analysis.

Backyard Wild Flowers by Brad Gibson

When they evaluated their data, they found that home practice had the greatest predictive positive effect on health. Frequency of home practice favorably predicted the following: mindfulness, subjective well-being, BMI, fruit and vegetable consumption, vegetarian status, sleep, and fatigue. They also found that the different components of yoga practice also had some influence: “Each component of yoga practice (different categories of physical poses, breath work, meditation, philosophy study) predicted at least 1 health outcome.”

Finally, they concluded, “Home practice of yoga predicted health better than years of practice or class frequency. Different physical poses and yoga techniques may have unique health benefits.” This so wonderfully echoed something I probably say once a week in class: “I love that you come to yoga class once a week with me, but if you want to get the real benefits of yoga, you need to practice on your own a few times a week.” And, of course, Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra says the same thing when he states that you will achieve your goals when you practice regularly over a long period of time!

To recap what the authors were looking at, I quote their study once again:

“The objective of this study is to better understand the interrelationship between yoga practice and health. Specifically, the study addressed the contributions of yoga practice in general (years of practice, classes per month, and/or days per month of home practice) and practice of specific components of yoga practice (physical poses, breath work, meditation, and/or philosophy study) to these aspects of health. It is important to study the unique contributions of the individual components of yoga practice because some aspects of yoga practice may be more effective than others in improving specific health outcomes such as body weight, sleep, and mental health.”

I couldn’t agree more! As I work with individuals, I am always considering which component practices would best serve the unique circumstances an individual is working with in designing a home practice for them. 

When reading the fine print, a few notable specific observations popped out at me, specifically related to the study of yoga philosophy. Notably, frequency of philosophy study was the yoga practice variable that most often predicted health.  In addition, more frequent philosophy study also contributed to a lower BMI and higher odds of being a vegetarian.  And this sometimes equated to only reading philosophy once a week. 

When they looked at categories of poses, “vigorous poses remained an independent predictor of BMI and sleep quality, for every additional day per week of vigorous pose practice, BMI decreased .21 of a point, and sleep disturbance improved .26 of a point.”  And doing gentle poses more often correlated to a greater chance of eating vegetarian diet and drinking less alcohol. In regards to fatigue, it seemed that for older practitioners, even a small amount of yoga had a positive effect on fatigue levels and sleep disturbances.

And since so many of us are concerned about eating in a healthy way as we age, “more frequent practice of gentle poses, including supine restorative poses and relaxation pose (Savasana), were associated with three aspects of health that deal with feeding behaviors or cravings: higher fruit and vegetable consumption, higher rates of vegetarianism, and lower alcohol consumption.”

When the question of how does yoga achieve these impressive results, the authors mention a theory on how yoga decreases stress: “It has been postulated that yoga impacts the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis and the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) response to stress, possibly via direct vagal stimulation.” In other words, yoga may have some impact on the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems that results in lowered stress reactions in the body. We have alluded to this mechanism of action in past blog posts, and although this study does not look at the biochemistry of those surveyed, this theory still seems plausible as an underlying explanation for yoga’s benefits.

I need to go back to the philosophy findings. The authors go on to note that all those who had regular philosophy study were also practicing a lot of yoga in general. They concluded,” Thus, any relationship between philosophy study and health may reflect the relationship of frequency and intensity of yoga practice to health. This provides more evidence that an intense practice involving all aspects of yoga practice may be more beneficial to health than a less intense practice that includes only one or two aspects of yoga practice, such as just practicing the physical poses or breath work.” Darn!  I can’t just sit around and read about yoga and expect good health! But we all kind of know that already from our personal experience, don’t we?

So, does yoga lead to good health?  Well, this study does not actually prove this. It infers that may be the case, but it does not conclude that yoga causes good health.  It may seem like semantics, but it simply means more work needs to be done to show causality between practicing yoga and good health.

Like all studies, there were some blind spots. Some of the limitations of the study included: studying only to Iyengar yoga practitioners in the USA; anonymous online surveys have the potential for lots of inaccurate data; the response rate of 27% was low; most of the subjects were predominantly white, female, and highly educated, so diversity was not represented; and this kind of study allows one to draw inferences, but do not allow one to conclude that yoga actually impacts health.

Despite these limitations, yoga still looks like a good bet to help improve your overall health. It seems you don’t necessarily need to practice for years to get benefits, but the more you incorporate it into your daily life, the more likely you are to see the predicted positives come true for you.

Stuck in a Rut?

by Nina

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get stuck in a rut with my yoga practice. I have a few different sequences that I’ve developed for myself, and I tend to fall back on them again and again. Then I start to get a little bored. So lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to change things up a bit. Of course it would be a lot of work to write a completely new sequence for myself every day. So instead I’ve been focusing on spicing up my typical sequences. It’s kind of like deciding to remodel a room in your house by making just a few changes, such as buying new curtains or throw pillows, rearranging the pictures, or even just by adding a vase of fresh flowers. Sometimes a small change can make everything else look different.

Front Yard in Austin by Nina Zolotow

 Here are a few tips for “remodeling” your home practice:

1. Add a new pose to your sequence, one that you never practiced at home before or haven’t practiced in a long time. I’m pretty good about working my way through the various standing poses on a regular basis, but I always forget about Dancer’s pose for some reason. Welcome back, Dancer's pose!

2. Replace a stretch you typically do one way with another pose that stretches the same area. For example, to stretch the fronts of my thighs of my thighs the other day, I tried replacing my Reclined Hero Pose with Frog pose. I hadn’t done that in years!

3. Subtract a pose you always do just to see what happens. Do you always practice Downward-Facing Dog or Triangle pose? What would happen if you skipped them? Would your other poses feel different?

4. Start working on a pose you think you “can’t” do. For example, maybe you think you can’t do arm balances, but even taking the shape of a pose like Crow without lifting your feet off the ground is doing a form of the pose. Maybe you can even lift one foot off for a second or two. Keep it light and playful, and you might find this adds a new element of fun to your practice. 

5. Face down a pose that you dislike. On a day when you feel up to it, try doing that pose that you really dislike (you know which one I mean) just briefly. Whew! Sometimes it can be exhilarating to take on something you’ve been avoiding (kind of like finally cleaning out your closet).

Readers, do you have any other tips for spicing up a sequence? Let us know in the comment section!

First Day of Spring: More Thoughts on Warming Up

by Baxter

Happy First Day of Spring!

As usual, Nina did a bang up job yesterday of getting into the topic of warm-ups for your daily home practice, mostly from an Iyengar perspective. I wanted to add in that, as may have been obvious from Nina’s post, you start by thinking about where you want to head in your practice on any given day. I think of this as an opportunity to pick what I and others call a “goal” or “crown” pose or poses that I would like to explore in my practice that day. My goal pose is usually one that I am working toward feeling more open or stronger in, or one that I feel has more to be discovered than what I already know about it. Once I have determined that, I can begin to consider appropriate ways to warm my body up for my goal pose.

Spring in Northern California by Nina Zolotow
(yes, we do have seasons)

Nina suggested four possible categories of goal poses you might work toward: seated forward bends, seated twists, backbends or inversions. And with each goal pose category, she gave you several areas of the body that need to opened up to safely achieve those poses. However, you could have as your goal pose a particular standing pose that is particularly challenging for you, say Revolved Triangle, which is part forward bend, and part twist, requiring you to blend warm ups from both of those categories.

Nina’s focus was mostly on the concept of stretching and opening areas, but don’t forget that many of your poses require an equal amount of strength and stability in order to successfully do them, such as Handstand or Heron pose, both arm balances that may require cultivating strength prior to attempting the full pose.  For instance, I often warm up with something I call “sag and lift” that looks a bit like cat/cow, except the movement is isolated to the shoulder girdle, and on an inhale, you sag your chest toward the floor a bit, and on the exhale you strongly press the space between the shoulder blades toward the ceiling. 

If you were to look at the back of Light on Yoga, Iyengar’s classic book on yoga asana, you would see a whole series of practices listed there. What you might not see was any clear “warm ups” listed.  At least not ones that are not already stand alone yoga poses. By contrast, what you may have noticed in your public classes is that there are often warm-ups that don’t fit directly into what we could call codified yoga postures. In fact a few days ago, in Shari’s interview on abdominals (see here), she recommend pelvic tilts and pelvic clocks, which are actually modern “poses” from the worlds of physical therapy and Feldenkrais technique. All this to remind you that you can think outside the box as you warm yourself up for you goal pose.

And since I have studied not only the Iyengar method, but also from the Krishnamacharya lineage, I do a lot of “mini-vinyasa” to warm up for my practice. The reclining hip opener sequence we introduced for the back care practice is one example (see here), but you can make it even more simple by linking a starting stance with the full pose, and moving back and forth between them with your breath, typically for around six breath cycles. As an example, take starting on hands and knees, exhaling into Downward-Facing Dog, then inhaling back to hands and knees, repeating this five more times. It’s a great way to prepare for a longer held version of Downward-Facing Dog. 

As there are a lot of different ways to warm up and sequence a practice, I am sure we will return to the topic again before too long, so in the meantime, give some of these ideas a spin if you have not tried them in your home practice yet.

Friday Q&A: Practice for All Seasons

Q: Practice and the seasons: Does your practice change with the seasons and if so how?

A: Where I live, there are seasons (though some people might argue differently), but rarely extremes of weather. But one summer day that was actually hot, I went to my regular Friday morning yoga class, expecting backbends because my teacher always teaches backbends the second class of the month. Our studio, though in a beautiful old building, had no insulation and very little climate control, with poor heating in the winter and no air conditioning in the summer, so it was unusually warm in the studio.

The teacher opened the class with a little smile, saying, “Today we’re going to do some nice cooling backbends.” Everyone laughed, because, of course, backbends are typically not at cooling. But guess what. We did do backbends, but our teacher modified his typical sequence so we did a cooler practice of stretches, passive backbends, and the less effortful, active backbends, rather than a “hotter” practice of standing poses and very active backbends.

Swimming Hole in Dripping Springs, Texas by Brad Gibson

That memory of that still makes me smile, but I bring it up today because I don’t necessarily change my practice with the seasons per se, but I’m definitely change my practice to fit the weather and the temperature in the space where I’m practicing.

Today is a cold and rainy day in Berkeley, California and my house is a little bit drafty, so I would incline toward an active, heating practice rather than a passive cooling practice. Trying to do, for example, a restorative practice in a cold room is not only very challenging because you get colder and colder the longer you stay still, but it is also not very effective, because being cold stimulates your nervous system, alerting your body and mind that you may in danger. So it’s very difficult to relax. On the other hand, the active poses warm up both you and the room quite nicely.

Likewise, being too hot is very stimulating for the same reasons; your nervous system warns your body and mind there may be danger. So when it’s hot, it’s a good time to do more passive and relaxing poses. Or, slowly work up to the active poses and take time to rest and cool down.

Naturally you don’t want to do only active practices all winter and only passive practices all summer, but as my teacher did that day, you modify any sequence by adding more cooling poses or heating poses to accommodate the climate, both outdoors and indoor. For your convenience, I’ve categorized the general groups of poses into Heating and Cooling.

Heating Poses:

Sun Salutations
Standing Poses
Active backbends
Headstand and arm balances
Twists and abdominal strengtheners

Cooling Poses:

Restorative poses
Reclined poses
Forward bends
Supported inverted poses

Some other considerations: Your body is stiffer when you are cold, so that’s a time when you may need more stretching. When it’s hot and your muscles are more relaxed, you may not need to stretch as much. The weather also influences how physically active you are outside the yoga room. I also tend to be more physically active outside during warmer, drier months, walking, gardening, and so on. So to balance my body on more active days, I’ll focus more on poses that complement those activities (see "Deciding What to Practice"). During the rainy season when I spent more time in the house, I’ll naturally gravitate toward more active poses to compensate for being more sedentary. However, some people may spend the winter skiing (yes, I’ve heard tell of that) and the summer hiding out in an air conditioned apartment (heard of that, too), so each person needs to find his or her own way with figuring out the best practice on a given day. 

P.S. Our Friday questions come from you, the reader. So send us your questions or concerns either by commenting on this or any other post, or by emailing us via the address you find on the Contact Us tab at the top of the page.

Deciding What to Practice

by Nina

After falling off the wagon, I did indeed pick myself up, dust myself, and start all over again (I even did some airplane yoga, including twists and shoulder stretches in my seat, standing twists and a wall hang using the wall in that tiny corner near the bathroom, a standing backbend in the aisle, and a long session of breath awareness back in my seat again). But then my first day home I had to decide what my first full practice would be.

Since my last few days were filled with a serious amount of walking, my legs felt stiff and tired, so leg stretches and hip openers sound delicious. Standing poses, well, not so much. And since I was bending forward a lot, moving boxes and putting things on shelves, etc., shoulder openers seem like a good antidote to the stress in my back and shoulders. And, finally, because I was under a lot of stress, I’d wanted to include my favorite inverted poses, including Headstand, Shoulderstand, and Legs Up the Wall. To prepare for the full inversions, it makes sense to do some partial inversions, including Downward-Facing Dog and Standing Forward Bend. And there it wisas, as easy as pie, my general outline for a post-walking-a-lot-and-helping-someone-move-then-taking-a-plane-ride yoga practice designed by me, for me. (And, of course, I can always—after some post asana assessment—change my sequence as needed while I’m in the middle of practicing.) Whew! I feel better already.

For Me, By Me by Nina Zolotow

Of course, when you get ready to do some yoga, you can always just practice whatever you’re in the mood for. If you’re craving backbends or forward bends, just go for it. But if you don’t have a particular impulse and can’t decide what to practice, you can consider what you’ve been doing lately with an eye toward balancing your body.

For example, if you’ve been very sedentary for a long period, standing poses get your whole body moving, strengthening and stretching you at the same time. Backbends are also great if you need energizing after being sedentary and they help balance your body from all the forward bending of being seated, so you might want to do a full backbend practice.

But if you’ve been physically active at work or around the house, gardening, painting, or building, gentle stretches and twists can help release tired muscles and balance you out. The same is true if you’ve been spent the afternoon playing soccer, basketball or another favorite sport (dare I make a joke about how active baseball is—or isn’t?). And if you’re really exhausted from physical labor or outdoor fun, you may even just need to rest in your favorite restorative poses.

In general, just think of about doing the reverse movements of those that you’ve been doing outside the yoga room. And if you have some particular condition you’re working with (for example, improving balance, strengthening your core, keeping your joints mobile, or dealing with back pain), just weave those poses into your sequence as well. In the end, this is one of the main reasons why having a home practice is so wonderful. You can do exactly what you want or need on a given day, rather than hoping your teacher’s plans just happen to coincide with yours.

Home Practice: Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, and Start All Over Again

by Nina

People who know me are often impressed by my dedication to my home yoga practice. Although I take class once a week, most of my yoga practice consists of what I do on my own, in my own house. And in general I'm very steady and consistent about practicing. But, of course, I'm only human, and sometimes I fall off the wagon. 

The two main times I fall off the wagon is when I have house guests (I just cannot bring myself to sneak off and practice while friends or relatives are in my house) and when I'm traveling. Yes, I know, we're posting all kinds of information about yoga you can do anywhere and everywhere, at the airport, in your hotel room, blah, blah, blah, but here I am in Austin, Texas, at a bed and breakfast, helping a family member who is going through some hard times, and, you know what? I'm not practicing. My days are long, with a lot of walking, unpacking of boxes, shopping for necessities, etc., and practicing just doesn't feel possible. 

But years of experience with similar situations have taught me that when I return home and things get back to normal, I'll simply resume my practice, with no harm done. It's like that song from the Fred Astair and Ginger Roger movie "Swing Time," where Ginger teaches Fred to dance: "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again." Years of experience with this have also taught me that it's easier dust yourself off and start all over again if you don't judge yourself and just accept it as a normal part of yoga for real life. If you're too hard on yourself, your more likely to think of yourself as a failure and give up entirely. And the more often you do pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again, the easier becomes. Maybe even as easy as it is for Ginger to teach Fred to dance!

Ginger tells Fred not to be discouraged:

 And, of course, Fred learns to dance really quickly: