What is Kids’ Aerial Yoga?
This is the chance for our younger students (ages 9 – 12) to discover yoga through the aerial playground! After all, kids grow up climbing, swinging, and jumping and loving it! This a place for kids to enjoy (literally) hanging out, working on some of their favorite smooth moves (what kid has never wanted to do a handstand?), and having fun with friends. The yogic aspects – controlling the breath, improving focus, gaining strength and flexibility – are the bonus!

What is the main difference between Kids’ Aerial and the adult class?
First, we don’t hold the inversions very long. After all, children are still growing! They are born with just one of the three spinal curves they will have as adults (think of the slight cat-curved spine of a fetus). The lumbar and cervical curves are still forming, so we don’t want to hold the kids in long inversions that lengthen the spine even further. Fortunately, that works well with the second difference: the class is tailored to the students’ energy and attention spans! This high-energy class guides students mindfully but at a faster pace through balancing, twists, backbends, inversions, sitting and standing on the hammock, and “just for fun” poses. It’s amazing how naturally kids take to the hammock, often inventing poses of their own!

Leaving your worries and “to do” lists at the door, the restorative practice offers a retreat from the outside world. We invite you to surprise yourself with the gift of how relaxed you can actually feel. The poses are held for several minutes working to relax the deep tissues of the body with the help of lengthening the breath, engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. By cradling the body with props, the muscles feel supported, and the stretch then begins to deepen, allowing the bones to drop, drawing the body deeper into the pose. As you practice letting go of the outer layers, you will begin to find yourself in a calm and quiet place – a place that resides deep within you. By holding each pose for several minutes we are also practicing patience -­ patience to stay with the breath, patience to stay with your experience, and perhaps the patience to let go just that little bit more.

About Fall Into Stillness: A Restorative Intensive

Encourage your body and mind to relax into stillness with the use of props to hold postures in a more comfortable state. Restorative poses are designed to be held for long periods (up to 15 minutes) in order to slow the body down into a rest and recovery state, release into the deeper connective tissue and to massage the major organs.

Through this practice we can truly begin to breakdown the build-up of chronic stress and begin the journey to a calmer, more relaxed state of being. Take time for yourself to release tension, enhance immunity and balance the nervous system.

Bring your own mat and eye pillow, if you have one.

What are therapy balls?

Therapy balls are, quite simply, grippy rubber balls of all shapes and sizes that you can use to access deep tissue release and self massage all over your body.

How is this different from getting a massage or foam rolling?

When it comes to foam rolling – you can get a great general release for large masses of muscles / muscle groups. But if you wanted to get into more specific nooks and crannies or move around bony landmarks of the body then a foam roller isn’t going to cut it. And the difference between this and a deep tissue massage is twofold: cost and svadhyahya. Tune up balls or other similar tools range between $10-20 and last for well over a year for most people (depending on how often you use them). Compare them to a $150+ deep tissue release from a well trained body worker and the savings are clear.

The second difference is svadhyahya, or the sanskrit word for “self knowledge” or “self study.” It’s frightening that most of us know more recipes or song lyrics than we know muscles and bones in our own body. Our inner landscape is often such a mystery to us. In many cases, we only listen to our bodies when they present pain or illness. But our bodies are communicating with us all the time in subtle ways. Ball rolling is a way to start to map and understand the landscape beneath the surface. As you start exploring your body with ball rolling, you’ll start to notice signs and signals of what is happening beneath the surface. When you understand where you might be a little stuck, asymmetrical or confused – then you can start to work your body back towards balance – healing pain, improving performance and improving nutrient delivery and hydration to your tissues.

Who can benefit from ball rolling? I’m not a professional athlete, for example – will this be useful for me?

The state of your body can be dependent on 5 factors: age, stage of development, trauma, learned movement and genetics. Say my mother always stood with her right hip kicked out to the side. There’s a strong likelihood that I also that way. If my right hip is kicked out then my whole right leg is holding tension and contraction differently than my left leg. So when I walk, run, hike or move around the house – my right leg is sending shock and tension up through the ankle, knee, hip and low back joints differently one one side than the other. My low back doesn’t like this because we are designed to absorb shock better when we’re symmetrical. I now have chronic low back pain. I could have scar tissue from a previous surgery that is hard, dense and stuck to other muscles and now one area of my body doesn’t move and glide the way it’s supposed to so all the other areas around it are compensating and I have referred pain in other areas because those muscles are doing jobs they aren’t supposed to be doing. The list goes on and on. When we say ball rolling can “improve performance” – we could mean the performance of getting out of bed, walking to pick up your paper OR running a marathon.

Will using therapy balls help my yoga practice / weightlifting / dance / running / cycling / boxing / rock climbing / other active hobbies?

The short answer is – absolutely. Because we get a large yoga audience we’ll often test yoga poses. I’ll bring students into down dog – when their heels don’t touch the ground they often say “it’s because my hamstrings are too tight.” Then I’ll roll their feet and calfs. We come back into down dog and the difference is measurable for 90% of students – heels closer to the floor. The difference in performance is immediately recognizable. Squatting in weightlifting requires proper knee to toe alignment in external rotation – if the hips can’t rotate out and the knee collapses then weight lifters can grind on the cartilage in their knees – they may need to relax their internal rotators with ball rolling OR just get a better sense of (ability to propriocept) where the strength comes from in external rotation – which is also a major focus of ball rolling. Dancers on the other hand are extremely externally rotated, helping the external rotators relax so they can walk with toes and knees pointing straight ahead is better for the health of their knees. We can look at any way that sport challenges the body and creates asymmetries and leverage ball rolling to realign the body, reduce liklihood of injury and improve performance.

Happy Feet, Happy Heart
by Ariana Brandao
As we continue to feel changes in the season, here are reflective poetic thoughts on the many reasons to spend an extra few moments thinking about our relationship with our feet.
Root, Ground, Drive;
like a tree
a house
a vehicle.

Our feet carry us from place to place, transporting our bodies into new spaces, inviting new energy upwards. I walk up the road, into this pose, and forward fold, reaching my nose towards my toes. My feet are as much my foundations, as they are my mode of transportation.

As yoga continues to transform my life off the mat, paying more attention to my feet continues to be foundational to the transformation in my practice. In the studio, we hear cues to root our feet into the mat or push out of the heels, drawing stronger lines of energy through the backs of our legs. Through the voices of many teachers, I continue to learn about the wealth of information our feet deliver to the body and brain regarding our environment.

Further exploring the architecture of our feet can increase our awareness of how we take our steps in life, both physically and beyond. Stretching our feet improves blood circulation and is a powerful way to mitigate the effects of wearing constrictive modern footwear. Compacted and constricted foot musculature translates into compacted and constricted musculature within the body. The practice of evenly grounding in the feet invites stability, rootedness, and initiates the free flow from greater reservoirs of energy up through our feet and into the body. With greater curiosity into how my feet affect my state of mind, I am happy when I remember to invite mindfulness of how my feet energetically support the way I am standing or seated when in line at the store, driving in my car, or around a kitchen with family.

The more I learn about the body, the more that knowledge transforms my practice – anatomical and yogic knowledge empowers an infinite process of informed integrative alignment. I invite you to bring a playful perspective into your practice – take a breath, and bring your awareness to your feet.

Can you find
your toes
your heels
your arches
and everything in between?

Can you find your breath with each step; can you invite walking meditation throughout your day?

Wherever you are going,
you are already there;
To thank the feet that carry our body, heart and mind
is a beautiful practice to share.

New Year’s greeting from The Yoga Studio.

Back in January of 2014, I shared through our newsletter my thoughts on New Year’s resolutions. I mentioned how most New Year’s resolutions last only a few weeks. I also shared the key to sticking to your resolution is through love, self-love. I wrote, “It is love that awakens the desire to make a change. It is also love that fuels the desire… and keeps the change permanent.” This message triggered some feedback from students, who shared with me how a New Year’s Yoga Challenge helped them discover Yoga. I loved their stories and have been slowly processing their words. I truly believe everyone can benefit from Yoga. It is more important for us to help as many people as possible to discover Yoga and pay less attention to how they end up on a mat. Once someone has experienced Yoga, a journey of self-discovery begins.

I am happy to announce our 2018 Yoga Challenge, with more details will be coming soon. This challenge is meant to both inspire as well as to encourage someone to try Yoga and keep up with it for the duration of the Challenge. It doesn’t mean you have to practice Yoga poses each day, but it does mean you have to do something Yoga related each day. The prizes will be announced, and they should provide the extra incentive needed. 🙂

In the past 3 months, I moved my whole life across the country. I wouldn’t say it was graceful or perfect – but what in life is really?

One thing I noticed during the time of the transition, where my to-do list for one month was longer than the entire previous year, was the 1,000 excuses I could come up with not to practice. I’ll be the first one to admit, a home practice is hard for me. I love the community of a studio practice. I love being led. I love being in a space that doesn’t have a pile of laundry calling my name. But since my husband had to move out early for his new job, it was home practice or bust!

At this point, I’ve done enough yoga to recognize my tendency to make excuses. As they started in: I have too much to do, my house is gross and full of moving boxes, I need to pack things… I have to be my own coach – remember that my body doesn’t know the difference between practicing in a gold palace surrounded by whirling dervishes or in my kids’ toy room surrounded by legos. The only real barrier, as is so often the case, was the imaginary barriers I was creating. The only thing I needed was my mat.

So as the holidays approach and you head into a time of stress, travel, excess and temptation of all shapes, tastes and sizes, remember that your body can’t tell the difference if you’re practicing in the laundry room at Uncle Ted’s house or the fanciest studio in the area. But your body can tell you’re doing something good for it, and I guarantee you’ll feel better when you do.

If I ask you the question of what moves your blood through your circulatory system, your answer likely would be your heart. Let’s ponder that answer for a moment. If our heart is solely responsible for moving our blood through our circulatory system, then something doesn’t add up. For one, the movement of our blood through our system was happening during the embryological development. The movement was there before our heart showed up.

Secondly, if you calculate the volume of blood that’s being moved through your blood vessels, and the resistance of those vessels to the flow of the fluid, you will quickly realize that the heart is terribly undersized if the heart is a pump which is solely responsible for all that movement.

So where did that movement originated from before your heart showed up? You could not have been the originator of that movement. It did not start in you. That movement was there long before anything even remotely resembling you showed up. The movement that moves the blood through our system was inherited. We inherited that movement from our mother. And where did she receive that movement, she received it from her mother. It is through the chains of mothers before us. That movement or energy was passed down to us while we were in the womb. You can go back as far as you can imagine in the line of species and life forms from which we evolved, to the primordial ocean, all the way to the big bang, because it’s an unbroken chain of movement that we have inherited. But we don’t get to keep that energy, it is not even ours. It sustains us and it moves through us, but it was here long before we showed up and it will be here long after we leave. We get to dance with it for a while, hopefully with some elegance, skill and awareness. This is a very interesting and humbling thing to think about. So, we got the movement of blood from our mothers. Our heart does the job of keeping that movement going like a parent keeping a swing moving once it is in motion. You are adding the momentum that was lost from the last swing. That’s what the heart is doing.

I lost my mother to cancer when I was 10 years old. I wished for so long that she was still here, and we could spend time together. How I wish she had the opportunity to hold my child. On each Mother’s Day, I wish I can take her to Dim Sum and spoil her for the day. When I realized the obvious, which is the movement in my blood originated from her, I was speechless. She was with me the whole time. After realizing this, I couldn’t wait to find my little girl, to hold her and to feel her heart beat. I close my eyes and know that I flow within her, and the line of mothers before me flows through her.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner. For all the mothers out there … I bow to you.

P.S. A special thanks to Leslie Kaminoff. Through his Yoga Anatomy training I have a better understanding of the role of our heart.