health

by Ram Evening Sky by Melina Meza A long-distance trip may be in the offing for me and may involve �crossing the seven seas� as they refer to travel to Asia. I dread airline travel, especially if it involves sitting for more than five hours on a seat that is generally 17-18 inches wide with hardly any space between my knees and the seat in front of me. Added to the butt and knee discomfort, I have to deal with stiff hips, a strained back, swollen ankles and feet and finally a jet lag that just refuses to cease. Frequent trips to India and other long distance places in the past few years have become so uncomfortable that I needed to make my airline travels more memorable by reducing the hazards of prolonged sitting from long-distance travel. So I have resorted to doing�you guessed right�what I call �yoga in the skies,� yoga poses that stretch my calves, hips, knees, low back and hamstrings among other muscles. As soon as the seat belt sign is turned off, I begin my practice. Since I oft...

Woman Carrying Laundry  (from Wikimedia Commons) Q: I have heard that using the cue "scoop the tailbone" is pass�, because people tend to over tuck their tailbones already. There is a class I attend where this cue is given A LOT�for tons of poses�tree, chair, etc. Is this cue "out" and is it ever appropriate? Thanks! Is there any research behind using or not scooping the tailbone? I tend to not. I hear point the pubic bone down. A: This is a very relevant question, for, as our questioner points out, the concept of �scooping the tailbone� is being taught in many quarters. Certain modern yoga teachers, some with large followings, teach this as an important action when doing many poses.  And although I think there are certain circumstances in which this action (which anatomically would be called �retroversion� of the pelvis relative to the femur bones� more on that later!), is appropriate, I believe it is sometimes drastically overused. In order to get a better idea of...

by Nina Full Chair Shoulderstand (My Happy Place) In her interview with us (see Judith Lasater on Yoga and Aging ), Judith Lasater mentioned the poses that she currently practices, citing "especially Viparita Karanai (Legs Up the Wall pose), Supported Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) on the chair and Supported Halasana (Plow pose) on the Halasana bench." In my post Judith Lasater's Favorite Poses , I talked about these poses and why, even though they may be a little tricky to learn, they're so worth the effort. On Monday, I described Supported Halasana in detail. Today, at last, I'm going to tackle Chair Shoulderstand! To be honest, when you first learn how to do this pose, it is one of the most challenging to get in and out of. So I normally teach people how to do Chair Shoulderstand in person. But I think it's worth having the instructions and photographs showing the process for those of you who may have seen a demonstration once and forgotten the steps, as wel...

by Nina and Bridget When I Drive a Flower Bicycle, I Will Have a Good Future by Yu Youhan As someone who walks and gardens a lot, I know how valuable it can be to use your yoga practice to balance your body after intense physical activity of a different kind. Our editor, Bridget Frederick, uses her yoga practice to balance her body from all the cycling she does. She has been completely bicycle dependent for the last 5 years, and has experienced her share of body aches as a result of riding 100 miles each week just to get where she needs to be. So she focuses her home practice on the areas that tend to take a beating on the bike (outer hips, shoulders, calves, hamstrings) to keep herself mobile while still commuting daily. Because Bridget will  leading her third Yoga for Cyclists workshop on Saturday, May 24th, 2-5 pm at The Yoga Room, Berkeley , I thought it would be a good time to interview her about why and how she uses yoga to keep her body in balance. �Nina Nina : Why is yoga s...

by Baxter Telomere Caps A while back, we reported on an interesting potential marker in the body for aging of the cells connected to the genes called a telomere (see Stressed Mind, Stressed Cells and Science, Aging and Yoga ). A telomere is like a tail on the end of DNA strands found in our cells, and an enzyme called telomerase influences the length and activity of the telomere. Studies done a few years ago by a Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF in San Francisco began to show a connection between telomeres and cell longevity�the longer the telomere, the longer the cell life. Her work garnered her a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Now Dr. Blackburn has teamed up with Dr. Dean Ornish to see what effect his life-style changes approach to prostate cancer has on telomeres and telomerase activity. Dr. Ornish has already shown that a combination of dietary changes (vegan diet with less than 10% fat per day), exercise in the form of walking for 30 minutes most days, and stress management tools that i...

by Nina In her interview with us (see Judith Lasater on Yoga and Aging ), Judith Lasater mentioned the poses that she currently practices, citing "especially Viparita Karanai (Legs Up the Wall pose), Supported Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) on the chair and Supported Halasana (Plow pose) on the Halasana bench." In my post Judith Lasater's Favorite Poses , I talked about these poses and why, even though they may be a little tricky to learn, they're so worth the effort. Today, at long last, I'll actually get into the nitty gritty details of how to get into and out of Supported Halasana, which Judith does with the Halasana bench. If you don't have a Halasana bench (very few of us do!), you need a chair that has no bar between the two front legs because you need to be able to get your head underneath the chair seat. And you also need a chair that either has no back panel or that has a space between the panel and the seat that is large enough to fit your legs through...

Hidden Flower by Brad Gibson Q: I am a Yoga therapist in Minnesota. A family member has been given a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I found very little on the IAYT publications and I also found little references on your blog for this problem. She is a 14-year-old girl who is very gifted with eye-hand coordination and physical activities, so I have few worries about doing postures and easy pranayama. But before I design a practice regimen for her, I am wondering if any of your professionals have any advice or can blog as to contra-indications and concerns as I found not much reference to these on any of the established yoga sources I currently have access to? A: This is a topic we have not previously addressed here at YFHA, and as for my practice, I have not worked with any individuals with this diagnosis, and I am not aware of any incidence of my fellow writers at YFHA working with this either. However, it would still be worth defining what this condition is and taking a look...

by Nina It�s our two-year anniversary today! Celebrate with us again this year by listening to "Float," one of my favorite songs by Flogging Molly (I love the video, too). I still think that the chorus for this song, �Ah but don't, don't sink the boat/That you built, you built to keep afloat,� works perfectly as a theme for this blog. That, and the ending to the song: A ripe old age, A ripe old age, A ripe old age, Just doing the best I can! We�ve had a very productive second year! We now have 492 posts on the blog, covering a wide range of topics, including asana practice, pranayama and meditation, stress management, aging theories, medical conditions, ayurveda, and yoga philosophy. If you are interested in reading earlier posts, you should know there are three different ways you can search the blog for particular topics (or authors). In honor of our anniversary, I�ve just added a new page to the blog that describes the three different ways to search the blog, and wh...

by Ram Fern Leaves by Melina Meza As you may have noticed, summer is gradually winding down and making way for autumn to take over. The days become shorter, the rhythm shifts, and the light and heat of summer subside. Both yoga and ayurveda stress the fact that we are in sync with our environment so we need to be mindful of the change in seasons. Thus, as seasons change, our body and mind adapt to these changes. This requires us to be aware of the qualities associated with the seasonal changes. Fall is marked by the domination of vata dosha (constitution). Vata is made of the ether and air elements. It represents the mobile force of the universe, and in our bodies is responsible for all activities that involve movement. Thus, locomotion, digestion, circulation, respiration, elimination, communication, sensory and motor function, cardiac function and nervous system impulses (among others) are all governed by vata. Vata in the mind is responsible for emotions that include enthusiasm, joy...

by Baxter Since I last wrote on subject of yoga and your digestive system (see Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Yoga ), I completed two live one-hour lectures on the topic for YogaU Online, which are now archived and available on their website if you had hoped to join me live but could not. See yogauonline.com to access these lecture. And, in addition to the information-packed talks, I completed a one-hour video practice on Yoga for Healthy Digestion in August! It is part of the package you get if you purchase the sessions from YogaU, and it is the first significant video practice I�ve produced in a long time, so I am pretty pleased to have it to share with you! To give you a sense of how I came up with the practices on the video, I wanted to share a bit about how yoga is applied to imbalances in the digestive system. As I discuss in my talks on yoga and the digestive system, when you have an imbalance in your digestive system, it can often be classified in one of two ways: either a condi...

by Nina, Shari, and Bonnie Grasses and Reflections by Brad Gibson Shari Ser and her teaching partner, Bonnie Maeda, who is a registered nurse and a yoga teacher, will be teaching a special workshop on yoga for chronic pain this coming weekend, on Saturday, September 21 (see Brentwood Yoga Center ). So I thought that it would be a good time to interview the two of them about this important topic. �Nina NINA : Why did you two decide to teach workshops on yoga for chronic pain? BONNIE : As I began teaching yoga with a therapeutic approach, it was evident that discomfort and pain were often a component for the student living with a chronic illness or injury. With the philosophy of teaching yoga to the whole person in a holistic way, I felt that there needed to be an awareness in the practice of the individual's experience of pain. As a teacher, I was also aware of another component for these students: the fear of pain (or of increasing their pain) was present as they practiced yo...