Yoga Poses for the Spring Season
September 8, 2009 by rosie
Filed under Healing & Bodywork, Yoga
Spring is also the season for allergies, asthma, and blocked sinuses. In allergies, the body’s natural defenses overreact to an otherwise harmless substance like pollen and initiate symptoms like wheezing, itchy eyes, nasal congestion, and runny nose. It can also lead to other chronic conditions such as asthma. The same symptoms also occur in the fall season, but the virus that causes them is different. Practicing yoga techniques can keep the allergies at bay. It will rev up your immune system and help you go about your daily routine. You will no longer need to stay indoors or keep the windows shut all the time!
The change in season and the nagging allergies can adversely affect your emotions too. Even a few minutes of yoga, will help strengthen and calm your mind. No more allergy, asthma, blocked sinus, and stress. Follow the routine given below and see the difference this season.
Asanas (Postures)
1) Fish Posture: Lie flat on your back with your legs bent. Raise your hips and place your hands under them, palms facing the floor. Now, straighten your legs, arch your back and rest the top of your head on the floor. Come out of the pose by bringing your arms out and resting them by your side while resting the nape of your neck on the floor.
Benefits: Encourages deep breathing and exercises the chest muscles. Provides immediate relief from wheezing, asthmatic symptoms, and other respiratory ailments.
2) Two Leg Lock: Lie flat on your back. Bend your legs at the knee and bring them towards your chest. Clasp your fingers around your bent legs. Breathing out, bring your face towards your knees. Breathe naturally while holding the position. Breathe in when resting your neck.
Benefits: Massages and tones the neck, upper-back, and shoulders, while releasing upper body tension. Brings mental relaxation.
3) Cobra: Lie on your stomach, with your palms resting below your shoulders and your chin resting on the floor. Breathing in, straighten your arms and lift your trunk. Breathe naturally in the position. Breathing out, lower you trunk and head.
Benefits: Encourages deep respiration, which in turn strengthens lungs and heart. Stretches spine, arms, neck, shoulders, chest, abdominal muscles, and hips.
4) Mountain Posture: Sit on your heals with your toes bent. Bend forward, resting your palms on the floor. Raise your torso while straightening your arms and legs to form and up-side-down V. Breathe normally. Do not bend your legs at the knee.
Benefits: Energizing stretch for the entire body, including feet, ankles, hamstrings, spine, arms, and wrist joints. Increases circulation to the brain, relieving mental fatigue.
5) Bowing Posture: Sit on your heels. While breathing out, lift your hips and rest the top of your head on the floor. Rest your arms at your side. Breathe naturally in the position. Breathing in, come up and relax.
Benefits: Effectively relieves sinus congestion. Improves, concentration, memory, and eyesight, complexion, and will power.
What is Prana Flow Yoga All About?
May 12, 2009 by hamish
Filed under Fitness & Exercise, Yoga
Whenever I tell people that I teach yoga, the first question out of their mouth is: ‘What kind of yoga?’
And when I answer, ‘Prana Flow Yoga’, they stare at me blankly. ‘Huh? Never heard of that…’
Taught by Master Yoga Instructor Shiva Rea, Prana Flow is a liberating, evolutionary, rhythmic, vinyasa-flow class that encompasses mudra, mantra, bandha, pranayama, meditation, asana, kriya and a whole lot of fun. As Shiva states on her website, “It is an energetic, creative, full-spectrum approach to embodying the flow of yoga.”
Prana Flow is all about a balance of opposites – strength and fluidity, skill and intuition, vital energy and relaxed being.
So in class, when we do sun salutations, we’re mindful of the integrity of our alignment, while tuning in to the innate intelligence within our bodies that will guide us into the postures. Downward dog doesn’t have to be static anymore, and the spine may undulate, or the hips sway, as we find release and openness from within.
Most of all, Prana Flow emphasizes connecting to the breath and awakening the flow of Prana within. Defined as “the life-force of creation”, prana lives within each of us. When we practice Prana Flow Yoga, we are practicing getting out of our minds and moving down into our bodies, and letting our breath guide us.
At it’s most simple, while breathing in child’s pose, if we can maintain our concentration on the internal processes and follow our breath around the body, we will sense blocks, or restrictions. These can be physical, mental, emotional or energetic. Just by being aware of these blocks or restrictions, and breathing into those places, we active prana to guide us into openness.
In this way, true Prana Flow Yoga practice will unfold breath by breath on the mat, with the practitioner having no attachment to where the practice might go, or even what the postures might look like. The body is freed to move into the exact asana it needs in that moment to find the greatest release and the greatest balance.
In a Prana Flow class, this might translate into asana where the teacher guides you to explore your body within the context of the alignment. If hands and feet are grounded in downward dog, and internal focus is maintained, where does the breath go? How does the body want to move? At first inhales are likely to move up the spine, tilting the pelvis forward and lifting the hips to the ceiling. Exhales travel down the back of the legs, releasing the heels to the ground. But in time, the breath will begin to travel to other places, finding other blocks to release.
This style of yoga was most famously taught at Kripalu Ashram in Pennsylvania, and written about in the books Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, by Stephen Cope, and Self-Awakening Yoga – the Expansion of Consciousness through the Body’s Own Wisdom by Don Stapleton Ph.d. Both men were senior teachers at the ashram, and with one a psychologist and one an art teacher, each brought their own emphasis to the effects of prana awakening within the body.
“The structural details of any yoga practice can be alluring, but practice comes alive with creativity when you commune with your body’s sensations,” writes Don Stapleton. “Being true to the intelligence of the body requires leaving the known as a jumping off point and venturing into unknown territory to allow prana to truly guide you. Taking your yoga learning to this level of personal ownership frees you from the illusion that ‘truth’ exists outside of you – in the authority of an expert or a teacher.”
Prana Flow classes focus on developing students’ connections to their own internal yoga teacher, to the flow of prana within them. It’s not about the teacher telling you what to do, or doing set postures (although both of these things do happen in class). It’s learning to trust your own body’s intuition, and learning to listen to the subtle energies within. And then having the confidence and the commitment to take that connection home to your own yoga mat, in your own time, to explore your own body’s needs.
Once prana is awakened, and a student has learned to surrender to it’s flow, yoga asana will spontaneously arise from within – even asana or kriya that the student has never learned before. It’s a magical process that is inherently natural. We all contain everything we need to know within us, and Prana Flow Yoga reminds of us this buried wisdom we carry.
And it does all of this while reminding us of the simple joys of moving in the body, of finding lightness, of playing. Prana Flow is nothing more and nothing less than life as creative energy, where we celebrate our essence of being.
Author: Kara-Leah Grant, once a Queenstown-based yoga teacher, now teaches in Wellington where she’s discovered the joy of Prana Flow Yoga. Read more of her articles on yoga and the art of living at Prana Flow NZ.
How to Start Living Your Yoga
April 9, 2009 by rosie
Filed under Fitness & Exercise, Holistic Wellbeing, Yoga
It’s the end of the week and while you managed to make it to two yoga classes, you haven’t unrolled your yoga mat once. Family, work, and household commitments make finding a 90-minute slot during the day next to impossible. Short of getting up at 5am, or re-prioritizing your life to ditch other commitments, there are other ways to regularly practice yoga. After all, home practice is where the deeper rewards of yoga blossom.
Start by realizing that you don’t have to wait for a 90-minute window to unroll your mat. Take 20 minutes in the morning, or 30 minutes after dinner. Use whatever space you have in your day for a practice. Allow your internal teacher to guide you through the appropriate postures for you in that time space – without any attachment to fulfilling a particular sequence of postures you may not have time for. Stepping into daily time gaps with your yoga mat cements your commitment to home practice, and often you’ll find that time begins to expand. You naturally wake up 30 minutes earlier, or you realize you don’t have to watch the news every night.
The second way to integrate yoga into your daily life is to practice whenever the opportunity arises. Let yoga spill off your mat and permeate everything you do.
Doing the dishes? Connect with your breath, ground the four corners of your feet, engage your quadriceps, align your pelvis and open your heart.
Having a shower? Practice back bends and forwards bends with breath and mindfulness as you shampoo your hair and shave your legs.
Working at your desk? Take five minutes to breathe mindfully and work through a short shoulder opening sequence.
In this way, yoga becomes not just something contained within the confines of your yoga mat, but something that infuses the way that you move about your day.
Now you are not just practicing yoga, but living yoga.
Author: Kara-Leah Grant, once a Queenstown-based yoga teacher, now teaches in Wellington where she’s discovered the joy of Prana Flow Yoga. Read more of her articles on yoga and the art of living at Prana Flow NZ.
How to Choose the Right Yoga Class for You
March 31, 2009 by rosie
Filed under Fitness & Exercise, Holistic Wellbeing, Yoga
Been thinking about starting yoga for ages now but feeling overwhelmed by the range of classes, teachers, yoga styles and studios on offer?
Here are a few tips to get you off the procrastination flow and into the yoga flow.
1. Get clear on what type of experience you’re looking for:
Write down what you want to get out of your yoga class.
- Just concerned about the physical side of yoga and like to do other classes as well? Maybe you should find a gym that offers good yoga classes.
- Want a class that will make you sweat, work you hard, and is consistent every time? Try Bikram.
- Or do you want something that flows from one posture to the next with emphasize on the breath? Check out Prana Flow Yoga, or Vinyasa.
- Are you an athlete looking to do some cross-training? Think about Astanga or Power Yoga.
- Are you interested in chanting? Give Bhakti Yoga a whirl.
- Or maybe you love the idea of pranayama (breath work)? Try an integrated class like Prana Flow, or Kundalini.
2. Talk to the studios and class teachers:
Once you know what you want, go and have a chat to the studios and yoga teachers available and see what they suggest to you. Pay attention to how you feel when you walk into each studio, or meet each teacher, and the way you are treated.
Are you listened to? Are you attended to quickly? Do you feel good in the studio?
Be mindful that some studios will lock the doors when there is a class on, so it pays to call ahead of time and check when an appropriate time is to drop in. Ask for a tour of the facilities. Take away a timetable so you can read it in more depth.
3. Talk to yoga-loving friends:
Recommendations are great — find a friend who’s judgment you trust and ask which teacher and classes they like, and find out why. Get them to take you to a class. It’s always more fun, and less threatening, to start a new activity with a friend. It also helps with motivation if you’re going with someone else – it can be the way you catch up every week.
4. Work out what times will suit you, and what budget works for you:
Sometimes the studio or teacher we choose comes down to convenience, so it helps to know when you would be likely to go to class and how much a class is worth to you.
Don’t think of the money you spend on a class as the same as spending money on entertainment, think of it as investment in your health and well-being. A regular yoga practice can help rehabilitate injuries and prevent new ones, and can also provide relief from certain conditions, and prevent new conditions from developing. How much is your health worth to you?
But do be mindful in committing to a year’s membership when you’ve never really done that style of yoga before. Try starting with a beginner’s offer – most studios will offer some kind of deal on your first few classes. Or try a ten pass. Then, when you know what you really love, dive in and get the best deal by committing to a year.
5. Try, and try, and try again:
The best time to think about joining a studio is when it first opens, because usually they will offer free yoga for a period of time so you can check out the classes, and they often offer discounted joining specials.
So jump in and try as many classes as you can, with different teachers and different styles until you find something you like. You may discover you love classical hatha yoga, but the teacher doesn’t quite speak your language, so find another teacher.
Each teacher brings something different to a class, and appeals to different people. Just because your friend raves about a particular teacher, it doesn’t mean you too will love him or her.
Which leads on to…
6. Pay attention to the teacher.
If you’ve never done yoga before, it’s hard to know what a great yoga teacher is like, compared to a not-so great yoga teacher, because you have nothing to compare against. Each teacher will have a different style too. Some teachers like to physically adjust and correct their students, while other teachers prefer to give verbal corrections and adjustments and let the students find the pose from within.
Regardless of their style though, what great teachers all have in common is that they ’see’ their students. They notice when alignment needs correcting, and when breathing is strained. They see where students are tight, and where they are weak. A great teacher is responsive to the needs of his or her class, and doesn’t recite the instructions for each asana by rote, instead paying attention to what needs to be said in that moment – even in Bikram, which is known for it’s tightly scripted class. A great Bikram teacher can work off the script, and still be responsive to the needs of individual students.
If, after trying a smattering of styles and teachers, yoga still doesn’t grab you… than maybe it’s not for you at this point in life. But don’t write it off completely either – we change every year, and yoga is such a transformative practice, you may find that down the track, it does appeal to you.
Obviously as a Prana Flow Yoga teacher and serious yoga addict I am completely biased, but if you don’t like yoga, do yourself a favour and try one class a year, just in case you do change your mind… and then you’ll understand what I’m raving about all the time!
Author: Kara-Leah Grant, once a Queenstown-based yoga teacher, now teaches in Wellington where she’s discovered the joy of Prana Flow Yoga. Read more of her articles on yoga and the art of living at Prana Flow NZ.
Hot Yoga Studio for Sale – Nelson, New Zealand
March 31, 2009 by rosie
Filed under Healthy Business, Yoga
Successful Hot Yoga Studio for Sale
Nelson , NEW ZEALAND (Top of the South Island)
$75,000 NZD or $42,500 USD + Desired Inventory (PrAna, Yogitoes, etc.) OR BEST OFFER
Studio purchase opportunity in the gorgeous artist and wellness community of Nelson, NZ. Purchase includes absolutely turn-key operation, equipment, heating system, trained staff, vendor listing, and business coaching for continued success as a hot yoga studio, or, alternately, as your own kind of yoga studio. Active client base, over 2500 names. 2007 yearly sales over $200K NZD / 2008 yearly sales over $255K NZD. Low overhead. Fabulously remodeled boutique studio in New Zealand’s sunniest beach community.
Please contact Claire at 64 4 801 9642 or email hotyoganz@xtra.co.nz for more details on how you can expand your yoga / bodywork journey in the most satisfying of ways as a studio owner while living or traveling abroad.
Asking price: $75,000 NZD or $42,500 USD + desired inventory, or best offer.
See www.hotyoganz.com for more pictures of the Nelson studio. Current owners are older Americans (wanting to travel and simply teach more). They can help guide your studio ownership and/or Immigration transition (which generally takes 3-4 months and well worth the effort to enjoy living and working in this beautiful country.) The foreign exchange rate is currently quite strong and is a fantastic business investment.
Namaste.
Scientific Support for Yoga’s Benefits
March 15, 2009 by hamish
Filed under Healing & Bodywork, Yoga
Dr. Holt promotes natural therapies that are supported by sound medical research and his book is a helpful reference for anyone considering natural therapies. In this video he tells Breakfast viewers that there is sound research to suggest that yoga has health benefits.
But as his Youtube Channel shows he is not slow to point out therapies whose benefits haven’t been verified by “western” medical research.
Author: Dr Shaun Holt is a GP and medical research specialist, he is the Author of Natural Remedies That Really Work: a New Zealand Guide and appears regularly on TVNZ’s Breakfast.
The Power of Faking It Until You Make It
March 5, 2009 by rosie
Filed under Fitness & Exercise, Life & Relationships, Yoga
I have a Baron Baptiste DVD which I use occasionally to yoga do. He’s one of the great teachers of Power Yoga and emphasizes finding strength within.
One of his favourite lines is ‘Fake it until you make it’.
I love this saying because it’s a way to unlock everything you want to be. If you decide to ‘fake’ being strong and brave by taking brave and strong actions… you will trigger feelings of bravery and strength within you and discover that you’re not faking it anymore
So often in life we allow our feelings to create our thoughts about a situation, and then those thoughts create our experience of the situation. This is a reactive way to live – your feelings are in control and you’re merely reacting to them.
If instead you decide how you WANT to feel in the experience, and then intend to act as if you ALREADY feel that way – faking it until you make it – you will find that those actions CREATE the feelings inside you. Brave action creates brave feeling. This is consciously creating your life.
It’s an active, participatory way of living, and it takes work – i.e. you need to observe yourself and be conscious of what you are feeling, thinking and doing. But the pay-offs are worth it.
If a situation or experience has been driving you crazy in your life, you can use these techniques to change what’s happening. It’s not about controlling and manipulating the external factors, like other people or situations. It’s about being conscious of how you feel, NOT reacting to it, and instead deciding what you want to create. It’s about changing your internal Self.
Yesterday I used this technique to address a situation that had really begun to really get me down.
After a week of dreading getting on my yoga mat, of experiencing fear and resistance when I did, I resolved to stop sitting in that fear and resistance and just do it. I stepped on to my mat with the intention of flowing through Astanga Series I with no cop outs. And I did. The amazing thing was that instead of feeling weak and pathetic and awful – like I had all week – I felt strong and confident and filled with courage. Plus my right hip, which had seized up in the last four days, loosened off considerably by the time I finished my practice.
This experience highlights how our thoughts really do create our experience. When I step on to the mat fearful of what I may encounter, and allow my fear to overwhelm me, I experience a weak, pathetic and awful practice. It’s not that that particular practice was there waiting for me on my mat -no, I took it on with me.
When I step on to the mat determined to face whatever comes up with courage and work through it, then I am filled with confidence and strength, and I feel great, no matter what I may encounter.
I know this intellectually, but I still get so caught up in my feelings, reacting to them and letting them control my life. Then I wonder why everything is so hard. Sometimes it just takes a reminder, like stumbling across Baron Baptiste’s website yesterday.
So next time life is overwhelming you, take a moment to be conscious of what YOU are creating. Observe your feelings for what they are, CONSCIOUSLY think about how you WANT to feel and then fake it.
Take the actions you would take if you already had those feelings.
And if you’re thinking right now that this won’t work, well, put yourself into scientist mode, intend to give it a good go and experiment with the technique. Play around with it, have fun. And then report back to me, let me know if it works as well for you as it does for me.
Author: Kara-Leah Grant, once a Queenstown-based yoga teacher, now teaches in Wellington where she’s discovered the joy of Prana Flow Yoga. Read more of her articles on yoga and the art of living at Prana Flow NZ.
