For most of us, the post- holiday sugar and alcohol funk puts “cleansing” on our radar, so this is a great time to incorporate twists into your yoga practice. When you twist, the organs become compressed, which then pushes out blood filled with toxins. Twisting also stimulates circulation and improves digestion, stretches and strengthens the spine, and helps maintain flexibility in the vertebral discs and ligaments.

Make sure before you move into any twisting posture that you extend the spine by lengthening through the crown of the head as much as you can- the effort is on the inhale to elongate, and on the exhale relax deeper into the pose without contracting your abdominal muscles; twisting first from the lower lumbar spine then making your way up to the cervical spine breath by breath.

I hope you enjoy this video I made for you with three poses from my Xen Strength Yoga program. I use weights here, but if you are new to my style, or new to yoga in general, then feel free to try them without the weights.You can find more videos like, and my new Xen Strength Yoga DVD on my website: www.xenstrength.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

An uplifting profile of Garth McLean and his unconventional battle with Multiple Sclerosis. Garth is a practitioner and a teacher of Iyengar Yoga. Through the results of his practice, Garth has enlightened members of the medical community who attest to his able management of the disease. The title “Courage and Caution” refers to the advice Yogacharya BKS Iyengar offered Garth upon learning of the challenges he faces with MS.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As my friends and patients know, I am a world music freak and I have been making mixed world music cd’s of my favorite tracks for the last 15 or so years.  They are continually playing at home and in my office. Recently I have been asked a number of times to put together a mix of world beats with relaxing rhythms, so here it is. I call it my yoga mix because I often do yoga at home to a mix of many of these tracks.

Here are the tracks with iTunes links followed by Spotify links:

1) Om Numah Shivaya By Apache Indian

2) Elhem-1 Original by Diaspora featuring Amina Annabi

3) Maya By Susheela Raman

4) Kala Infinite By Bill Laswell

5) Guramayle By Gigi

6) The Long Road By Eddie Vedder With Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

7) The Way You Dream By Michael Stipe

8) Falling By Nitin Sawhney

9) Weyu Lárigi Weyu (Day by Day) By Andy Palacio

10) Sabu Yerkoy By Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté

11) Bamako By Toumani Diabaté

12) Boubacar By Bill Frisell

13) Savane By Ali Farka Touré

14) Haayo By Bill Laswell

15) Tara Mantra By Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors

Although the book was written and illustrated for children 4 to 8 years old, the delightful surprise about Watch Me Do Yoga is that it appeals to kids of all ages! Feedback coming in says that much younger children (toddlers and babies) are also enjoying it. My youngest “reader” is my great nephew nine month old Hayden, from New Zealand. He loves having Watch Me Do Yoga read to him. Here he is with his daddy completely absorbed in the story and the pictures.

Brittany from New Jersey sent these pictures. Brittany’s initial tweet announced that she had given her niece Hannah, who is fifteen months old, Watch Me Do Yoga for Christmas and that it was Hannah’s favorite! Hannah asks her mom Shelby and her aunt Brittany to read it to her “all the time.” If they are too busy to read to her, she “reads” it to herself!

Here is Ella, aged 7, who I met at a Thanksgiving party. We spent most of the afternoon doing yoga. Matsyasana (fish pose) was her favorite posture. At one point, Ella demanded that I call the entire gathering into the “yoga room” to watch her perform this pose. Kids love yoga. They also love being watched doing yoga!

Three little girls inspired the drawings for Watch Me Do Yoga:

Here is Mali (and also her Dad!) posing in their back yard. It was Mali who initially inspired me to write the book. She accompanied her Mom to a private yoga session with me — but she was not happy. She was bored. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to play with the toys her mom had bought along to keep her occupied. She was quite vocal about her misery. Finally, I pulled her into the class and I taught her along side with her Mom. She was transformed. She had a blast! She did not want to go home. She protested! She wanted to stay and do more yoga. The idea for Watch Me Do Yoga was born.

Here is Simone. You can see her beautiful tortoise pose, next to my drawing. I couldn’t have drawn this picture (and some of the others in the book) without her.

Here is Simone again with my son Jake who I co-opted into modeling for the daddy character.

This is Lila who along with her Mom, posed for the swimming picture: “And then I’ll be a swimming fish with little brother Paul.”

More kids and their yoga.

Send in your “kids love yoga” photos and I will post them here.
Text and illustrations from Watch Me Do Yoga, copyright © 2010 by Bobby Clennell. Reprinted with permission of Rodmell Press. All rights reserved.

It took me 13 years of teaching asana, and over 17 years of practicing it, to finally take a seat for meditation. Until recently, if I managed to sit down to meditate, I felt the irresistible magnetism of the dishes, the inbox, laundry and the cabinet to reorganize. Nothing could make me sit still for more than a few minutes, and on the few occasions I did, I felt fake every time, as though I was missing something. Turns out I’d needed a manual to help me crack the code.

Anodea Judith’s “Eastern Body, Western Mind” is shifting my relationship to, and my navigation of, meditation practice. Given practical details about each energy center (chakra) in the body (note: the word is pronounced with “ch” like “choice,” rather than “sh” like “shall”), I’ve learned to be more specific and purposeful in the meditation seat. I’m learning to locate, in my actual physical body, the places where unresolved confusions have been stored, which activates a ready focus for my breathing when I sit — in my own time, in my own words: the ultimate empowerment. Most importantly, I’m learning to generate more listening and respect for the closest people in my life — the ones who’d become accustomed to getting the worst of me, while my students, teachers and friends got the best.

The succinct “takeaway”: a level of consistency in my sitting, and therefore my behavior. Now I can be as astute a listener with my mom as I am with a new student detailing an injury. That wasn’t always the case. I was misappropriating my compassion away from my family and only toward my students. This made for a hilarious paradox — lovely, compassionate, generous teacher with her students versus the inattentive, angry, punishing girl with her family. And when my son was turning four last fall, I saw him trying to take it on. He became like a skycap at the airport, old enough to start helping me with my proverbial baggage, and that was so scary to see. He was impatient, mad, screaming “me.” I knew I either had to handle that weight myself, or pay dearly for the service he’d try to provide for the rest of my life, taking on the problems of parents as we’ve all done.

So if you’re reading this and you don’t currently have a meditation practice, I’ll finally get to the point, and offer you an example of one of the more universal coping mechanisms I’ve encountered in myself. Then you can get a feeling for how this might map out an aspect of you, and get you sitting down with yourself for meditation.

Place one hand on your belly, just below your navel, breathe right there, and read on. If it’s hard for you to hold space for others when they’re getting emotional, stay with me. If you have the compulsion to fix and serve others (teachers and parents to your parents, that’s you), this will help you bring healing to the cycle of having long been depleted emotionally, and you don’t need to blame anyone. In fact, you might find yourself thanking them for placing you in that situation so you could come to this profound healing for yourself.

This region holds your needs as a child — a child who had viable needs but was unable to ask for what was most needed. So instead, you either tuned out or started helping to avoid the feeling of not having your own needs met. Older siblings in big families, households wherein someone was ill, or a parent left abruptly or parents fought incessantly, this is you, too. This region holds the sensations of having been rejected, whether consciously or subconsciously, while others’ needs were addressed. It’s interesting to look at this because we do have a choice: We can blame and dramatize the situation (been there, done that), or sensitively bring balance to that situation by softening our own interior reactions to it.

On behalf of your family members, who in all cases did their best with what they had, you are here to evolve that feeling, that circumstance, or that cycle of behavior, in honour of them. And as awful as it may have been, you really did pick the right life.

Keep your hand on your belly, and breathe deeply there. Let it extend and really open when you breathe in, and soften back toward your spine as you breathe out. While the chakra just below this one (pelvic floor, root chakra) is about grounding, stability and focus, this second one is all about how we flow, feel and yield. It’s related to the element of water, which constitutes 80 percent of your body. When I’m teaching or speaking, I can take cues from anything, seen or unseen, and am completely in the flow – that’s my comfort zone, my hiding place. But when it comes to being alone with myself, I’ve avoided my own healing (and my meditation practice) by placing my focus literally anywhere else.

Your second chakra holds your guilt and your shame. This region also holds your right to feel. If someone was consistently volatile (or exceedingly incommunicative), your entire family had to create ways to handle that subconscious emotional tyranny, and everyone was constantly directed away from their own wellness into impending crisis mode. So you were all waiting for the next outburst or problem, and the flow in your house, your belly and your heart was re-routed in that direction. And you’re all still sort of exhausted from it. We needed healthy examples of how to address our own selves with huge love, and how to nourish ourselves with great care, and we have a chance to be that example now, for everyone around us. It’s never too late.

Here’s where meditation begins to make sense to me, at long last. After learning about the second chakra, the next time I sat down, for the first time ever, I was there for myself, in the same attentive way I’d been for my students. I put my hand on my belly, and sat with my body, by myself, feeling the block and breathing it open. Super simple, really. I’m just gathering information and breathing it open all the time now, whether I’m sitting or standing.

So now I’m listening, with this opening, which is healing me and my relationships with my family. I have a much broader, gentler view of how I can slow down my reactions, in real time. I’m no longer cursing so much in my classes because I’ve seen that my own healing vibration is pinched when I go down that road, which means my students’ healing is being similarly stifled. Misused words give birth to tiny contractions in our bodies. As funny, or inviting, or even comfortably familiar as it can be to hear your yoga teacher curse, I don’t want to perpetuate that tension in the context of class anymore. For now I want to explore what it’s like to just deliver the teachings, sans drama.

And now, when I’m having a really difficult conversation, or trying to get my kid’s shoes on, I’m breathing more space into my belly, and into everyone nearby. When I remember this with my son, I let him dance around in my boots for one extra moment (his favorite pastime) instead of rushing him into his own shoes and out the door. (By the way, the irony of his wanting to wear my shoes isn’t lost on me.) Every time I bring the work back into my body, I restore a bit of balance to myself, to him and to our relationship, thereby clearing the path for him to do this intuitively for himself going forward.

Take time to sit, unravel what resonates with you, ask for help if you need it and give yourself the gift of your own attention. Rather than finding some way to gain control over my animal instincts or take cover from the dictatorship of my mind or my past, I’m specifically bringing attention to the vortices in my body that been have been closed or too open, and I can just be still when I sit. That stillness helps everyone near me. When I bring awareness to those junctions via my simplest breathing in meditation, instead of feeling lazy, fraudulent or disconnected, I’m experiencing a reverent healing.

http://www.amazon.com/Watch-Me-Yoga-Bobby-Clennell/dp/1930485263/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290812907&sr=1-1

Kids love the bright images in picture books, stories they can identify with, and rhymes they can remember. And kids want to do things they have seen their parents do. Most of all, kids yearn for approval and attention, and what better way to come by it than Watch Me Do Yoga, a new illustrated book for kids by our own blogger, senior Iyengar teacher, Bobby Clennell.

Watch Me Do Yoga is a wonderful book to read with a wide range of ages. The book pulls you right in — it’s active from the start. The book celebrates yoga — with a few child-friendly poses — but also relishes the interaction a child has with its parents. In the book, a little girl tells us about her yoga practice as she does poses with her dad, her mom, the family dog, and sometimes alone on her mat. We see her in the garden, on the patio, in her bedroom, and even sitting on a gigantic lotus. She stands like a tree or a mountain and imitates the actions of animals — a fish, a dog, a lion, a tortoise. She celebrates her connection with the life around her and wants her parents (and us) to watch!

Bobby ‘s engaging text and lively illustrations encourage kids and their families to have fun reading together and practicing yoga together.
A great Xmas gift

Simple Twist promotes flexibility in the spine.

Medical Uses:

When the spine is rotated in this way, various problems relating to the spine such as arthritis of the lower back, dorsal region and shoulder joints, as well as sciatica can be corrected. Those who have heel pain or heel spurs are also helped by regular practice of Bharadvajasana.

1. Sit on two folded blankets in Dandasana (Staff Pose).
2. Slide over to the left edge of the blankets. Fold your legs to the left. Place your right shin across the upturned foot of the right foot.
3. Place your right hand on the blankets behind you and your left hand to the outer right thigh. Turn to the right.
4. Lift the whole trunk and rotate even further to the right. Turn your head to look over your left shoulder.

I have been involved with the Ubuntu Education Fund for a number of years now and feel proud to be part of the Ubuntu family. After going there with my mentor and yoga teacher, Lindsey Clennell a number of years ago and starting a yoga program, I was thrilled to see the development of this when I recently returned a few months ago. Here kids in our after school program were having a yoga class, so I took out my flip camera and filmed some of it.

Ubuntu Education Fund understands that children growing up in the townships of Port Elizabeth, South Africa face challenges and obstacles that often prevent them from accessing the same opportunities as their global peers.  With a 40% rate of HIV/AIDS in the community, many of Ubuntu’s students are either infected or affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis.  To this end, Ubuntu has created an after school program and holiday camps that provide a safe space for students to experience activities that can broaden their knowledge and interests.  During these camps, students are also provided with academic and psychosocial support. 

 In the camps, children experience yoga, baking, pottery and ballroom dance classes which help to create more well-rounded, creative individuals.  The camps also provide an opportunity for children to learn new skills and take a break from the hardships they face on a daily basis. The Ubuntu Model of development focuses on not just touching a child’s life but fundamentally changing it.  To achieve this, Ubuntu’s has developed a unique approach to development that integrates medical, psychosocial and educational support.  This model ensures that a child who is enrolled in their services is guided down a pathway to increased opportunities – the ultimate goal being university and the world of work.  For more information on Ubuntu Education Fund please visit their website (www.ubuntufund.org).

Head of the Knee Pose. Practice this pose to promote flexibility in the hip joints and relief from mental turmoil.

Medical Uses:

Practice Head of The Knee Pose (along with the other forward bends) to bring high blood pressure under control. Acidity, bronchitis, colitis, leg deformity, diabetes, kidney problems and prostate problems, can also be tackled by working intelligently and regularly in this pose.

1. Sit in Dandasana (Staff Pose). Bend your left knee to the side and place your left foot against your inner left thigh. Raise your arms.
2. Reach forward and hold your right foot. Curve your spine in and up.
3. Fold forward over your right leg. Place your head on your shin.

Practice Note:

If you are flexible turn your hands out and clasp the left wrist.

If you cannot clasp your feet hold a strap. To enable a quiet mental release, either support your head on a bolster placed across the legs, or rest your head on a chair.

Chapter 11: “Facing the Truth” Excerpt from feature documentary, Addiction, Recovery and Yoga.