I would bend over backwards...

As WoYoPracMo draws to a close, I thought it would be nice to share what I actually do on my mat most days!

Regular reader will know that I have had recurring trouble with an overstretched (oh, ok, horribly damaged) hamstring, and forward bends, at least seated forward bends, are pretty much out of the question a lot of the time. Combine this with the hunching I have been doing over my knitting in the evenings, and, well, I gotta bend backwards - relieves the stiff shoulders, gets movement into those muscles in the back, doesn't antagonise the hamstring (another post on overstretching to come...)

I am still not a flashy backbender, but my back, and front for that matter, sure have loosened up.

From this (notice the yawning gap between my back thigh and the floor):

To this (photos taken during actual practices, so not quite as pretty as the one above!)

Just so you know, I don't do the flashy stuff (I think this is flashy stuff, not the basics) every day. Or even every week, sometimes. Just on the days I feel like it, and it feels safe and possible. Seems to work much better for me that way, since the poses are after all tools, not a goal in themselves - just a reminder, since you might get the wrong impression from all these photos!

New Year, New Yoga Association

Stand up (on a chair), originally uploaded by jnmerrit.

Hee hee, this is truly hilarious. We should all join, methinks....

You will get the chair thing once you have read it.

Q & A with Anna Dubrovsky

I met Anna in September 2006 at KYM, and liked her instantly. She is one of those warm, kind people you feel you can trust, and in fact you can! She is also a really inspiring woman; she has changed her life completely in the last few years - which is why I asked her to do this Q & A. Read on to find out more. Did I mention she is also funnnee? She is.

1. How long have you been practicing yoga, and how did you start?

I took my first yoga class in 2001. It was at a day spa in a New Jersey town I'd just moved to. The ladies in the class were a gorgeous, glowing lot, and most of them were considerably older than I was. I stuck with yoga because I figured it had something to do with their fabulousness. (It's also possible that chemical peels and tummy tucks had something to do with their fabulousness...)

2. How has yoga changed your life?

I wear Lycra instead of rayon to work.

In 2006 I quit my corporate journalism job and moved to India to study yoga. Pretty big change. I came back to the States seven months later and enrolled in a yoga teacher-training program. Now I'm teaching, and I make my living writing about yoga and other topics that interest me. I get paid to go to yoga conferences and gab with the world's most prominent teachers. I won't bore you with the details of my previous career. Suffice it to say that I worked in a cubicle and had five computer monitors on my desk. That change enough for ya?

3. You are currently training to teach yoga. Which teachers have you found most influential and why?

I graduated from my teacher-training program last month.*

I've had quite a few wonderful teachers because I've moved several times since starting yoga. My first steady teacher, Jo Carter, was deeply influential. Her enthusiasm and knowledge hooked me on the practice. She had an Iyengar background, and I left her studio in New Jersey with a great foundation. My next home was in Los Angeles, dubbed "the yoga capital of the West," and I had the opportunity to take regular classes from the sort of teachers who give workshops around the world. Erich Schiffmann was one of them. It was through him that I glimpsed the world of yoga that's beyond the physical. I dove into that world in India, at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, which is where I met you! My teachers there ranged from founder TKV Desikachar to my roommate and friend Ben. I soaked up so much information during my time there. I studied the Yoga Sutra. I learned Vedic chanting. It was truly transformative. Then I came back to the States, moved to Pittsburgh, and began my teacher training with Robert and Cindi Barton. They taught me how to teach. I know that's a lot of "most influential" nominees, but I've been shaped by a lot of hands.

Jo Carter
Erich Schiffmann
Desikachar
Robert and Cindi Barton

4. What kind of a teacher would you like to be?

I want to be the kind of teacher who lives the teachings.

5. And lastly, tell us about your new blog...

In November I started a "diet blog" for Fitness magazine. I don't like calling it a diet blog because of what that suggests. I'm not chronicling my efforts to slim down or squeeze into an old pair of jeans or anything like that. I'm trying to change my eating habits because for many, many years I've done the reduced-cal, non-fat, lite thing. In the process, I've ingested so many unnatural ingredients that it's a wonder I haven't grown a sixth toe. I'm trying to purge my diet of highly processed foods. I have a lot to learn about healthful eating, and I'm hoping the readers will learn along with me -- and teach me.

Find Anna at her website and her blog - worth a visit for anyone who has ever cracked open a diet soda.

* Yay Anna - if you are in her area, you should try to get some teacher time with her. Trust me on this.

Be content

All Is One, originally uploaded by Stephen J Phillips

New year, new beginnings, right?
I have signed myself up for Nischala Joy Devi’s Free Weekly Sutra emails. I quite like seeing what her take on the YS is, as compared to the version I usually consult, TKV Desikachar’s.

Her version on Sutra 1.2, 'Yogascittavrttinirodha' is :

Yoga is the Uniting of Consciousness in the Heart

The past few weeks, I have had occasion(s) to notice just how far our practice of yoga sometimes strays from this intention. For example, grading yoga classes into ‘beginner’, ‘advanced’ and so on. How on earth did we get the idea that you are an advanced yogi if you can do certain poses? I won’t even call them difficult, because there will always be some people who find them easy, some who don’t. Does this mean that a former gymnast who is able to contort more than a normal Joe Shmoe is automatically a more advanced yogi? No no no.

Seriously people, refusing a 50-something woman admission to your advanced class because she can’t do chaturanga 'well enough' is not yogic. Call the class something else. Arm balance or strength, maybe. But if that woman is able to sit quietly with her breath, and sometimes, unite her mind and her heart, she is well on her way to being an advanced yogi. Madam Indra Devi practiced yoga postures until just before her death, and I can tell you she wasn’t doing chaturanga, or bakasana. And nobody could question her advanced status as a yogi.

It can be useful to have physical goals in your asana practice, as it is a way to keep you enthusiastic and coming to your mat every day, and achieving those goals can be liberating and exciting. Stella put this beautifully in her post about achieving handstand. But. The asanas are a tool on our way to yoga, one of the EIGHT limbs of yoga practice. Just one of eight. Not the everything. Not the goal.

So, this year, give yourself a gift – be content with where you are in you practice right now. And grateful that you can practice. Every day maybe? Hee hee.

Start Well!

Today, the first day of the first month of 2008, a year, I am told, of new beginnings: you could start by practicing yoga. Today, and every day for the rest of the month.

For more info, see here.

As you know, I have had a daily practice for a long long time now. I have missed the odd day, it's true, but on the whole, I have to practice to feel half normal. Even if it is just a ten minute breathing practice. Something to tune me in a bit. Or remind me that I am tuned in, depending how you look at it.

Give it a go!

Baking as Yoga

Since we are well into the holidays, and probably all the eating that goes with them, here is a guest post from my friend Anja Zander, who bakes like the proverbial domestic goddess! She is also a dedicated Ashtangi, maintaining a regular practice and even squeezing in a bit of teaching, despite regularly (always) working 14-hour days. She tells me the New Year will hold more balance on that front...

My favorite memories of my childhood are eating freshly baked bread (which was rather super healthy with loads of seeds and not an ounce of white flour in) smothered in butter or eating Apfelstrudel with heaps of fresh cream. Birthdays were most important because then I could have either a Malakoff cake or Profiteroles filled with cream and peaches. My love for baked goods never subsided. Yet years would pass were I would not eat cake never mind attempting to bake. Shop bought cakes or biscuits never had any appeal to me. They tasted all of sugar and bland flour to me. Some have said growing up in a Austrian/German household spoilt me a little bit in my tastes for baked goods......

When I had the chance to go to Europe, I would make sure I had my croissant and bol au chocolat in Paris, my cream smothered Sachertorte in Vienna or the Apfelstrudel with (once again) cream. The smells of their good quality sugar, grounds hazelnuts, flour and butter made me feel calm, comfortable and for a few blissful moments, all was good in the world.

Yet, I was a lousy baker! I could not cook nor bake. Not being able to cook never bothered me, I love throwing salads and pasta together which requires very little cooking. But baking, there was a whole world out I wanted to discover there yet every attempt to bake ended up in total failure. Burnt, stodgy, boring, too sweet.

Until the day I got hold of the book by Nigella Lawson, How to Be A Domestic Goddess. I liked the title. A book written by a modern woman with a good sense of irony and self depreciation, someone who unapologetically loved food and as she said herself, was not someone who liked fancy pretentious food. A woman after my heart! I enjoyed the little introduction to each recipe (scoffing dark chocolate cake at midnight is always a good thing according to Nigella) and decided to try bake. I cannot even remember what is the 1st thing I baked but I know it worked! I could create something so tasty out of flour, sugar, butter and some good dark chocolate. Around the same time I realized I could bake, I started to take yoga up again. Like baking, yoga had been part of my life early but I abandoned it because I lacked good guidance. I found a wonderful yoga teacher (Nadine...yes you!) who re-inspired me to do yoga, who taught me how to be more gentle, calmer and be in the moment.

There have been many a tear and panic moment when some cake did not turn out the way I had in my head - from a cake bursting into flames in the oven to plastic melting around a cake to just me having way too high expectations of what the cake should look like. I do apologies to everyone around me who had to put up with the angst that I managed to artificially create! As the years passed, I did more and more yoga and stopped punishing myself in yoga if I could not pretzel myself as the teacher could or as the pretty picture in the yoga book. I learnt, without really consciously thinking about it, to be in the moment, enjoy the poses I could to in yoga and realize we all have different limitations and to work within those. And what seemed to be quite sudden, the yoga poses came more easily to me, I managed to do poses I never thought I could. And one should not measure oneself according to what one can do but it is so fun when one can do something one never thought one could!

And this brings me back to baking, now I bake and bring a whole lot less angst into it and the cakes turn out so much better. Oh yes, occasionally there is the still the moment of angst and I am sure everyone around me scuttles off then (as much as in yoga I have moments of annoyance with myself). In general, I talk to my baked goods while they are rising, mixing, melting or resting. Seems perfectly sane to me :) I lovingly melt the 70 % dark chocolate into the smooth butter, I coax the egg whites to be all firm and well behaved, I have a rather good relationship with yeast, which produces yummy cinnamon buns with a maple pecan topping (they are I must admit one of my favorite recipes and I think most of my friends agree). Nigella and her humorous descriptions and reassurances helped me become a Domestic Goddess, but yoga taught me to be in the moment, to focus only on what I do now and baking needs that, as does yoga. The ingredients need your full attention and to really be there and then they do happily as you want it. Every now and then the baking faeries get a bit sneaky and mess it a little bit up;I laugh and try again. Or maybe try something different. As I do when I get stuck on a yoga pose.

To yoga and baking - both bring benefits of good friends (and not just because I feed them occasionally) and a certain peace of mind and fulfillment!

* Sorry about the poor-quality photo of Anja - it was the only one I had to hand, and I had to fiddle with the color/contrast a bit.