Overkill

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LABOR DAY CHALLENGE

The labor day challenge is find an unusual place to yoga plank and take a picture of yourself.

The rules are that it has to be SAFE.

Unusual and doable. NOTHING DANGEROUS. Have fun and post it somewhere, your FB page for instance.

Hint Hint to teacher trainees you might get this as a last minute assignment. First on FB page WINS!

I will post mine later.

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Kicked In The Asana

No pic downloads tonight.

In southern Wisconsin we got kicked in the asana with extreme high heat the last two days which have made me extremely ill.

So I am resting.

I was watching the news tonight and it appears that all the extreme weather we are experiencing is due to back to back La Nina. Interesting trend. It actually comes from a cooling pattern in the Pacific which causes this weird patterning so that we had extreme patterns in storms last winter, drought in Texas, and the recent storm up the coast.

Weather rules. Our lives. Literally. I think the reason it is affecting me so intensely because my normal patterning expects cooling this time of the year and my pitta has been aggravated all summer.

So.

I am really ready for the cooling to begin. When pitta is aggravated there are several things you can do:

Stay cool. Which is difficult if you teach in a hot yoga room.
Eat cooling foods. Sorry no Mexican.
Try to relax.

So right now I am laying still in a cool room. No heat. Trying to not be aggravated by my normal aggravations. And watching the wether.

The worst thing you can do is to fight it.

One thing you learn in Ayurveda is that people TEND to attract to what is not necessarily in their best interests. We are drawn to what aggravates us. and we stubbornly refuse what we need.

I am giving a workshop on restorative yoga in a few weeks and I know the people who need it most. Will resist.

Right now every tendency in me is telling me to resist and go out and create heat but my mind is saying lay here and chill the heck out. I have enough heat right now built up from the summer. Hope I can store a little for January.

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THE DAM BURSTS OPEN

I.E. my hips are opening.

Last night I was teaching a class and moved the class into double pigeon and it happened. My top knee dropped on to the bottom ankle and vice versa. My back was straight. I don’t know what shifted but my rotators have been tight for so many years I had given up. Even though I work on that opener DAILY. I just felt it would never happen.

The first time it occured to me that this area was problematic was in my 200 hour teacher training. At that time I was mostly practicing Bikram yoga and the only pose that resembles this hip rotation is toe stand. Which you pretty much have to be able to do since there is nothing that warms you up for it in Bikram. When we practiced seated poses in my training I remember having the top knee about 12 inches off the ankle and being very hunched over. And very uncomfortable.

That was four years ago. Since then, I have worked on this area and although I steadily started to drop the knee and sit straighter, there was definitely a wall I hit where everything stopped and what I had opened seemed to be it.

One thing that helped me was realizing that ONE pose was not going to solve this tightness in my hips. I started working it from a variety of angles. I also moved it into some standing poses. I also practiced it on my back. With straps. Sitting on blocks. Yin. Yang. I did it all. So the lesson is to be PATIENT and flexible in your inflexibility. In my teaching career I do have to say that I see students who ALWAYS want the familiarity of working into poses they like. The students who like variety, are patient, and breath, open like the dam.

Scarey picture. I want to drive over this bridge, but then again, I DON’T.

Can this be in my future:

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