Back pain is one of the most common physical complaints people have. 80% of Americans complain of back pain at some point in their lives. Learning to stop overusing your spine (which we do to avoid having to stretch big hip and shoulder muscles) can help keep your spine safer. In addition, learning to lengthen and compress your spine intentionally [...]
Last week we worked on spreading awareness to all the parts of our bodies. This week we will focus on generating the sensitivity to guide your awareness to where you need it most. There are many poses in which almost everyone benefits from the same alignment instructions (i.e., energize and lift the back thigh in high lunge). However, all our bodies are [...]
Yoga and meditation teachers often use the words 'attention' and 'awareness' interchangeably. To me they are fundamentally different, as they create two fundamentally different experiences of reality. Attention means being focused on one thing. Awareness means taking in multiple things at once. Focusing on one thing gives us a distorted view of reality, especially when we (as we often do) [...]
As your awareness of your body grows more subtle, you may notice that your head is not really where you thought it was, namely balancing on top of your spine. This postural misalignment is called hyperkyphosis/head forward position. To address this problem, you need to focus on stretching out the front of the chest and strengthening the middle-upper back. [...]
Keeping your shoulders safe can be more challenging than protecting your hips. The shoulder joint does for the arm what the hip joint does for the leg. It connects the limb to the trunk. Both are ball and socket joints, which allow for the greatest range of motion of any joints. However, there are two key differences that explain [...]
Getting your upper back involved in backbends (last week's theme) is a challenging adjustment for many. However, like any directional adjustment, it IS possible to take even this important adjustment too far. When we do that, we collapse the back ribs and reduce spaciousness in the back body even as we create more space in the front. This week we [...]
One major problem with backbends that most of us have experienced at some point is a sore lower back. Backbend-induced lumbar pain is the result of following the path of least resistance. Concentrating your backbends in the lumbar spine is simply the easiest thing to do. However, it's neither the healthiest, nor the most effective path. If you want [...]
When you look at photos of people in super-deep backbends, it often looks like they have a sharp 90 degree kink in their lower back. It looks that way because they do. They have a hyper-mobile lower back. That certainly seems advantageous for deep backbends, but it is not something you want to emulate if your back doesn't do that [...]
What does it mean to think of yoga as a gift? Plenty of people practice yoga because they sense that it has the power to transform their life. They sense that it can create a shift away from the ego-centric, achievement-oriented mode that the modern world incessantly reinforces. But it is all too common to see yogis unconsciously applying the [...]
In the yogic tradition, spanda is the subtle creative pulsation that manifests in all living and non-living entities. Recognizing and aligning with spanda helps us become more present in the moment, with a greater sense of connection and joy. The ancient yogic assertion that everything pulsates is true in a very literal way: Scientific investigations confirm that everything vibrates, from [...]
