NOVEMBER THEME: Heart Openers with Backbone

Yoga is a cumulative process. The practice will slowly but surely change you, like sea glass in the ocean - waves smoothing out the edges and polishing the surface. It is a gradual process of refining that happens over minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years on the mat and no one else can do it for you. As the practice changes you, you will see the experience of your practice with new eyes, and feel the postures from a new body. You will see your life with new insight. There is constant and continuous opportunity for deepening, growth, and insight. If we are really paying attention, there is never a moment to be bored! It is truly a joyful path.

Each month, my Livestream yoga classes will constellate around a theme. Through repetition of the theme you become well organized, confident, and skillful in your body one theme at a time. Classes will remain diverse in sequence and postures each session yet you will begin to deepen your strength, understanding, and facility around the monthly theme each time you join me for the practice so that your progress becomes cumulative.

I plan to write a bit about each theme here on this blog at the start of the new month. Throughout the month I will share small video snippets of how we are exploring these themes on the mat.

I want to kick off my blog with this theme that is dear to my heart and bound to my approach to yoga: Substantiated Expansion. Strength to Open. Scaffolding that you erect around yourself so that you can really go out on a limb! Heart Openers with Backbone.

As a younger practitioner, I used to practice yoga by just sinking into my natural flexibility. I moved from the joints but didn’t fully understand how to articulate from the bandhas, the inner depths of my core, or the brakes of my opposing muscular strength to get the most out of each posture. I pushed my body in the direction of, “deeper! further! go back! reach back” as my college years Bikram teacher used to say. When I learned to harness the strength, stability, and integration that was the scaffolding to my flexibility my practice and my body changed for the better. My pelvic joints felt buoyant, supported, decompressed, and stable. (Bye Bye SI Joint pain!) I found a powerful connection to my deep core, pelvic floor, and shoulder stability that was a turning point in my inversion practice. (Bye Bye wall - hello handstands in the middle of the room!) I found those rusty, dusty, under-activated, overstreched muscles in the glutes and hamstrings and upper back that I had been stretching stretching stretching and learned how to turn them on and activate my own strength to open. Now this was really living! I was standing in my own strong legs. I could breathe deeply in my deepest back bends and luxuriate in each moment of opening my lungs. I felt rooted as I opened. I felt connected to the ground beneath me and the core of my being. Instead of feeling compressed and jammed up in my low back after a class focusing on spinal extension (back bending) I felt shaky in my legs that I was using powerfully to hold myself up and well supported/activated in my upper back. I was in my power. I had my own back. It was a different kind of trust fall - more competent and substantiated and less blind and hopeful. It was a personal revolution in my approach to the practice.

Now with the world in varying degrees of social distancing, I am noticing in my Livestream classes student community the need for opening the front body (hip flexors, chest, anterior deltoids) and strengthening the back body (glutes, hamstrings, upper back, posterior deltoids) to act as a counterpose to the Slumpasana of hours behind the computer screen and slouching into less ergonomic postural work from home set ups. So that is exactly what I intend to do this November - heart openers that are substantiated from a strong back body. Free your hip flexors from sitting in chairs. Open up some more breathing room in your chest and shoulders. Studies show that upright, open-hearted posture is connected to a reduction in low level anxiety and depression and an increased ability to focus mentally. Slouching habitually not only affects our physical bodies but our entire attitude, energy, and orientation to our lives.

So how do you correct slouched posture? Do you reflexively pin the shoulders back, suck in your gut, and puff up your chest like a military posture and then watch everything melt and slump and sag back again moments later? Or do you gradually yet surely improve your posture by focusing on postures and movement to open the front body and strengthen the back body so that your posture becomes sustainable and deeply embodied? The latter is what we will be doing this month. Join us to improve your posture, uplift your mood, and substantiate your back bends. The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. Yoga is a powerful vehicle for change. It is a practice for liberation - for one and for all. As you build strength you start to believe in your own inner resilience and integrity. As you gain flexibility you release habitual patterns of tension, guarding, and and straining in your body and your way of moving through life.

I hope you can join me this month for a drop in Livestream or on my Membership platform to explore this compelling theme and feel how an open heart and dropping into your own Strength to Open ripples out to every dimension of your life.