The Travelling Yogi

If you’re a serious yoga nerd, travelling, wonderful though it may be, can sometimes create a bit of an issue – where the heck will you fit in your practice? This may be no problem if you’re the type of person who wakes at the crack of dawn and gets the whole shebang done before hitting the sights, but what about the rest of us? Can you really keep your yoga going amid a week jam-packed with sight-seeing?

Only go on yoga retreats and beach vacations?

Is this the obvious solution? Create your whole trip to accommodate your practice? Tempting, and such trips certainly have their value. But what about when the serious adventure-bug bites? The planets align and you’re able to go on your dream trip city-hopping through Europe! Or cat-café hopping through Tokyo! Or driving a Jeep through the Australian outback! Perhaps it’s possible to use the unpredictability and exploratory spirit of such travel to your yogic advantage.

Yoga in the interstices

One of the beautiful things about travel is its potential to break up our routine and our tendencies to over-plan our lives. You may make the perfect plan to see all the monuments of Rome, take one wrong turn, and end up spending the day chatting with some locals over pizza and red wine. Similarly, if you try to plan yoga into every day of your travels, chances are you’ll get frustrated, over-tired, and stop. But if you simply do it when it feels right – a few balancing poses at the top of a mountain hike, a long ankle stretch in your tiny hotel room at the end of a pavement-pounding day – you will reawaken to the incredible benefits a little bit of focused yoga can bestow.

Put a studio on your itinerary!

Another approach is to incorporate at least one full-length yoga class into your vacation plans. This is of course much easier if you are visiting larger urban centres, but Googling around nowadays reveals that yoga instruction is thriving even in smaller towns. Even if you never find it, setting some time aside in your vacation to seek out a studio can take you off the beaten track, away from the hubbub of touristy sites. If you do find it, it can be fascinating and rejuvenating to see how the practice has been taken up by other cultures. Of course the benefits of a full class in the midst of a busy time are myriad and well-known to the yoga nerd!

So next time you get that travelling jones, make a plan, keep it loose, roll up your travel mat and hit the open road. If nothing else, travel is a great time to reconnect with a yogic feeling of wonder and openness to new things. Breathe deeply, stay present, and enjoy every step of the journey!

Even When You’re Not Doing It, Yoga Can Help

A cold, hard truth – sometimes life gets really, really hard. This is, of course, a truth that yoga helps us observe unflinchingly. And yet, sometimes we still flinch. No matter if we have a loved one dying of cancer, our daughter has just failed grade three, we’re enduring a divorce, we’re stuck in a career we hate, or we’re simply caught in a spiral of depression, there are times when things just plain get too tough, and we feel very, very low.

So we just solve all our problems with yoga, right?

Of course the thing to do here would be to practice as if our hair was on fire, to paraphrase the venerable Pema Chodron. Often, however, we find these are the times we do anything but! Watching nine hours of TV, drinking a whole bottle of wine, eating a whole bag of chips…whatever our vice happens to be, we indulge it. And the next day we indulge it again, even though we swore that was the last time, the next morning we would for sure get up at six, practice an hour before work, sit for an hour before bed, be mindful and present all day long and eat only whole foods with chia seeds on top. But we didn’t. Again.

Sometimes we just don’t. Sometimes it really feels like we just can’t.

Those times are especially hard, because we know by then, as seasoned practitioners, how good we can feel if we just commit. Because we have been there. We have been on track. We have seen the light that yoga can lend to our lives.

Why can’t we pull it together and practice our yoga when it absolutely matters most?

This, of course, is the million dollar question. And of course there is no easy answer. Of course it has to do with all the sludgy webby weird stuff about being human and alive and in the world that we deal with every time we come to the mat.

But even if practice itself seems virtually impossible, is it perhaps fair to say it is absolutely amazing to even be aware of its existence? That, even in these garbage times of mindless Frito-eating and Buzzfeed-surfing, we are aware there is a space of connection and calm, and we know the tools to get us there? Even if it’s not currently within reach, even if today it is only a source of guilt because we can’t get off our butts and get there, perhaps this knowledge can serve as a source of comfort. If connection and calm were accessible once, we can know that they will be again.

If you can, allow this knowledge to cheer you. If you can’t, that’s okay too. Let it all be. And see. Chances are, one day, light will break through, your bum will rise up into its first downward dog of the week or month or year, and you will begin again.

More than One Way to Use a Yoga Mat

Here is a story of a friend. Perhaps you have a similar friend. Who is simply the opposite of calm. She is anxious, a worry-wart, has a bad temper. Much as you know yoga would help her, you also know she’s not going to do it. She’s just not the type. She’s told you so repeatedly.

And so you worry.

By this point in your life, you have gone through the phase of giving your friend your dog-eared Iyengar texts. (“What does he know about suffering? He thinks he knows it all, eh?”)

You’ve stopped suggesting she just sit still and breathe a bit. (“It just makes me hyperventilate!”)

You see the yoga mat you bought her for Christmas curled up in a corner every time you visit, bright green as the day it was born.

By now you’ve learned, good little yogi that you are, that it’s best to be calm and listen as your friend rhymes off the dramas she’s facing – conspiracy theories about who hates her at work, her partner’s inability to correctly load the dishwasher, the impending doom of an upcoming visit with a sister. You sit and listen, you breathe, you laugh at her jokes and her strange, brash kindness, but you worry all the same.

After all, she has high blood pressure, some kind of stress rash, is it only a matter of time before things get worse? Maybe it’s time to start bothering her again. After all, if something happened to this friend, not only would you miss them terribly, you would feel somehow responsible as the one who was that much closer to enlightenment!

And then one day she calls.

Equal parts embarrassed and proud, she informs you, “Well, I bought a meditation tape. You know, a relaxation thingy for my ipod.”

“You did?” you squeal. You have won! She listened to you! “What kind of relaxation thingy exactly?”

“One of those, ‘picture yourself on a beach, sinking into the sand,’ kind of things. I gotta tell you, I really like it! I’m finally using that yoga mat! I lie there for twenty whole minutes and chill!”

For a moment, you’re indignant. She didn’t listen to you at all! That isn’t yoga, it’s escapism! That won’t help, it’s not what the mat was for!

And then you picture this friend actually lying on her green yoga mat, imagining for twenty whole minutes that she is on the beach, ignoring the demands of her job, her irritations with her family, all of it, actually chilling!

Thank god she didn’t listen to you!

She finally listened to herself. Just like what happened to you way back when, she heard the chatter of her mind, the butterflies in her belly, the tension in her back, and finally realized they were far too loud, something had to be done. Something that actually helped her. She found her own way.

And this, of course, is yoga.

So what’s the moral of this story exactly? Use your yoga mat as a beach towel? Well, yes! If that’s what floats your boat. Or connects you to the earth. Or whatever it is that your own particular bodymind is crying out for in the moment. No matter what your well-meaning friends may say!

Managing Life Transitions with Yoga

Sometimes transitions are hard. Really, really hard. Losing a loved one, let’s say, or going through a divorce. We know that these universally qualify as extremely hard times, so we make special effort to diligently practice to help get us through. As many of us have experienced, yoga can be a real lifesaver during life’s most difficult transitions.

But what about not-so-difficult transitions?

Given all that we’ve learned from the big stuff, a little move across town shouldn’t be a problem! An internal job change? No big deal! We’re busy during these transitions, so we might ease up on practice to accommodate the extra things we have to do. After all, we’ve got this! We’re seasoned yogis! We know how to be comfy in the face of uncertainty, how to breathe and stay present.

And suddenly — whump! The new apartment is way noisier than we expected! The new job has a ton of ridiculous paperwork involved that we never had to do before! The new grocery store doesn’t have our favourite brand of lentils! And we lose it!

Suddenly there’s no time for yoga at all, we’re too busy obsessively researching sound-proofing wall-paper, desperately begging for our old job back, trying to get a crate of lentils shipped to our home. Before we know it our upper back is a crunched-up, nasty old thing.

Even worse than that, we are flagellating the heck out of ourselves for losing it, our internal monologue rife with, “Chill out! What is your problem? You were actually calmer when your sister had cancer!”

Where did we go wrong?

Just because we’re yogis, doesn’t mean we won’t react to change or that we are somehow failing when we are not calm in the face of transition. Further, yoga is called a practice precisely because there is no place of fruition, no time when we can stop and say, “Okay! Now I get it! I am done.” As mentioned, when things really heat up, when things are undeniably tough, we might take special care to practice hard. When things seem a little easier, we might want to front a little bit, and act like the needed lessons have already been learned.

Hmm. Yet another lesson learned.

Time to practice. Again.

Luckily, philosophies of various schools suggest specific poses that will help to ease transitions.

From a chakra perspective, stimulation of the second chakra helps to balance the energy centre responsible for weathering change. Try a yin-style frog pose (very wide-legged child’s pose) held for two to three minutes to stimulate this chakra.

According to Chinese medicine, replenishing our kidney chi can help ease a fear of change. To get the vital energy flowing in the kidney/urinary bladder meridians, try a yin-style sphinx pose.

Any yang style practice – vinyasa, ashtanga, etc. – will help unblock stagnant energy and ready the body to accept change.

And if you’re all tuckered out from resisting the transition, try just a few minutes lying in savasana, breathing. This could be just the pause we need to remind us that even when everything is different and unmanageable and undesirable, there is really still only this. One moment at a time.

The Yoga is in the Details!

One of the reasons yoga never gets dull for its devotees is the endless details inherent in the practice. There is always something to refine, whether it be externally rotating your femur that quarter inch further in Warrior Two, feeling the connection as you engage Mula Bandha, or noticing you’ve overextended yourself by the jagged quality of your breath – attention to detail is what the practice is all about. In light of this, “Always find the right details,” may also be excellent advice for yogis – especially teachers of the practice.

How Might this Axiom Apply to Yoga?

A creative writing teacher of mine once said, “Always find the right details.” He meant that your story or poem or passage of prose would only truly come to life if the reader was able to see, hear, or smell, in their mind’s eye, ear, or nose, the little details of the story’s world – the deep, throbbing wrinkle in a mother’s forehead; the otherworldly shriek of the wind; the grape gum scent of the lilac bush. My teacher explained how these details were what made a work of creative writing completely specific to the individual author, yet somehow universal and recognizable to a large number of readers.

Just as specificity is important for the writer, it is key to the yoga teacher’s success. When a teacher advises to lift the pelvic floor muscles, decrease the space between the hips and ribs, and feel the pit of the belly pulling in, more students are likely to respond to the cue than if the teacher simply said, “Engage your core!”

Just as writers do, excellent yoga teachers often employ analogy, simile, and metaphor to convey their meaning to a class. For example, comparing the sound of Ujjayi breath to waves pulling in and out gives us a specific reference point. Imagining we are holding a block between our thighs helps us to engage our muscles without excessive thought and effort. When asked to truly embody what a warrior means to us, our Virabhadrasana One becomes that much stronger. The specificity of the cues helps make the practice satisfying.

How do Yoga Teachers Come Up with These Cues?

Again, like the writer, through patient, consistent observation. Teachers must observe their students and see both what works, and what mistakes are repeated. More importantly, they must closely observe themselves as they practice.

Finally, the committed yogi must read and research to provide a sense of history and authenticity in their classes. While texts pertaining to yoga are wide-ranging and diverse, if a teacher can zero in on something specific – a single sutra from Patanjali, a particular chakra, or a pair of Chinese meridian lines – students will benefit from the constrained focus. This honing in on something specific allows the practitioner to discover new details within themselves.

When all of this is working in harmony – anatomic details, useful imagistic language, and a thematic focus – we experience the type of class that truly engages the whole group and creates an experience larger than the sum of its parts. Much like reading a juicy novel where everything simply comes together, a good yoga class is evidence of the teacher and their students doing the hard work of finding the right details.

Making Your Own Private Yoga Retreat

Imagine a one-day yoga retreat at a converted barn amid rolling country hills, complete with spring-fed pond, saltwater hot tub, and macrobiotic brunch. A beautiful retreat. What might it mean, and what purpose might it serve in the practitioner’s life?

The obvious benefits

A retreat provides the yoga student with all the obvious benefits of extended practice, plus the benefits of a day in the country – relaxation, self-care, time to breathe and be with nature.

Something longer and further flung – Costa Rica, let’s say, or Hawaii – would undoubtedly provide students with more of the same, as well as the intense experience of consecutive days of practice in an ideal setting.

Combined with the healthy foods served in these places, we are bound to come away feeling like our best selves and then some.

But what if that’s not possible?

Of course there will be times, for whatever reason, that a lengthy, idyllic retreat is simply not available to you. Is it still possible to create that retreat feeling within our own city, or even our home?

Thinking of what makes a retreat a retreat, and not just everyday practice, it seems that much of it has to do with the commitment to it, the devotion of one’s valuable time. The first step then, seems to be to declare a certain length of time – a weekend, or just an afternoon – as your retreat time.

The setting is just as important. The nature thing is nice, sure, but if you’re stuck in the city can you plan a walk in a nearby ravine, coupled with two hours of uninterrupted time to practice and read in your candle-lit rec-room?

Can you devote three consecutive evenings to practice at a nearby studio, followed by stargazing, even if it’s only in the parking lot?

Perhaps you have a friend who makes a wicked quinoa salad, and another who’s a smoothie-nut. Maybe the three of you could get together for a Sunday morning, teach each other a few moves, read something inspiring to one another, and chow down.

Change it up!

Another benefit of a yoga retreat is simply changing one’s routine. The change could be as simple as trying a new studio. Maybe there’s that new one that just opened with the special for first-time students. Declare the duration of the intro rate a retreat, and see where it goes!

Or shake up the style of yoga you do, and allow your body to explore new frontiers. The retreat I just did was my introduction to traditional ashtanga. Used to gentle vinyasa, yin, and sitting meditation, my body was achy in brand new ways, but open and alive in new ways as well! If you’re fast-paced, slow down! If you tend toward the slow, crank things up a notch!

Okay, so none of these things are a week in Costa Rica, but it’s possible monks in ancient India weren’t getting there much either. So think about what yoga retreat might be possible for you, and get away from it all, right here and right now!

Three Ways to Creativity Through Yoga Practice

Whether you are a yoga teacher who paints on the side, a full-time author who enjoys a weekly class, or a yoga practitioner who’s always wanted to try something creative, you are on the right track with yoga! As connections between the two types of practice reveal themselves to you, they can be cultivated to make yoga one of the most valuable tools in your artistic arsenal!

Here are three ways your yoga practice can serve your creativity:

1. Smooth Out the Jitters:

Many of us have been there. You’re ready, at your desk or the easel, cup of tea poured, relaxing music on the stereo, all your equipment laid out. And you just can’t start. You seize up! What if you mess it up? What if you waste all this nice paint? Maybe you’d better just go make a snack. Before you know it, the time set aside to do your art has passed, and nothing’s been done.

Studies have shown that asana practice reduces cortisol, the stress hormone. Some sources say the reduction lasts for up to two hours after practice, making these two hours the perfect window to give your art a shot. Breaking through anxiety is especially key when starting a brand new project.

2. The Voices in our Heads:

Okay! You’ve managed to keep your bum in the chair, your fingers on the paintbrush for a few hours – you’ve started a work of art! But then the voices begin. “Who would want to read this stupid thing?” your brain might say. Or, “This doesn’t even look like anything! The colours are all wrong!” Time to return to good old swadhyaha – the practice of self-study.

Regular practitioners of yoga and meditation have already laid the groundwork for identifying such judgements as thoughts rather than any sort of truth. While such thoughts can be persistent and distracting when doing vulnerable, personal work such as art, the act of labelling them and not engaging with them gets us that much closer to allowing these thoughts to simply float away.

3. Being Bodies:

It is no secret that yoga helps us to learn the language of our bodies. Understanding and valuing the body’s wisdom can be of profound import in an art practice. Most art projects involve making myriad decisions that affect the outcome of the work. Learning to make these decisions more intuitively, with less stress, depends upon understanding the body’s subtle cues. Are you tensing up? Are you breathing freely? Does your belly feel open as you begin this next section?

Rather than seeing the physical act of writing or painting as merely a way to get your ideas from brain to the paper, you can begin to experience the work the body is doing as inextricable from these ideas – even generative of them. Regular yoga practice underscores the all-important mind-body connection, and helps us to apply it.

The list of connections between a yoga practice and creative practice could go on and on. The more you explore and cultivate these connections, the more profound they become, until, in the most blissfully creative times, it seems the two practices are simply two sides of the very same coin.

Can Yoga Just Be Fun?

Picture this – you’ve been looking forward to class all day. You got up long before work for a sitting meditation and a little pranayama. Some B.K.S. Iyengar served as your light subway read.

This afternoon when you felt a flash of anger toward your colleague, you took a deep breath, had a good look at the thing, and let it float away. Nailed it! And now it’s time for class with one of the best teachers in town – Nirvana feels within your grasp!

Sounds perfect! What could go wrong?

Class moves along nicely, from the opening Om to several sweaty Surya Namaskars, challenging standing sequences, and plenty of balancing work. Your focus is impeccable, you’re connected to your brothers and sisters on their yoga mats, flowing, and growing, the sound of the ocean right there in your victorious breaths.

“All that,” your teacher says, “should leave us feeling good and ready to give Crow Pose a go!”

“Yes!” you’re thinking. “Totally! Now is my time! Not only do I love practicing Crow, I’m also no longer attached to achieving it, I get it now! Process! I need only be the crow I want to see, etc. etc.” When the woman beside you attains lift-off. Nails it. And lets out a pretty funny yelp. The sweaty folks in the room start to laugh. The Crow-nailer thunks to the floor, giggling herself. A woman in the back shouts out, “She’s having a Crowgasm!” and everyone just dies.

Even your calm, very serious, steeped-in-authentic-tradition yoga teacher is cracking up!

And just like that, you’re furious. This is not what you paid for! You were getting somewhere, damnit, and suddenly no one’s taking this seriously at all! You were about to lift a toe off the ground in perfect harmony with your out-breath, nary a discursive thought in sight, and now you’re supposed to throw it all away for a crummy joke? Everybody’s chatting! The lady next to you is saying how fun that was! Fun! Of all things!

Which is when, of course, it hits you. Somewhere along this path to enlightenment you’ve been loping down lately, you forgot that part of the whole point is balance! You’re allowed to have fun, you’re allowed to laugh, and you’re really, really allowed to be present with others and seek connection even when they veer off the path you thought they should take.

Not to say, of course, that yoga should be all Crowgasms all the time. But when you step back and see what led to that moment of laughter, it was significant hard work and plenty of concentration. The fact that that woman’s success and celebration threw your own off course may serve as a very useful teacher indeed.

An Ounce of Yoga to Heal or Prevent Injuries

My friend, fellow yoga teacher, and physiotherapy assistant, Lindsay Regan teaches and assists people with injuries every day. As her personal practice and teaching experience has deepened, she has come to see the extent to which yoga can not only heal existing injuries, but also prevent injuries from returning or occurring at all.

Having found her insights so helpful to my own body’s quirks and misfires, I decided to share her wisdom here in a brief interview:

JT: What injuries do you often see that you believe could be prevented by yoga practice?

LR: Lower back injuries can often be prevented and/or healed with a regular yoga practice. Many of my clients who come to the clinic with back pain have jobs and lifestyles that find them sitting for hours on end, or performing heavy lifting. Counteracting these stresses to the body by focusing on chest openers (anahatasana, bridge), strengthening the back (salabhasana, utkatasana), and working on proper posture (tadasana, balancing poses) can make a world of difference.

JT: Are there certain poses you would recommend everyone do every day or is it just a matter of having a regular solid practice?

LR: My own teacher always says that a little bit every day is better than one hour once a week. While I agree, I also know it can be so difficult to fit daily practice into a busy lifestyle. Committing to a class or two a week is a terrific start. I recommend to my students to make note of just one or two poses from class that felt especially good to their body, and to try to practice those daily. Just five minutes in the morning or evening makes a big difference. Since every body is different, letting people find the poses that help them most helps them to listen to their body and create their own path to prevention and healing.

JT: How does yoga play into rehabilitation and healing from injury?

LR: I think that yoga can play into healing in many ways. By moving, stretching, and strengthening your body you are healing. But, as mentioned above, yoga also teaches us to listen to our bodies. This is a skill I can’t recommend highly enough. Slow down and listen to what your body is trying to tell you.

Yoga also teaches us to be patient with ourselves, which is of chief importance when we are trying to heal. You cannot rush back into whatever you were doing that got you injured in the first place. Be patient and allow yourself time to recover. Incorporating an asana practice into your routine can be an excellent way to lay all-important groundwork between your injury and resuming more vigorous physical activity down the line. You will be more in touch with your body, more patient with your progress, and less likely to risk pain and injury again!

JT: Thank you for the great tips, Lindsay. I guess I’d better get off the computer and onto the yoga mat!

Put Your Best Feet Forward: Yoga for the Feet

How much does the average person think about their feet? Not enough! These strange little guys at the ends of our legs do so much for us, day in day out. Luckily yoga practice encourages us to take off our shoes and socks, stretch our toes, and feel our soles meet the earth.

Why are feet so important?

Healthy feet are a key element to a healthy body! Many experts, from podiatrists to osteopaths to yoga teachers agree that proper alignment in the feet can stave off not only foot problems, but knee, hip and back trouble as well. When we look at the body holistically, as we do in yoga, this certainly stands to reason.

So how do I find this proper alignment?

Next time you’re on your yoga mat, try making a little date with your feet. Give them a massage by rolling them over a tennis ball, pressing the ball into the sole of your foot as you roll. When you have rolled out one foot, find Tadasana and note the difference between each foot. Many practitioners experience a greater sense of connection to the earth in the activated foot!

NOTE: do not try this massage if you are pregnant, due to meridian lines associated with miscarriage present in the feet.

Next, focus on the four corners of your feet – the big toe mound, baby toe mound, right side of the heel and left side of the heel. Notice where your weight naturally falls, then try to redistribute the weight evenly to find a truly strong foundation.

Now stretch those toes!

Yoga teachers are always telling us to spread our toes wide. Of course this helps with balance, but did you know that when we lift our toes, and ground through the toe mounds, we are naturally lifting those all-important arches? Further, keeping our toes stretched and able to articulate individually helps to prevent all sorts of ailments from bunions to hammer toes.

Going deeper

Yogically speaking, our feet do much more than hold us up as we walk around. They serve to connect us to the earth, and can be key to balancing the first Chakra, Muladhara. When we connect our feet to the ground, we awaken our feeling of the right to be here and the safety of the earth.

In Eastern Body, Western Mind, Chakra expert Anodea Judith explains her practice of having clients stand to work with first Chakra issues. “Doing psychological work while standing increases the body’s energy, allows greater assertiveness, overcomes passivity, and supports independence. The mere act of standing is an assertion of autonomy.” She draws our attention to metaphors such as “taking a stand,” “having a leg to stand on,” and “putting one’s foot down,” as examples of how the connectedness of the feet plays a vital role in one’s ability to feel comfortable in the world.

While it may be unrealistic to spend our lives barefoot and grounded every second of the day, taking the time to care for our feet is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. So make them a focal point of your practice from time to time, in gratitude for all they do for you!