Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. -Cicero

The body is an amazing source of intelligence. It is always there for you, pumping blood, never skipping a heartbeat, digesting whatever food you put in it and maintaining homeostasis. Is this reliable, intelligent bio-computer making a mistake by craving ice cream or a hamburger or chocolate? Are cravings due to lack of will-power or discipline? I’d like to suggest that cravings are not a problem. They are critical pieces of information that tell you what your body needs.

The important thing is to understand why you crave what you crave. Perhaps your diet is too restrictive or devoid of essential nutrients. Perhaps you are living a lifestyle that is too boring or stressful. Your body tries to correct the imbalance by sending you a message: a craving. A craving for something sweet could mean you need more protein, more exercise, more water or more love in your life. The key to stopping the sugar craving is to understand and deliver what your body really needs.

No book or theory can tell you what to eat. Only awareness of your body and its needs can tell you. Of all the relationships in our lives, the one with our body is the most essential. It takes communication, love and time to cultivate a relationship with your body. As you learn to decipher and respond to your body’s cravings, you will create a deep and lasting level of health and balance.

The next time you have a craving, treat it as a loving message from your body instead of a weakness. Try these tips to respond to your body:

• Have a glass of water and wait 10 minutes.
• Eat a healthier version of what you crave. For example, if you crave sweets, try eating more fruit and sweet or root vegetables.
• What is out of balance in your life? Is there something you need to express, or is something being repressed? What happened in your life just before you had this craving?
• When you eat the food you are craving, enjoy it, taste it, savor it; notice its effect. Then you will become more aware and free to decide if you really want it next time.

To learn more about understanding cravings, and and eating for energy, join Kamala on June 3rd at 1pm at Whole life Yoga!

I just got back from my first Viniyoga training with Gary Kraftsow at the NYC Yoga Journal conference last weekend.  I’ve been practicing hatha yoga for over 15 years and have mostly gone to classes that just had a bunch of sun salutations in them.

Yoga has been a way for me to release tension and tightness but I think I was not trained in proper alignment and anatomy and after doing thousands of up-dogs, down-dogs, shoulder-stands and warrior poses without proper body mechanics, I have a feeling I injured my body pretty badly.  I’ve had chronic neck stiffness and headaches for many years now and the last year my knees have been pretty bad.    I was starting to dread yoga teaching so much since I would have to ice my knees after my classes and I would not be able to sleep due to my screaming knees.

I started to take some Iyengar classes and that seemed to help my throbbing knees.   I went to a doctor that specialized in athletes and knee pain and based on his recommendations and my Iyengar classes I was finding a higher level of manageability for my knees but my neck and headaches were persistent (despite rounds of holistic practitioners and conventional western medicine I could not figure out how to get rid of my head-aches and neck stiffness)

Imagine having someone whack you on your head with a sledgehammer all day long and just about every day.  Now imagine someone is sticking a little knife at the back of your neck.  Welcome to my body.  I used to want to run away from my body but there was no where to run to.  Deep sleep provided the only vacation from my body.  I used to hate waking up in the morning since I had to wake up to my neck and forehead screaming at me.

Enter Viniyoga…..

I am not sure if I had ever heard of Gary before this weekend.  I think his name was familiar to me from Yoga Journal.  I remember reading once about Viniyoga but whatever I read didn’t grab me and I was never interested in exploring it any further.

I went to his first workshop on upper body, neck and shoulder pain.  We did some unusual yoga poses that were similar to other poses I had done before but there were key differences.  Gary kept emphasizing coordinating our breath to our movement, (otherwise it’s just calisthenics .   We twisted,  We triangled. We saluted and we warriored.   After about 30 minutes of breath-centered poses, I slowly but deeply started to feel some relief.    It would take hours for my body to integrate what we did and later I started to feel more relief.

I was comfortable just being in my body.  I felt present.  I felt at home.  I didn’t want to run away from myself or my body.

I went to Gary’s all day intensive even though the title sounded uninspired. “Yoga for Depression and Anxiety.”  We dove deeper into some of the physical and emotional mechanisms behind anxiety and depression.  We explored chanting and breath centered movement.  It was like a moving meditation.  I could feel deeply ingrained patterns of limitation, pain and constraint being worked though levels of my fascia and psyche.

I felt a sense of liberation.  I was freed up to have new thoughts and new feelings.

I taught some of these methodologies the next week in my beginner yoga classes and was delighted to see the look of relief on my students’ faces after I had introduced them to Viniyoga.

I can’t wait to dive deeper into the warm waters of Viniyoga.

Jasmine

Jasmine Kaloudis teaches  beginner yoga in Philadelphia  and is the author of the best spiritual websites list.  She writes about yoga on her blog at http://www.synergybyjasmine.com/yoga-blog.

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Hayden, a Whole Life Yoga teacher training graduate asks:  A student asked me today how he could measure his progress in my drop-in classes, since they vary so much week to week.  He mentioned, in particular, other yoga classes that always contain sun salutations, and how, if you do them regularly, you can tell that you are getting stronger. But since I don’t want to do regular sun salutations with my class, how can I design drop in classes so that my students are experiencing growth and can see it?  This seems easier to do in a series.

Hi Hayden!  As is usually the case, I don’t have any quick and easy answers to this question.  Gary (my teacher) always says that real progress in yoga practice can best be measured by your relationships.  If your relationships get more stable, your yoga practice is working, and vice–versa.   He also often says that if he were forced to measure the “accomplishments” of his teacher training graduates, he’d evaluate the level of their neuroses.  Remember, according to the sutras, physical prowess was never the intent of yoga practice.  The intent was clarifying and calming the mind.

However….

Viniyoga is multi-faceted.  It can have an orientation that is developmental (Siksana), like my Energize and Strengthen series, therapeutic (Cikitsa), like Yoga for Healthy Backs, or spiritual (Adhyatmika), like my New Years Day workshop.

Physical practice is indeed easier to measure in series classes, as you have the same students over and over again throughout a defined time period. A drop-in practice is trickier, as it’s designed each week based on the students present in class. But drop-in students can still pay attention to how they feel in common poses over time.   There’s absolutely nothing magical about sun salutations.  They are simply a series of specific postures done in a flowing manner. You can measure physical changes in any posture that is taught over and over again.

The trick is to teach the same posture over time and ask students to pay attention to how their body responds to that pose.  For flexibility, seated postures work well. They block escape valves so progress can be more directly seen.  The lateral adaptation of janu sirsansa, deep twists, or regular old pascimatanasana work well for this.  For strength, poses such as plank, caturanga, half squats, arm balances, or all of those lovely prone postures work well.  Progress in those poses would be measured in how many repetitions a student can do or how long they can stay in the pose while maintaining a smooth breath.  For endurance, any flow done repeatedly over time works well.  Breath adaptations in asana and pranayama practices provide effective measurements of breath development.

But the bigger question, I guess, is why is the student practicing?  What do they hope to gain?  And why are they so concerned about measuring themselves? Remember, external measurements are really antithetical to the goals of yoga practice.

Finally, as a teacher, you need to decide who your audience is.  Each class you teach must meet the individual needs of the students present.  This is no easy task–believe me, I know. You may find over time that you need to segment your students into levels, such as beginning, intermediate, and advanced.  Otherwise you won’t be able to adequately meet the needs of anyone.

But above all, please remember, that emotional stability is much more important that any external physical measure.  External measures are more about ego than real growth.

I hope that helps!

Namaste

Tracy

More information about Whole Life Yoga’s teacher training program can be found at our web site:  Yoga Teacher Training at Whole Life Yoga.

Leslie is a long-time student of Desikachar who lives in New York.  He founded The Breathing Project, an institute dedicated to this style of yoga in New York City, and his knowledge of both breath-centered yoga and anatomy is renowned. Although I’ve never studied with him personally, I know several people who have, and they have described him and his teaching approach as grounded, accessible, and filled with humor. I never hesitate to recommend his work to my students. 

His DVD offers four practices that vary in length from 18  to 29 minutes.  The 29 minute practice is meant to be a stand-alone practice.  The three shorter practices can be practiced individually or combined to make a single practice that is a little over an hour in length.  The DVD also includes several bonus audio tracks with descriptions of adaptations for everything from plus sized bodies to “real men.” 

True to the viniyoga methodology, the practices on this DVD involve dynamic movement in addition to stay.  The video’s  practitioners don’t move in concert, but at their own pace, and they each practice using their own adaptations. The video is described as offering “gentle, therapeutic yoga routines that are accessible for all levels.”

I haven’t actually seen this video yet, and I don’t yet carry it in the studio. However is it readily available on Amazon.com and other online retailers. I hope to add it to my retail offerings later this spring or summer. I am excited to find another video I can recommend to my clients by a very reputable viniyoga master!

In the mean time, if any of you buy and review it, please tell me what you think!

Namaste

Tracy

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I started taking yoga classes after a minor back injury, partly to heal but mainly to strengthen and stretch my body to prevent hurting myself again. I loved the way yoga made my body feel and sensed there was more to it for my mind but didn’t understand the mental and emotional benefits until I was introduced to viniyoga just before I became pregnant with my first son (now 5 ½).

After I found out I was pregnant I started going to prenatal yoga classes at Whole Life Yoga and practicing at home almost daily. This is really when I started to get the body-mind connection that yoga, especially viniyoga, has to offer. By practicing viniyoga regularly throughout my pregnancy I was able to connect with my body and my baby in a way I don’t think I would have otherwise. The breath work and linking breath and movement allowed me to be fully present and helped me to ride the emotional roller coaster of pregnancy in a much more mindful way. The same held true for labor – and motherhood. I used the same tools during my son’s birth and then again as I struggled with being a new mom.

A couple of years (and many viniyoga classes) later, my dear friend and mentor, Sharon Beaudoin, urged me to consider enrolling in Whole Life Yoga’s teacher training program. I hadn’t ever thought about teaching yoga but met with Tracy anyway and decided to enter the program mostly as a way to enhance my home practice. Then came baby number two! I was lucky to experience the teacher training during my pregnancy for many reasons, one of which is that it ignited in me a passion for teaching prenatal yoga.  And of course I fully experienced the many benefits of viniyoga throughout my pregnancy, labor and transition to mother of two!

Yoga is such a gift for pregnant women, most of who are getting know their bodies – and their minds – in an entirely new and different way. I feel so fortunate that I get to join them as they begin their journey to motherhood.

Shelley

Please Join Shelley in her new prenatal class at Whole Life Yoga!

This year, my dog seems unusually entranced by the newness.  Our normal ninety-minute walks stretch to two, even three hours as the paths she found disinteresting all winter suddenly come alive to her again.

Today, as she walked me to her new favorite spot at Greenlake, I was struck by how the familiar is continually interesting to her.  By conservative calculations, we’ve walked Greenlake’s path almost 2000 times in our seven years together; yet she still finds it fascinating.  As she gets older, her interests and abilities change.  She is no longer the great hunter-dog that dragged me, face-down, across the grass as she tried to catch those ever-elusive squirrels.  Now she’s more of an observer, a tour guide of sorts, saying hello to familiar walkers as she gazes across the lake from her new treasured spot in the shade.

But still, every time, she leads us to Greenlake with enthusiasm–with intention.  I never know exactly where we’re headed, but I can tell that she does.  And in spite of her obviously planned destination, she enjoys every minute of the path along the way.

Like Tasha, we can live our lives–and practice our yoga–with great enthusiasm and a sense of newness.  We can bring the same sense of wonder to the 2000^th repetition of cat pose that we brought to our first.  As our bodies change, we may not be able to do handstand or wheel, but we can invite vitality, energy, and joy to every pose we can do.  We can invite gratitude and intention to every breath we take.  In fact,  these simple poses give us the opportunity to more fully experience the connection of body, breath and mind that is truly the purpose of yoga.

As we enter this season of re-birth, I’d like to invite all of us, including myself, to experience life and our practice the same way Tasha does.  As happy in exploring the familiar as seeing the new.  As present and joyful in our old age as we were in our youth.   As connected with our world on the days our path is difficult as the day we took our first step.

The yoga sutras call this persevering practice:  Doing the same practice over and over again, over a long period of time, without interruption, with enthusiasm and an intention of growth.  Such a practice, they say, leads to the true goal of yoga: clarity.

May you find newness and re-birth, joy and optimism, hope and clarity this Spring.  And may you experience the inner peace that is the state of yoga.

Namaste

Tracy

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“We spend so much time walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. For once, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.”- Ellen Goodman

The mind is a very powerful thing. The stories we tell ourselves can be vicious and mean, things we wouldn’t even say to our worst enemy yet we hardly blink an eye when we say them to ourselves. It’s these stories we tell ourselves, whether we heard them first through someone else or devised them on our own, that lead us down a dangerous road.

I often find myself walking through life telling myself so many stories it’s almost hard to believe. I am thirty-one years old after all and I SHOULD be exactly where I expected to be at this age, right? I SHOULD be doing exactly what all my friends are doing, right?

More often than I care to admit I get caught up in what I think I should be doing that I fail to see what I AM doing and all the things I HAVE done in my life. At times I get absorbed in this idea that my glass is half empty that I find it hard to believe that in reality, my glass is more then half full.

The normal tape recorder that plays in my head goes a little like this; ‘I’m not creative enough, I don’t have a career to show for, I’m not a wife or a mom, I don’t have an excellent green thumb, I’m not as good of a writer as I wish I was, and worst yet, I’m not yogi enough.” Seriously, this is the negative tape recorder in which I often find playing in my head with little to no effort on my part. So what is my point you’re probably asking?

Lately I’ve been asking myself why do I, like some many others, get caught up in this idea of ‘when I arrive’ I’ll will be the person I always thought I would be? Why can’t I be the person I want to be right now?

To be honest, I don’t have a definitive answer because I think this is subjective to each individual. What I do know is that a lot of these feelings I have are projections and expectations I’ve placed on myself based off of what I think others think of me. Silly, huh?

So where does yoga fit in to all this mental craziness?

Yoga, for me, is teaching me slowly but surely, to see myself and others a little bit clearer. And although there is still that inevitable tape recorder playing in the back of my head, I mean, thirty-one years is a long cycle of habitual negative self talk to break, a regular yoga practice has provided me with some powerful tools to bring with me in my everyday life. For example, back before I practiced yoga, I was terribly reactive towards people who I felt were judgmental towards my life and the choices I had made. I would get super fired up, defensive, and often begrudge them for even voicing an opinion to begin with. It was a harmful and hurtful cycle for both me and those in my life.

Flash forward to now and I honestly feel that what I have learned through a regular practice of asana, meditation, and breath work combined with my experience from taking the Whole Life Yoga’s teacher training course, I have been given another opportunity to look at life differently.

Every day I work on letting go of this idea of ‘when I arrive’ and try to look at each day as an opportunity to be exactly who I am and know that I am exactly where I am suppose to be. I am me. That’s all I can ever be and what I am doing in my life has no relation to anyone else. As long as I am happy, that’s all that matter.

I think Dr. Seuss says it best, “Today you are YOU, that is truer then true. There is no one alive who is youer then YOU!

I hope that all of us can walk through the rooms of our lives and instead of looking for flaws, truly and with a clear mind see our own intentional!

Amanda

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Finally, a yoga-related news article I’m happy to pass on to you! It seems like yoga has had more than its share of bad press lately—from the New York Times article proclaiming that yoga can “wreck your body” to many recent articles that have been forwarded to me about a famous (non-viniyoga) yoga guru who has recently, shall we say, fallen from grace. 

So I was more than a little pleased when a student approached me in my Yoga for Healthy Backs class recently to say that two of her friends recently forwarded her a positive article about yoga from The Huffington Post.  This article discusses recent research showing what I’ve known for years:  that yoga, specifically viniyoga, can help overcome chronic low back pain.

The research described is the most recent in a pair of studies co-sponsored by the National Institute of Health and Group Health Cooperative.  Both studies used viniyoga—the same style taught at Whole Life Yoga, and the yoga protocols were designed by my teacher, Gary Kraftsow.  One goal of the most recent study was to see if earlier benefits of viniyoga could be replicated with a larger test group.

According to Karen Sherman, one of the study authors, they specifically chose viniyoga, because “we wanted to pick something to test that was likely to be safe and easy for beginners to practice both in classes and at home.”

The results?  Students who participated in weekly 45 – 50 minute viniyoga classes, including deep breathing and guided relaxation, experienced clinically significant improvements in low back pain and dysfunction.  And those improvements were still apparent at least 14 weeks after the end of the study.  Similar benefits were found in students who practiced weekly 52 minute stretching classes with 20 minutes of home stretching on non-class days.  Although the article does not state this, I do believe the yoga students were also given home practices. 

Researchers attribute the improvements to the physical benefits of yoga—specifically, stretching and strengthening, versus any mental benefits. So I guess all the stress reduction and emotional balance we yogis experience is just an awesome side benefit!   (By the way, a recent study on viniyoga for stress reduction also showed great results, but that’s a blog article for a different day).

And on a personal note—the Group Health study specifically looked at chronic low back dysfunction that interfered with participant’s day-to-day activities.  But I can tell you from personal experience, yoga also helps with upper back and neck pain, along with a variety of other physical, physiological, and emotional issues.

If you, or someone you know, suffers from chronic low back pain, consider giving viniyoga a try! If you’re in the Seattle area, please check out Whole Life Yoga’s Yoga for Healthy Backs series.

Namaste

Tracy Weber

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Whole Life Yoga booth at Vegfest 2004

I became a vegetarian years before I took my first yoga class.  I come from a long line of farmers.  In fact, when my father passed away, he lived in the same house he was born in, which was on the same farm that my great-grandfather started when he immigrated to the United States.  Dad was a dairy farmer; my Uncle Jim raised the beef cattle.  But even though I came from a strong meat-and-potatoes family, I always felt a deep personal connection to animals.  I often said that if I allowed myself to think about it, I wouldn’t be able to eat meat.  In my late 20’s, I thought about it. 

People become vegetarian for a variety of reasons: personal health, animal welfare, environmental stewardship, you name it.  For me, it was about compassion.  I just didn’t believe that an animal had to die in order for me to live.

Now where’s the connection to yoga in all of this?

Yogis heatedly debate about yoga and vegetarianism.  Many believe that if you claim to be a yogi, you must also be vegetarian.  Others, of course, disagree.  The word you hear bantered about in these discussions is ahimsa.   According to the Yoga Sutras, yogis must practice ahimsa, or non-harming, in all situations.  For me and people who think like me, ahimsa has to include non-harming to our animal friends.  For others, it’s not that simple.  To be sure, ahimsa has a much broader reach.  We should attempt to act without harm in all situations: to ourselves as well as others, to the planet as well as ourselves.

In all honesty, I don’t have the answer.  My own food choices are judged harshly by others.  I’m vegetarian, not vegan, meaning I eat limited amounts of cheese.  My dog and cats aren’t vegetarian, meaning some animal dies for them to live.  And my husband isn’t vegetarian—but I’m rather fond of him nonetheless.

In the end, each of us lives by our own values.  Whether or not we choose to eat meat, we would all benefit by embodying greater kindness and compassion.  Perhaps even more importantly, we should all learn to live by our own values without judging others for theirs.

Now, on to the free food part of this blog entry.

I’m proud to support Vegetarians of Washington. They promote vegetarianism in a very “ahimsic” way.  They don’t judge, they entice.  As my friend and founder of the organization often says, “we tempt you through your taste buds.”

On March 24 and 25 (this weekend) they are hosting Veg Fest at Seattle Center, and Whole Life Yoga will be there!  Whole Life Yoga teachers and students will be on hand to talk about our classes, answer questions, and give out free passes to students who haven’t tried the studio yet.  And anyone who joins Vegetarians of WA at the festival gets a gift certificate for one free drop-in yoga class!

While you’re there, you can taste hundreds of free samples of delicious, primarily vegan food.  The vegan ice cream alone is worth it!

I hope many of you stop by and see us.  Bring your friends and come hungry.  And take a moment this week to reflect on your definition of ahimsa, regardless of what you eat.

Namaste

Tracy

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Sitting is notoriously painful for people with back pain; sitting on the floor, crossed legged, without back support, is even worse.  Of course, that’s that most of us tend to do in every yoga class.  There are many better alternatives. A few of my favorites are below.

First, if you do choose to sit cross-legged, look down at your knees.  If your knees are above your hips, then your spine is not in neutral alignment, which will lead to back discomfort.  This problem can easily be fixed by elevating your hips.  Fold a blanket or two and place them under your sitz bones (or ischial tuberosities, for you anatomy geeks.) These are the bony prominences between the tops of your thighs and the bottoms of your hips.  Add blankets until your knees are below your hips, as in the photo below.

For people without knee issues, the sitting posture below is my favorite.  This is how I sit when I teach.  In the first photo, the student is sitting on a block, which elevates her hips to put less pressure on her knees.  In the second, she is sitting on a meditation bench.  My favorite benches are sold at East West Bookshop.  They can be a little pricey, but they last forever.  I’ve had the one in the photo for over 11 years.

We have plenty of blocks and blankets at the studio, and we also have four meditation benches.  So feel free to experiment and find what is most comfortable for you.

Finally, you can always lie down.  There’s nothing magic at all about achieving that perfect lotus pose.  Our goal is to connect the body, breath, and mind. To do that, the spine should be neutral. A neutral spine can be found sitting, kneeling, lying, or standing for that matter. While it’s true that the breath is subtly blocked in a lying position, for most people the effect is minor. If lying gets you out of pain, I say go for it!

Generally, the most neutral supine position lying with the knees bent, feet on the floor, as in the photo below.

The biggest risk in this position is falling asleep.  So try to keep your mind alert, and if you come with a friend, tell them to nudge you if you start snoring!

I look forward to seeing you at the studio soon!

Namaste

Tracy

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