Taking these observations on how a child moves isn’t just a motherly pastime, but a key ingredient to understanding your own body. Let’s apply this information to help with fundamental physical exploration on your mat and find your inner child.
anatomy
I recently asked my students to lift their big toes without moving the rest of their foot. With much consternation, they discovered this to be a more difficult than they had anticipated. Intrigued? Try it yourself!
After meeting with a student a few weeks in a row, she looked over at me and said, “You were nice to me for the first few weeks. It’s so much harder now!” I smiled and told her that was just the way I like it. But silently, I scanned through what we had done. It wasn’t wildly complicated—I hadn’t planned for […]
The Splits: Jill Miller On Her Total Hip Replacement And Saying Goodbye To Certain Yoga Poses
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YD News
Yoga keeps growing and seemingly so do the yoga-related injuries. And, surprise surprise, it’s not just students who are getting the injuries—though often we as a community don’t really like to talk about such things, whether the problems come directly from yoga or were exacerbated by the chosen practice. A few weeks ago, Jill Miller, [...]
Have you ever thought about the distinct movements that each of your joints make? Perhaps after you’ve rolled an ankle or tweaked your knee in Trikonasana? Or maybe you wonder what your hip joint is doing in your favorite Pigeon variation?
As many of you have undoubtedly heard, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used yogic alternate nostril breathing to help get over her electoral defeat. She’s been singing the praises of the ancient pranayama technique in her bestseller What Happened as well as on CNN.
When I was young, my mother always told my sister and I, “stand up straight,” or “keep your back upright when you are walking!” Growing up, keeping our backs straight was standard protocol in my household. When I used to walk to school, my mother would always be watching me from her window, so I worked very hard to walk “properly” in order to please her.
We rarely pause to consider the functions of the organs that process and assimilate our food into our bodies. Yet without our digestive system, our bodies would lack the essential nutrients to keep our beings healthy and vibrant. In this post, we will explore how our habitual body positioning can throw our digestive systems out of whack.
When we develop mindfulness practices and allot chunks of our days to them, we are quite careful about what they entail—we sit properly for meditation with alignment to support the spine, in yoga practice we move with grace and alertness toward the precise placement of our limbs, we allow sensation to teach us strength and connectedness with our full bodies and then…we step off the mat and into our world.
