This is my son’s birthday and all the best to Angus! It is also Earth Day and an opportunity to be grateful for the beautiful place where I live. Before we can save the earth, we must be grateful for it, and to feel gratitude we must take the time to observe nature and become awed by its rhythms, diversity (surprises), and sheer beauty. Angus is going on a fishing trip with his dad in June, so last night my husband and I discussed the life cycle of bugs that are copied as flies to catch trout as we walked to the town docks. School children are always entertained by caterpillars , which seal themselves into cocoons or chrysalises, and emerge as butterflies or moths. But how about nymphs that wriggle in the water and then become flighted insects to mate and fall back, dead into the streams or lakes from which they flew?

Learn something new about the earth and it’s creatures today. Take a stroll on the beach,  in a park, or the woods. Visit a zoo or aquarium. They aren’t just for kids! Allow yourself to be amazed!

There are many variations of the Bridge posture, setu bandhasana. The following series of photos includes an alternate sided bridge warm up, snow angels, a traditional bridge, the wheel, the hammock, and the fish. Normally they are not all performed together, but you can try this back bending series as a vinyasa flow. See even more details in the accompanying Setu Bandhasana PDF. These postures stimulate the thyroid gland and their regular practice may benefit those with hypothyroidism and permit them to decrease their medications. Please confirm with your doctor. For those with nagging back pain, these poses can be very soothing. In general, listen to your body and choose an appropriate level of challenge for yourself. If you have an eye infection, unmedicated high blood pressure, acute back pain, or neck issues; this may not be a beneficial posture series for you. End with a supine hip opener,  then hug your knees to your chest and twist them side to side. Take a moment to belly breathe, and finally melt into sivasana, or relaxation.

Alternate Sided Bridge

Snow Angels

Setu Bandhasana

Wheel

Hammock

Fish

Belly Breathing

Sivasana

Click on this PDF for more detailed instructions and photos.

Setu Bandhasana Series

This past week I went to York with an acceptance lesson plan to honor the women’s resilience after a week of lock-down. These are women that listen to music, read novels, and write letters to feel connected with the freedoms and the people they miss. When I can speak of their resilience under stress I feel that they are not forgotten or invisible. I view myself as a bridge between the narrow confines of prison and the outside world.

In my lesson plan for this week I included a reading from Rachel Schaeffer’s Yoga for Your Spiritual Muscles which speaks of our body as a bridge that can lead us from struggle to forgiveness. Sometimes when we are still, we can sense the flow of activity around us more clearly without having to enter in to the drama. We can be like the steady bridge with the tides ebbing and flowing beneath us.

The bridge posture, when held until sensation builds, builds heat and energy in our bodies. Slight changes in pressure in the feet change the tilt of the knees and the tension in the buttocks. Pressing more or less into the shoulders or arms shift the curvature of the spine. Experimenting with deeper breathing and micro movements  keeps our attention on the sensations within our bodies. We notice where our bodies open to breath and where they feel more constricted in any given moment. We can choose to relax  and find our equilibrium as sensations eddy through us.

The Bridge Pose is a heart opening back bend which can often buoy are spirits. When we feel isolated or frustrated, a postural reminder to nurture our own  hearts can help us to open our compassion towards our neighbors as well. When we feel better emotionally, situations and people around us seem more accommodating. Have you noticed that when you are rested and relaxed, your days flow more easily? When you are exhausted and tense, do you find everything and everybody more difficult?

Here is the full class:

Acceptance & Sadhana Prayer PFD

Try the following vinyasa as an exploration of the vayas, or patterns of energy in and around your body. I described the vayas in an earlier post, Yoga Energy Flows. Sorry it has taken me so long to post photos! I recommend incorporating a standing vinyasa in your practice after you have loosened your spine, joints, and muscles with some gentle, repetitive warm-ups. Search Yoga Table Warm-up in the Search box if you want a review of the concept of vayas and the post should appear.

I have posted many photos, but the flow can be executed fairly quickly if you hold each pose for only a few breaths. As you become comfortable with the postures you may want to hold them longer to feel the energy intensify. Some days you may want to omit some of the asanas. Muscling through a series that exhilarates me may not be appropriate for your body. Notice how you feel at the end of the series. Relaxed? Limber? Energized? Find the variations and intensity that result in the most delicious Sivasana for you.

For a printed list of the series click here: Hamsa / Ganesha PDF

Begin as you would for a Sun Salutation with your hands in Angeli Mudra. Close your eyes for a moment and sense the flow of your breath. Can you feel your heart beating behind your thumbs?

Lower your hands and your gaze to honor the earth. This downward movement initiates the following rebound upwards, just as the downward flap of a bird’s wings propels it higher.

Reach high to the sky.

Swan dive down while chanting OM.

Let your hands fall to the earth in Forward Fold, bending your knees as much as necessary. Feel your weight.

Hold your elbows and prepare to swing side to side, coordinating your breath with your movement. Still holding the image of a swan in my mind I like to think of ruffling and lifting my feathers as I breathe in and stretch one side of my rib cage and then the other. The feathers lie flat and smooth as the intercostal muscles relax on my exhalation and I sink deeper and deeper into each Forward Fold.

Folded swing to the right.

Folded swing to the left.

Return to Forward Fold. Bend your knees and walk or jump your feet back to plank.

Press back towards your heels and down into your hands (do not let your weight roll out towards your pinkies or strain your wrists) to keep lengthening and lifting your spine in Plank. Your transverse abdominus muscles lift to support the spine. You can either hold the posture (breathing into your back, chest, and sides, but not belly) , try a few push-ups (elbows at a 90 degree angle and snug into the sides of your ribs), lower your knees to hold or try push-ups, or simply transition to Downward Dog, skipping Chatarangha.

Lower into Chatarangha, the push-up pose, on your way to the floor. Can you see how I am still pressing back through my heels?

Return to Plank.

Begin to lift your hips to transition to Downward Dog. Keep your heels lifted.

Lift your hips and lengthen your spine while still on your toes. If your legs don’t straighten, don’t worry.

Prance your feet, bending one knee to stretch your toes still further and then the other while the opposite heel reaches for the earth.

Finally hang out in Downward Dog with your heels lowered. Again, don’t worry if they don’t reach the ground. Think of spiraling your inner thighs up between your legs while keeping your feet parallel. Don’t let your heels rotate outwards. If you were to bend your elbows, would they track backwards towards your knees? Is your weight level on your hands? Keep consciously pressing through the mound of your first finger to keep from rolling towards your pinkies. So much to think about! Are you here in the present moment?

(Rest in Child whenever you need to… Shake out your wrists.)

Child Pose

Return to Downward Dog

LIft your right leg into Donkey Kick …

and begin to circle your knee

a few times in each direction.

Swing your right leg forward into lunge. If you straighten the front leg, it may be possible to straighten the back leg and then gently bend the front knee while pressing back through your back heel.. If you can’t reach the floor, place blocks under your hands for the lunging series. Notice if your foot is directly under or in front of your knee. In the long run, your knee will not be happy if it is bent past your ankle. The front foot should also be flat on the floor.

Lower your back knee and flatten the top of your back foot, coming into a low lunge. This posture helps us feel apana, the downward energy flow as we exhale into the stretch. If you want to add a relaxing breath, try making a buzzing “brrr” sound on your exhalation and dropping your head. I call this Horse Breath. Repeat a few times.

Lift your arms, balancing in a deep lunge.

Rise up on an inhalation, straightening the front knee until you feel the quads in your back leg firm up. Sink back on the exhalation. Lift and drop a few times with your breath until you find your midpoint with both legs engaged.

Without dropping the head backwards, reach your arms back. What a bird! Ruffle and smooth out your feathers with your breath. Appreciate the upward moving, udana, energy flowing up through the crown of your head as your firm legs ground the posture.

Sweep your wings down and dip your right wingtip down into the water on an exhalation. Relax your neck as you look for goldfish in the clear, still water below you.

Ruffle the feathers on your left side as you lift your gaze to the sky.

Come into Child or

slide your hips back coming into a stretch of your left hamstring. Experiment with flexing your left foot for more of a calf stretch. Then slide back into lunge. You can slide back and forth a few times, coordinating the movement with your breath, and then hold the hamstring stretch.

Come back to lunge.

Clasp your hands to prepare for Ganeshasana Mudra.

Shiva was absent from his consort, Parvati, for so long that he did not recognize his son, Ganesha when he returned home Parvati was relaxing in the baths and had instructed Ganesha to let no one enter. Ganesha dutifully refused to let his father, as stranger to him, into the building. Siva was furious and in his misreading of the situation cursed his child. When he tried to make amends by offering Ganesha the head of the next being to come down the road, an elephant wandered towards them. The resulting elephant headed Ganesha is much beloved in Southern India and is often invoked for good luck at the beginning of any enterprise: a kirtan, an exam, a voyage… In the context of this posture flow, think of the elephant as a heavy counter weight to the image of Hamsa, the swan.

Extend your middle fingers to create the elephant’s trunk and twist to the right, hooking your left elbow over your knee and gazing over your right elbow. (In this photo I am twisting left.) Try to keep your elbows level and your shoulders down. Exaggerate the downward energy, sinking into a low lunge. I learned this mudra and lunging twist from Jennifer Reis at Kripalu. Check out her website at Sacred Fire Yoga.

Return to center and rest in Child.

Begin to slide forward into

Caterpillar. Your hips remain elevated as long as possible and your elbows bend backwards along the side of your body.

Prepare for Cobra by grounding your hips and lifting the upper body without using your arms. The legs exhibit heavy, apana, energy, while the upper body rises with udana energy. Feel both.

Practice a swan necked Cobra, keeping the shoulders low. I knead the carpet like a cat, pulling backwards to draw my heart forward.Grounding the hips and drawing the heart forwards helps to elongate the spine.

Lower and windshield wipe your legs with your knees bent. This gentle twisting of the low back relieves tension that may have built up as a result of the back bending. Over time you will learn to lengthen rather than compress the spine in back bends. If you are a beginner, be gentle!

Prepare to return to Downward Dog by tucking your toes under and bringing your hands back beside your ribs. Press into your hands and toes and lift your hips.

Once in Downward dog we will repeat the series to the left.

Lift your left leg in Donkey Kick and circle the left knee in both directions.

Swing your left leg forward into lunge. Add a few horse breaths. “Brrrrr…”

Lower your right knee and begin the lunge series: Reach arms up and back; Side Bends: Hamstring Stretch; Ganesha Twist; Child

Slide out onto your belly and rest with your forehead on your forearms. Once your breath has normalized, reach back for your right foot and press down on your toes, stretching the top of your foot (a counter stretch to the prancing you did earlier in Downward Dog). Relax the foot as much as you can. This is a healthy stretch for anyone who suffers from plantar fasciatis.

Prepare for the 1/2 Bow by grabbing your ankle and flexing your right foot.

Grounding the hips lift the right leg and try to keep your shoulders square.I could have brought my forearm closer to my chest so my left shoulder could be more level. This may be your full Bow posture. If you feel discomfort in your right knee, try to lift more with your hamstring and upper back muscles and pull less with your arm. Always make adjustments or come out of a posture if you experience joint pain.

For more challenge, reach out with your opposite arm and leg into a 3/4 Bow. Release after a few breaths and relax. Windshield wipe your legs to nurture your sacrum.

Repeat the 1/2 bow and 3/4 bow to the other side, relax, and windshield wipe your legs again.

Are you familiar with the swan boats in the Boston Common? In keeping with my avian theme, I like to call the full bow the Swan Boat. To prepare, grab both your ankles and flex your feet.

Ground the hips and belly downwards and soar into the full swan boat – or not. Remember to stay in the moment, to breath, and revel in the postures. Don’t push into variations that are beyond your enjoyment level, as that is when injuries occur.

Release the Swan and sink onto the floor. If you are ready to end your practice, roll over onto your back and see what your body wants to do before you spend a few delicious moments in Sivasana. Don’t cheat yourself of the fruits of your practice. These few restful moments while you relax your whole body and let your body breathe are when the body heals itself. Trust your body’s wisdom. There is nothing for you to do, just BE. You are already kind, wise, and brave. So hum, Ham sa!

Song birds and Spring Peepers chirping by my pond are among the earliest signs of Spring along the Connecticut shoreline. Our neighbors spotted this peeper as we were taking an evening stroll. The first clip of froggie sounds is just 19 seconds, so let me know if the sound is familiar and relaxing for you.

Spring Peeper Class Intro.

During Sivasana or anytime you want relaxing background music, tune in to this slightly longer clip:

Spring Peepers for Relaxation

Many of you know that I’ve been supporting a school for Zimbabwean refugees in Johannesburg through the Elias Fund . I to read an informal update on Zimbabwe in this morning’s NY Times and wanted to share the news.

Nicholas D. Kristof – Postcard From Zimbabwe

This week my ladies at York CI are in lock down. This means that they are unable to enjoy this gorgeous Spring weather. Their meals and medications are delivered to their rooms while the prison is searched with a fine toothed comb for contraband. Can you imagine being stuck in the same room with someone you love for five days? Imagine sharing an overcrowded space with a haphazard group of women. A moment of peace and quiet becomes the most valuable gift they can grant one another. Please include my students and all the inmates and staff of York in a loving kindness meditation.

As I thought of my classes for the veterans this week, I decided to focus on meditation and for me, meditation is a form of prayer. Ann Lewin, in the lovely anthology of poems, Women Pray, edited with introductions by Monica Furlong, compares prayer to bird watching. It is not a question of what you do that causes a bird or a spiritual experience to occur. We need to focus instead on being and wait.

Practicing patience and slowing down is a profound spiritual practice. Manavasi Parthasarathi, an Indian teacher of Sanatana Dharma who has studied sacred scriptures for most of his life, just sent me a transcript of a lecture he gave in an elderly home. The topic was preventing falls, but his solution, to slow down and to pay attention, was both physical and deeply spiritual. If we can’t slow down and know ourselves we will fall off a ladder, actually or metaphorically, damaging our bodies as well as our souls.

Click on this Kingfisher link to read Ann Lewin’s poem. You can print it out if you choose.

After reading the poem, simply sit and follow your breath without trying to manipulate it in any way. Where do you feel movement in your body as you breathe? What is the temperature of your in breaths? Your out breaths? What is the humidity? Are you breathing predominantly through one nostril or the other? (This naturally shifts throughout the day.) Does your breath flow in and out like a continuous ribbon? Or are their breaks between your inhalations and your exhalations, or your exhalations and your inhalations? Can you rest in these pauses and wait? Are you comfortable adding a mantra to the observation of your breath? As your mind wanders, simply note if it was a sound or a plan or a story or a …. that distracted your attention and return to your posture, your breath, your mantra if you use one, and wait. No expectations, no judgment. Space, silence, and expectancy (different from a specific expectation) are enough, “but sometimes, when you’ve almost stopped expecting it, a flash of brightness gives encouragement”.

Sangha comes in many flavors. The avid women’s basketball fans in Connecticut are gathering around TVs in homes across the state to encourage their team. I remember attending a game after spending a few days at Kripalu and marveling at my spiritual experience in the Hartford Civic Center. The affection of the fans and the talent of the college girls brought the crowd and players together in community. Tonight I hope we can admire the tenacity of the finalists (and coaches, and cheer leaders, and my personal favorites, the pep bands) on both the Stanford and UConn teams and be proud for their families and friends!

Notice these tulips. Yesterday they were wide open to embrace the sunlight, while overnight they shut tight to conserve their energy. Does our yoga practice honor our personal energies of expansion and condensation?

This Spring I seem particularly aware of the shifts of temperature and humidity out doors and of the rising and falling of energies within my body. We observe the cycles of rest and activity in nature and feel them reflected in our own bodies. In my Easter Yoga Class I introduced the yoga concept of vayas, the five energies flowing in our bodies. We are accustomed to the term prana and although it is more precisely associated with respiration, our hearts, and our lungs, I use the term loosely to refer to all the energies I observe in my body or in my environment. I take in prana with my breath and feel it among all the changing sensations that intensify and release when I observe my body. I can feel the prana of my emotions as movement or stagnation, heat and chills, and sometimes even as colors. Music, speech, and the sounds of nature are all vibrational prana that flow through and around me.

Have you noticed my recent obsession with swans? The Ham sa meditation on the Sanskrit name for the swan or wild goose both grounds me with its full, heavy Ham exhalation and invites me to rebound upwards with the light, soaring, inward sa breath. Birds are a beautiful metaphor for spirit, for uplifting thoughts and emotions, but each wing must pulse downwards in order for the bird to fly. Bird sounds seem to elevate our thoughts and spirits.

Ganeshasana, a lunging twist with an awkward elephant hand seal or mudra, draws our attention to our weight. Hindus invoke the elephant deity Ganesha (a son of Shiva) at the beginning of any new venture and I find it significant that such a solid image is brought to mind. First we take stock of our physical and mental condition, our personal reality in the present moment with all it’s possible density, stiffness, and resistance. Then, as we breathe fresh prana into our system we can notice shifts in our muscles and our attitude. We are reminded that we can choose our response in this and every moment. For me, Spring Peepers are a resurrection sound as the wet, earthy mud explodes with the mating calls of small creatures each evening.

The upward-moving energy, udana vayu, is usually associated with the activity of our brain (meditation and sense perception) and our voice (mantras and chanting). The downward-moving energy, apana vayu, is traditionally associated with our organs of elimination. In my Easter Lesson Plan I played with the contrasts between rising up, spreading our wings, and expanding our lungs; and sinking into the force of earth and gravity. I also played with the notion of squeezing and relaxing our internal organs of digestion and elimination to re-energize our stagnate winter bellies, a common Ayurvedic spring practice. Samana vayu is the energy of assimilation, optimizing the energy from our food. I selected asanas that draw us in on ourselves to re-invigorate the outward spiraling energy of vyana vayu, associated with the circulation of our blood and of our nervous energy. Recall Garudasana, the eagle, with its tightly intertwined limbs and one-pointed gaze.

I spent a night at Kripalu last weekend to serve on the Leadership Gift committee. While there I attended a presentation by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul. In his talk and in his latest book, Writing in the Sand, he acknowledges the structural and psychological dangers inherent in many Spiritual communities while encouraging his audiences to delve deeply into the scriptures of their childhoods. I was raised a Protestant, but am convinced that my favorite childhood stories influenced my spiritual development as much as the Bible verses I memorized in school. This Easter week I will share DuBose Heyward and Marjorie Flack’s The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes in my classes.

DuBose Heyward was a white gentleman from Charleston, South Carolina who was fascinated by Gullah culture. Although he was a prominent business man, his novel, Porgy, 1925, may be the first in the South to portray Blacks without condescension. Ten years later George Gershwin used his libretto and his lyrics for nearly half of the arias in the celebrated opera Porgy and Bess. When I listened to the tale of The Country Bunny as a child I never considered race. None the less I was teary eyed (still am) to follow the success of the “little country girl bunny with a brown skin and a little cotton ball of a tail” in her competition with the “big white bunnies who lived in fine houses and the Jack Rabbits with long legs who can run so fast”. If you haven’t read this quintessential tale of compassion, wisdom, bravery, and yes, speed – get your cotton tail down to your nearest bookstore. Whatever your faith, this book is not to be missed!

Nor is my class:

Easter Lesson Plan (PDF)

Please click on the title of this post if you have questions or comments. I will be delighted to elaborate by e-mail.