Newsletters
Issue: #1: April 2007
Namaste friends -- welcome to Good Space, Full Potential Yoga's newsletter on ways to heal, strengthen and live. Good Space (or sukha in Sanskrit) comes when openness and ease meet strength and stability (sthira). It is the heart of a healthy and rewarding practice and lifestyle.
Yoga has the ability to address many needs - physical, therapeutic and emotional - at any age or experience level. All yoga requires is a willingness to persevere and pay attention. It is an invitation to play, to de-ossify body, mind and heart and to step into "good space."
Yoga is also an open-ended invitation because the learning never ceases. The well never runs dry. The Good Space newsletter is a way to share this wealth and start a dialogue with you. Please e-mail me any questions, ideas or suggestions. Let me know what's up in your practice-the highs, the lows, what's working, what's not. The more we share the yoga, the more we all stand to grow.
Breathe well, be well,
Suzanne
Soul Food
"Nothing in the world
Is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
The gentle overcomes the rigid."
For more such inspiration, read Stephen Mitchell's beautiful translation of Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way).
HEAL
Cradle Your Cranium
No matter how smart you are, there are no lightweights when it comes to the human head. They all weigh eight to twelve pounds, so it's not surprising that your neck muscles can become chronically overworked and cranky. Relief can be as easy as closing your eyes and visualizing a fountain or geyser rising from the base of the neck with your skull floating on top. Now feel those steel cables in your neck liquefy as your head becomes weightless.
A Hip Revision
Melt open your hips and heart with this restorative variation of Sputa baddha konasana. You'll need a bolster and two blocks. Place the bolster lengthwise on your mat. Sit in the middle of the bolster and slowly lower your back on it so that your shoulders hang off and rest completely on the floor. Place the soles of your feet together on the bolster and let your knees fall to either side. Place blocks under yours knees so that your hips and inner thighs can release. Arms can be bent out to the side (like a cactus), or straight out overhead.
A Feet Feat
A forgotten massage tool, your feet, can keep going long after your hands have tired. The recipient needs to sit cross-legged on the floor. The giver lies supine behind the receiver with knees bent and feet on the recipient's back. Walking their feet up and down the recipient's back, the giver digs their heels into any tight spots to ease tension.
STRENGTHEN
Anatomy Junkies The muscle-minded should check out bandhayoga. Ray Long, author of a great new book on yoga anatomy, The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga, uses the site as a fount of anatomy information, including providing email updates on the anatomy of yoga poses. The illustrations are spectacular, depicting a skeleton with all the active muscles highlighted.
Pelvic Power
Strengthen your pelvic floor, inner thighs and abs with this supine version of garudasana (eagle legs). Lie on your back; bring your right thigh over your left; and, if possible, hook your right foot around your left calf. Actively draw your heels away from each other. Squeeze the outer hips in and the inner thighs together, as you try to straighten your legs (they won't), without the lower back arching up. You'll feel the surge of energy coiling up from the pelvic floor.
LIVE
Resolution Solution
Remember that New Year's resolution that's fallen by the wayside? Resolutions are hard to keep because we often lack the simple skill of starting over. Meditation can help cement your commitment. Meditation teaches you to come back again and again to the object of attention, be it the breath, a visualization or a mantra. You can apply the same practice to your intentions. Rather than give up after the first lapse, refrain from judgment and simply be willing to begin again. And again, and again.
Taste Teaser
Everyone knows about sweet, salty, sour and bitter. But there's also a little-known fifth taste sensation called umami. It comes from the Japanese word for delicious or savory. Taste buds actually respond positively to foods high in umami, such as aged cheese and meat, mushrooms, peas, tomatoes, concentrated broths and mature wines. Slow cooking also tends to elicit the umami flavor in foods without added salt and sugar. For recipes, start here: umami recipes.
Mat Matters
Most people think of yoga as a physical exercise, good for flexibility and maybe even relaxation. But yoga offers much more. In this inspiring volume of essays, Yoga teacher Nicole DiSalvo Billa weaves together yoga philosophy and personal experience to show how yoga can enrich and enlighten your daily life. Yoga off the Mat is available online at Barnes and Noble for $10.95.
Namaste friends -- welcome to Good Space, Full Potential Yoga's newsletter on ways to heal, strengthen and live. Good Space (or sukha in Sanskrit) comes when openness and ease meet strength and stability (sthira). It is the heart of a healthy and rewarding practice and lifestyle.
Yoga has the ability to address many needs - physical, therapeutic and emotional - at any age or experience level. All yoga requires is a willingness to persevere and pay attention. It is an invitation to play, to de-ossify body, mind and heart and to step into "good space."
Yoga is also an open-ended invitation because the learning never ceases. The well never runs dry. The Good Space newsletter is a way to share this wealth and start a dialogue with you. Please e-mail me any questions, ideas or suggestions. Let me know what's up in your practice-the highs, the lows, what's working, what's not. The more we share the yoga, the more we all stand to grow.
Breathe well, be well,
Suzanne
Soul Food
"Nothing in the world
Is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
The gentle overcomes the rigid."
For more such inspiration, read Stephen Mitchell's beautiful translation of Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way).
HEAL
Cradle Your Cranium
No matter how smart you are, there are no lightweights when it comes to the human head. They all weigh eight to twelve pounds, so it's not surprising that your neck muscles can become chronically overworked and cranky. Relief can be as easy as closing your eyes and visualizing a fountain or geyser rising from the base of the neck with your skull floating on top. Now feel those steel cables in your neck liquefy as your head becomes weightless.
A Hip Revision
Melt open your hips and heart with this restorative variation of Sputa baddha konasana. You'll need a bolster and two blocks. Place the bolster lengthwise on your mat. Sit in the middle of the bolster and slowly lower your back on it so that your shoulders hang off and rest completely on the floor. Place the soles of your feet together on the bolster and let your knees fall to either side. Place blocks under yours knees so that your hips and inner thighs can release. Arms can be bent out to the side (like a cactus), or straight out overhead.
A Feet Feat
A forgotten massage tool, your feet, can keep going long after your hands have tired. The recipient needs to sit cross-legged on the floor. The giver lies supine behind the receiver with knees bent and feet on the recipient's back. Walking their feet up and down the recipient's back, the giver digs their heels into any tight spots to ease tension.
STRENGTHEN
Anatomy Junkies The muscle-minded should check out bandhayoga. Ray Long, author of a great new book on yoga anatomy, The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga, uses the site as a fount of anatomy information, including providing email updates on the anatomy of yoga poses. The illustrations are spectacular, depicting a skeleton with all the active muscles highlighted.
Pelvic Power
Strengthen your pelvic floor, inner thighs and abs with this supine version of garudasana (eagle legs). Lie on your back; bring your right thigh over your left; and, if possible, hook your right foot around your left calf. Actively draw your heels away from each other. Squeeze the outer hips in and the inner thighs together, as you try to straighten your legs (they won't), without the lower back arching up. You'll feel the surge of energy coiling up from the pelvic floor.
LIVE
Resolution Solution
Remember that New Year's resolution that's fallen by the wayside? Resolutions are hard to keep because we often lack the simple skill of starting over. Meditation can help cement your commitment. Meditation teaches you to come back again and again to the object of attention, be it the breath, a visualization or a mantra. You can apply the same practice to your intentions. Rather than give up after the first lapse, refrain from judgment and simply be willing to begin again. And again, and again.
Taste Teaser
Everyone knows about sweet, salty, sour and bitter. But there's also a little-known fifth taste sensation called umami. It comes from the Japanese word for delicious or savory. Taste buds actually respond positively to foods high in umami, such as aged cheese and meat, mushrooms, peas, tomatoes, concentrated broths and mature wines. Slow cooking also tends to elicit the umami flavor in foods without added salt and sugar. For recipes, start here: umami recipes.
Mat Matters
Most people think of yoga as a physical exercise, good for flexibility and maybe even relaxation. But yoga offers much more. In this inspiring volume of essays, Yoga teacher Nicole DiSalvo Billa weaves together yoga philosophy and personal experience to show how yoga can enrich and enlighten your daily life. Yoga off the Mat is available online at Barnes and Noble for $10.95.
"We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use."
Lao-tzu
"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Let your awareness sink into your breath and find the bottom of your breath. Allow the breath to come and go as it may...As you get to the end of the out breath, let go in the same sort of feeling that you have when you let your body drop into a very comfortable bed--let it drop and fall. Let the weight of the air do it. Don't push, drop. Then after awhile the breath will return. But don't pull it in, let it fall back in. The breath will drop in until you've had enough; then let it drop out again."
Alan Watts
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust
"The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body."
George Sheehan
"Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack."
Henry Miller
Lao-tzu
"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Let your awareness sink into your breath and find the bottom of your breath. Allow the breath to come and go as it may...As you get to the end of the out breath, let go in the same sort of feeling that you have when you let your body drop into a very comfortable bed--let it drop and fall. Let the weight of the air do it. Don't push, drop. Then after awhile the breath will return. But don't pull it in, let it fall back in. The breath will drop in until you've had enough; then let it drop out again."
Alan Watts
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust
"The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body."
George Sheehan
"Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack."
Henry Miller
©2007 Full Potential Yoga. All Rights Reserved.