Global Yoga

Yoga = Joining together

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Fear. We learn a lot about it in our yoga practices.  And then because of our practice we realize how it manifests in our lives.

Sometimes what I most fear is attempting what I know can be done.

Recently, my fear was gathering people to practice. How do I get a group of yogis together in a city where I´m only passing through? I had an idea from day one, but it took me nearly two months to overcome the fear of failure to give it a try.

TriangleSpain

Couchsurfing has been my travel companion since 2007. It now has a function that allows users to create events and gather people together. Arriving in Madrid with language confidence and more time for social media, I created the event. To my surprise, I taught two classes with fourteen students in each on my birthday weekend!

HalfMoonSpain

The practices in the park were beautiful because they brought together people from all corners of the world: Bolivia, Malaysia, France, Spain, Turkey, Ireland, Germany, Suriname…the list continues.

We all practice yoga for various reasons. For me, yoga gives me a sense of peace and calmness. I became a teacher to share this tranquility with others and ideally, globally. By bringing cultures together to share in a practice of the mind, body, and breath is by one of the many definitions of yoga or “joining together.”  I´m so grateful to have replaced a fear with a stunning, global yoga community in Madrid.

SavasanaSpain

4 Ways to Stretch Your Shoulders

/ jackiesuepowell / 2 Comments

Is there anything you’d like to work on in your practice today?

I keep hearing “shoulders.” This is fine with me since I’m the one carrying a heavy backpack all over Europe. However, in “normal life” our shoulders are usually killing us from hunching over a computer 9-5…or longer.

There are two ways to stretch our shoulders — forward and back. Sometimes we think a shoulder stretch is a shoulder stretch and eagle arms do the same thing as cactus arms. This isn’t exactly true…

Our shoulders are connected to both back muscles and chest muscles. This is why we practice stretching our shoulders both forward and up (eagle arms) to stretch our upper backs as well as back and down (cactus arms) to open our chests, opposite of hunching.

The next time you’re stretching your shoulders notice how it either opens your chest or stretches your upper back. It’s all connected!

© Yoga By Candace

There are many ways to stretch your shoulders. Here are a few of my favorites:

Shoulder/back stretch:

  1. Lie on your stomach and cross your arms on the ground. Gaze towards the ground neck relaxed. Switch arms, do both sides.
  2. Eagle arms: don’t forget to do both sides!

Shoulder/chest stretch:

  1. Cactus arms with circles, slight back bend, drawing arms up and slowly draw shoulder blades down back.
  2. Bow pose, for a more intense stretch while in bow roll onto your side, pressing shoulder into the ground. Do both sides.

What I learned about Yoga through Vipassana

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Graham Samuels Illustration / Äventyr

Throughout the meditation course I found many similarities between meditation and yoga:

1. Work, Practice:

You wont see results (mental or physical) if you don’t, period. Roll out your mat, find a quiet place to focus on your breath, do it when you don’t want to. You’ll never regret it.

2. Patience, Persistence:

Yoga, meditation, and life…so many things can seem too hard, too impossible. You’re ready to quit before starting. Don’t. Keep up the work, you will see results—and the funny thing is you have no idea what they will be for you.

3. This too shall change: Impermanence:

In our meditation practice we were instructed to experience sensations in our bodies and not react to them. When we observed these sensations, we realize they eventually pass away or another sensation crops up taking our awareness off the first sensation. The same is true with our yoga practice, we may struggle with Pose A but it’s always followed by Pose B, followed by Pose C, etc. In our practice and our life, change is the only constant. It’s helpful to intellectually know this but to understand it we must experience the sensation and then let it go.

Yoga, unlike meditation, is a physical practice. One should experience sensations during yoga but determining when and how to react to them is up to us as individuals. Some sensations in yoga should be reacted to (like intense pain!).

4. Gross to Subtle:

I first heard this terminology from Peg of Ashtanga Dispatch during teacher training. It was refreshing to come back to the concept when practicing Vipassana, which focuses on narrowing body sensations from the gross (feeling hot/cold or the touch of your clothes) to the subtle (which for me feels like prana). Thankfully because of my yoga practice, I was able to connect with these subtle sensations quickly—the hard part was not reacting to them!

5. Mind over Matter:

The asana isn’t the hardest part—whether it’s a yoga pose or sitting for meditation. The physical body’s work is easier than training your mind to overcome the voices craving more of one sensation or degrading our ability which prevents us to discover new edges in our practice. When we can overcome our egos we can deepen our practice, automatically improving our lives off the mat.