namasteph yoga blog

I have a little yoga peeve I’d like to share. There’s a woman who teaches classes at a gym I teach at, and whenever she sends out an email to the other yoga teachers, she often signs it with hugs and kisses, i.e.:

xox

And maybe a smiley face. Sometimes, if she’s in a hurry, it will just be a double or even a single x:

x

I feel like I have warped back into high school, and if she were writing the note by hand, every “i” would be dotted with a heart on top.

I’m wondering if she’s just really young (I have yet to meet her in person). But maybe coming from a more business-y background, I feel such communication is a bit too intimate as well as immature. As a feminist, I also feel that it infantalizes women when we communicate like that professionally. It makes us appear to be someone who should not be taken seriously.

Now, this is “just” yoga, but I feel that acting professionally and maturely should be something we strive for to a certain extent, and that includes communicating to our work peers regarding covering yoga classes. We’ve got enough sleazy videos on YouTube now of “models” doing yoga in skimpy clothing…to me, yoga is something that should be treated with a small amount of respesct.

Or do I have a bug up my you-know-what? Thoughts and feedback are appreciated.

xox (just kidding!)

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I am happy to announce I am starting new public yoga classes on LA’s westside at the Gateway Portal for Health and Welness. These are all levels classes with a spiritual focus – one is an hour-long class where we focus on our intentions for the upcoming week. The other is a hatha yoga class with meditation. FIRST CLASS IS FREE!

For more information, please see:

http://yogareiki.com/schedule/gateway

PS I will be starting some classes in downtown LA in September…stay tuned!

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Found on the Jade Yoga website…I don’t think they’ll mind if I pass the info along:

Thanks Jolene Bennis Dimitroff of Yoga Tree in San Francisco for the following list of “25 Ways to Reuse Your ‘Old’ Yoga Mat”

1. Look for reuses www.freecycle.org or email info@jadeyoga.com
2. Use as a seat liner for the back seat in the car while taking your dog to the vet or groomer.
3. Place under an area rug for no-slip gripping.
4. Drop off your old mat at an animal rescue group. Most of these places need soft, durable mats, rugs, towels, & blankets to line crates.
5. Use an old mat in the garage or shop to keep from slipping on the workbench while using power tools on them.
6. Line kitchen shelves to prevent glasses from slipping and scratching.
7. Cut the mat into squares and use them as “bases” while playing baseball with the kids. Easy to carry and easy to clean!
8. Use to kneel on in the garden to protect your knees!
9. Use as kitchen drawer liners.
10. Cut it up to make a mouse pad.
11. Use it on the beach instead of a towel.
12. Use as grip pads to open jars.
13. Cut to size and use as foot pads for the bottom of furniture that is on a wood or ceramic floor. Glue on pieces with a non-toxic adhesive.
14. Place it under your sleeping bag as a sleeping pad while camping.
15. Make covers for sharp corners like in a parking garage or school.
16. No more messy packing peanuts! Old yoga mats get a new life as a protector of valuables while moving or shipping.
17. Make children’s toys: cut holes and create masks, hats, costumes and props; cut into shapes and letters for tub and pool toys.
18. Cut and put down in front of the kitty litter box to stop the litter.
19. Plug up drafty places, windows, doors, & under window air conditioners, and save energy!
20. Great for those hard bleachers when watching sporting events.
21. Makes a great liner under house plants, you can even cut it to fit each plant!
22. Donate to nursing homes so that residents do not slip while getting in and out of bed.
23. Place between your surfboard & car to protect both from abrasion.
24. Lay it over the dashboard and steering wheel to keep the sun out!
25. Keep in the car for those spur of the moment picnics, keeping groceries from sliding around in the trunk, or for a myriad of other uses limited only to your imagination!

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My number one problem area is my tight hamstrings. My number two problem area is my tight shoulders. Years of doing web design, plus a natural tendency to round my shoulders, has resulted in a lot of tension being held up there. Les Leventhal has put up a nice 30-minute free yoga video working on the shoulders. Hurrah! I need more videos like this one! You can watch it here:

FREE Class 5 – Shoulders [Full Length Premium Version] from Les Leventhal on Vimeo.

This is a good class for physically fit people who want to work on strengthening the upper body while opening up the chest and shoulder area. The beginning portion is a bit strenuous, particularly for the upper body and core. If you are a beginner, I’d recommend coming to your knees in dolphin plank.

P.S. I love half-hour online yoga classes like these. You can get a decent workout at home without having to invest two or more hours of your time (as when you go to a live yoga class).

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I was searching the Internet in vain for any training offering a combination of yoga and QiGong or Tai Chi. In doing so, I stumbled across Dahn Yoga, which is billed as a form of Korean yoga. In checking out the Dahn Yoga website, I found a few centers close to me, but with costs at around $160+/month, I wasn’t buying. Something felt not quite right about the organization, so I search a little more…

Turns out Forbes has just published an article/expose about Dahn Yoga possibly being a mind-controlling cult. Some of the allegations aren’t pretty:

Shipley, now 25, is one of 27 former Dahn practitioners who filed suit in Arizona in May claiming the group subjected them to psychological manipulation and fraudulently induced them to spend thousands of dollars on Dahn yoga classes and retreats in Sedona, Ariz. and other places. The punishing techniques, they say, included forced isolation from friends and families, exercises like bowing 3,000 times all night long without breaks, disciplining members by sticking their heads in the toilet and making them lick other members’ feet, and having them hold certain poses, like the push-up position, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. On top of those charges, the suit alleges that Ilchi Lee, the 57-year-old Korean founder of Dahn and its spiritual leader, sexually preyed on young female disciples.

Read the rest here.

(Big surprise – the guru being accused of sex with female disciples, will wonders never cease!)

The only comment (as of this writing) on the Forbes article tries to paint the woman featured as someone with a gripe against the company. I think a far fairer thing to look at are some of the past reviews of Dahn Yoga on places like Citysearch and Yelp. Here’s a postive review on Citysearch:

After a lifetime of bad habits, in 2001 I got severely ill. After not being able to work because of a series of viral infection problems, I looked for a yoga/fitness program that I could really commit to and that would be flexible in meeting my schedule. I found all that and more at the Dahn Center. I’ve been a member for over 5 years. 3 at the Torrance center and now 2 years in Glendale. The masters and other members are some of the most supportive and loving people I’ve known. I’ve now been basically health problem free since I joined. It’s not a traditional yoga, but more like pilates, kundalini and mediation combined together. Make sure to check out Friday’s vibration classes.

Seems like a real review to me and not just a PR person making that one up. But here’s a negative review on Yelp:

RUN!!!!!!!!! RUN AWAY FAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DO NOT USE THIS PLACE!!! RUN!!!

Probably like many “cults,” if you go and enjoy the classes without getting sucked into the deeper workings of the place, you may actually get some decent benefits. It’s when you get yourself involved to the point where you’re mortgaging your house to pay for trainings that things start to get bad. It may also be that some local centers truly do have genuine, caring instructors who mean well, even if the organization itself is run as a cynical mind control cult.

Moral of the story – curb your enthusiasm! Don’t put all your eggs into one cult basket.

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I hate my hamstrings. Oh, I know, I should love all those parts of my body that frustrate me, but I can’t find much love for my very very tight hamstrings. There is hope though…after years of hard work, I can finally see that a day might exist sometime in the future (perhaps far, but still a possible future!) where my heels might actually hit the floor in downward facing dog.

They are actually almost there. Just an inch, maybe even less. But they have been kind of stuck in this netherworld for a few weeks now. Teasing me. Saying: Yes, you do have the possibility of touching the floor, but we’re not going to give it to you…just yet. Almost! But not quite! I can even kind of hit the floor if I do one foot at a time!

I’m hoping they’ll just pop soon and go PLUNK down on the ground! Wow! A miracle! A yoga miracle!

Patience, Grasshopper, I know!

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I feel a little guilty – I had jokingly posted on Facebook yesterday taking names on who the next big celebrity to go would be. The general consensus was that we’d like to see some sort of evil despot like Kim Jong Il die, but no, it had to be a luminary from the yoga world: Pattabhi Jois, who brought us ashtanga yoga. At 93, though, I can’t feel too sad…that is a long and fruitful life. From the Associated Press:

NEW DELHI—Krishna Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher and practitioner famous for popularizing Ashtanga yoga in the West, has died. He was 93.

Jois died in the southern Indian city of Mysore on Monday, a press statement from the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute said.

More: http://www.chicoer.com/news/national/ci_12410237

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Yoga Journal has published an interesting article on yoga’s positive effects for chronic fatigue sufferers. They cited a study where yoga was found to be extremely beneficial for CFS sufferers:

Searching for solid scientific data on what works and what doesn’t, Hartz and his associate Suzanne Bentler launched a study four years ago. They asked about 150 patients with chronic fatigue to list all of the interventions they were using for their fatigue—from the alternative to the conventional, including physical activity and pharmaceuticals. About two years later, the researchers contacted the study subjects again and asked how they were doing and whether their CFS had improved. When the researchers compiled their data recently, they found some unexpected results: Yoga appeared to help the CFS patients more than anything else. Hartz was shocked.

Hartz warns that these results are preliminary and further study is needed to verify the findings; in fact, his team hasn’t even finished fully analyzing the study data. And if yoga is indeed as helpful as the study suggests, Hartz won’t know without further research whether CFS patients benefit from yoga’s gentle physical activity, meditative component, or some other factor. Even with all of those caveats, however, Hartz’s research offers CFS sufferers an exciting possibility for effectively treating their ailment.

The article, however, did not do enough, in my opinion, to cover cases of people with CFS who have extremely stubborn, chronic forms of the illness. There are differing varieties of CFS – one is where people recover almost fully in about a year, another is where people suffer chronically for years with periods of relapse and remittance, and another where people degenerate over periods of years. The people cited in the article seemed to be of the first variety – two people who got CFS and recovered mostly after a year of rest and recovery.

This is not to say yoga is not helpful for those with severe cases of CFS. It has certainly been instrumental in helping me manage my CFS. But it is not a guaranteed cure – for me, it mostly helps keep the CFS at bay.

For those who have very severe CFS to the point where just getting up and walking can be strenuous, please check out Liz Franklin’s Yoga in Chairs DVDs. (I recently got certified in her Yoga in Chairs, which I’ll share more about in a future article!)

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I was looking for yoga jobs on Craigslist today and saw one where they wanted a recent photo sent in along with your resume. I decided not to apply. It’s not that I feel I can’t compete physically, but I don’t want to work at a place where women are being chosen to teach yoga simply because they are pretty.

This same ad was also looking for a female jump rope instructor – which I believe is probably gender discrimination against men – so you have to wonder…were they looking for a large-breasted woman to gawk at during the jump rope class?

Eeuw.

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Here’s an interesting study: It found that an 8-week program of daily yoga, including asanas and pranayama, decreased verbal aggressiveness in the males and those under 25. More info here.

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