Kepping The Sun In Your Heart
/Dear Yogis,
The sun is warming up the air and classes are empty. I get it! I recently did a weekend of workshops with Eddie Stern – (I have written about him before). He said: ‘we are all here because there is something wrong. How do I know we all have those problems? Because we're all here in a yoga class. If we didn't have those problems, we'd be fine. We'd be happy. We'd be eating gelato in the sun. And we wouldn't even think about standing on our heads’. I don’t know – I quite like standing on my head!
Talking of being in the sun, we’ll soon be doing classes in the garden – proper sun saluting. In the meantime, I’m adding a new 90 minute class to Sunday mornings. It’s a Yoga For Strength class. There will be Sun Salutations… with press-ups. (If you’ve ever been to my Core & Strength class at Eden, you’ll know the score). Then, for Sun Salutation B with High Lunge instead of Warrior 1 and turn that into Split Squat reps. Then various amounts of arm and leg work and back and core work. Then we calm everything down with some Ashtanga seated postures, inversions and finishing breathing postures. How does that sound?
Get the biceps out!
Classes
Recent changes mean the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday classes are now all Stretchy classes. The next introduction will be a post-school-run class. I’m thinking of Tuesday mornings to begin with at 9.30am but opinions welcome.
Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday = Stretchy yoga at 7.00pm – this is the popular one.
Friday morning = Ashtanga at 8.30-9.30am – this is the ‘dynamic’ style of yoga.
Saturday morning = Ashtanga at 8.30 – 10.00am – this is the longer one that pushes you.
Sunday Morning (From May 24th) = Yoga for Strength at 8.30 – 10.00am – this is Ashtanga with strengthening drills.
And, by the way, you can post a google review of my classes here.
Yoga in The News
The Glasgow Times has: Surprise yoga session encourages construction workers to embrace 'softer side'. ‘’ Popular quiet pleasures like petting animals, listening to soothing music, or taking bubble baths are rarely talked about openly. To help change this, Irn Bru hosted a surprising yoga session for construction workers on Glasgow’s Clydeside.’
The Guardian has: Do the tiny, boring exercises: how to really look after your hips. ‘The ball-and-socket hip joint is very mobile, able to move in many directions and rotate, so it’s vital to keep the muscles around the hip joint strong to support it and reduce the risk of pain and hip osteoarthritis, O’Brien says. “That can be doing reformer Pilates, it could be doing some simple exercises at home, some simple weight-bearing exercises,” he says.’
Esquire India has: Face Yoga for Men: How It Works, Benefits & Real Results Guide. ‘Most men carry more facial tension than they realise: a clenched jaw, a furrowed brow, lips pressed into a near-permanent line. Done properly, face yoga works as much on release as it does on tone. It focuses on undoing what stress has done to your face, not changing its shape.’
