Food Matters

Hi all you yogis and yoginis out here! As you all know yoga is about making conscious educated decisions. Well, I stumbled upon a movie trailer for "Food Matters." I had never seen nor heard of this movie before, but it looks VERY INFORMATIVE! I will be downloading and watching it. Please take the time to watch the trailer and if you are still interested you can download the movie from foodmatters.tv for just $4.95!! Or buy it on their site for $24.95. Let me know what you think!

Namaste, Tricia

Post & Courier Doga Article, Photo Gallery and Video

Thanks to David Quick for covering our Doga fundraiser. Great article David!

http://postandcourier.com/news/2009/apr/16/yoga_dogs_breaks_workout_rut78801/

Inspiring Video from YouTube

Tricia found this video on YouTube about a long-time MS survivor and wanted to share it here. Although it's not specifically about yoga, the concepts he talks about will sound very familiar to anyone who practices yoga. This is a truly beautiful and inspiring video.

Teachers playing

Here are some YouTube videos from a recent teacher class, as we played around with inversions, backbends, and arm balances. Hopefully our joy comes through, even as we struggle and fall! Enjoy!

Looking for lightness in inversions and arm balances:


Working on backbends:

Yoga with Injuries

There are a few things that can happen to your yoga practice when you become injured. Sometimes people assume that if they can't do their regular practice they should not practice at all, or wouldn't know how to practice. Others may decide that they'll just "push through" their injury without changing their approach to their practice. Some people become frustrated and give up on yoga until their body is "back to normal." But there is a better way.

The practice of yoga can have great healing properties when it is approached with care and thought. Many injuries can be worked around more easily than you might think. When I broke my foot last year I continued to practice even though I couldn't do any standing poses. I continued doing some sort of sun salutation even though it might be unrecognizable to someone as a sun salutation (see the video below). I gained new insight into my breath and the subtelties of many of the postures I had been practicing for years.

So if you have an injury now or have had one in the past, or are just curious about how you would deal with one if it came up, come to my "Yoga with Injuries" Workshop on Friday 11/14 at 7:00PM. This will be a discussion of how to approach yoga with an injury, both in setting up your own home practice and also in modifying your studio practice. Everyone welcome!

Interesting video clip

I found this clip on YouTube. It's a Japanese news clip about Acroyoga in New York City. If you watch carefully you can see Clayton and Jordan in the background, because we just happened to be taking the class that they were filming last time we visited New York.

If you understand Japanese maybe you can tell us what they're saying!

Enjoy!

Jordan & Clayton's workshop with Tripsichore

Here's Jordan and Clayton being held in the air by Edward Clark of Tripsichore Yoga!

Jordan and Clayton drove to Chapel Hill over the weekend for a wonderful workshop experience with Tripsichore. Tripsichore is known for innovative vinyasa techniques (mixing inversions into the sun salutations, transitioning between poses in different ways), but what we really took away from the workshop was how unimportant all of the yoga poses actually are in the grand scheme of things. As Edward Clark kept saying, "There are lots of trained monkeys in the west who can do all sorts of crazy yoga poses." That's not really the yoga and focusing too much on the poses misses the whole point. We really learned how important it is to keep energy moving in your body with your breath and attention as you practice, and when we came up against a wall it was usually a limitation in our focus and energy, not our tight hamstrings or shoulders.

We also were reminded how wonderful it is to be a beginner in yoga, because we really felt like one much of the time! There are so many possibilities and each little "a-ha" moment means so much. If you click this link you can see a promo video for a dance piece made up of yoga asanas that Tripsichore performed on the first night. Enjoy!

PS. Some students wanted to see how it was possible to float your feet off of the floor into a handstand. Here's some video I shot from the workshop showing a couple very brief demonstrations (note the speed of the video has not been altered...this shows a great deal of control in lifting off slowly).

Yoga Teachers class caught on video

The teachers at Serenity Now like to get together to practice together, inspire each other, and learn from each other. We heard that many people liked seeing video of us attempting challenging poses, sometimes with great success, sometimes falling, but always having fun, so we filmed some more! Keep reading to see 2 recent videos of Hannah, Jordan and Clayton playing around with handstands, backbends, arm balances, and partner flying.

This first video is a compilation of handstands and backbends, including dropping back to wheel. Clayton tries a one handed handstand away from the wall with a spot from Hannah. Hannah and Jordan experiment with a rocking tick-tock motion in their wheels as a preparation for standing up from wheel. Popping the hands off the ground in full wheel is harder than it looks.




This next video is a compilation of arm balances and partner flying balances. These poses required lots of focus to stay balanced!

Advanced Yoga Practice caught on video

Here are the videos we taped in 2007...many of you said you were inspired to watch some teachers attempt advanced poses...sometimes successfully and other times falling out or messing up. So here are the YouTube videos again.

Yoga Inversions


Yoga Montage


Partner Yoga - Learning to Fly


And of course: Jordan doing sun salutations with her broken foot (as of this posting, it's now completely healed!):