by Hilary Lindsay | Jul 31, 2015 | anatomy, Asana, Healthy Living, medical yoga, nashville yoga, society, therapeutic yoga, Yoga, yoga class, yoga community, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
Inquiry and Experience #6 and #7 There’s a surge of disclosure on yoga injuries due to the quickly growing number of students and their use of social media. Don’t panic. Although you will likely be injured at one time or another doing yoga (including muscle strain as injury), it’s unlikely to have a lasting effect for the majority of you. On the other hand you might get yourself in trouble if you have a condition that will be ill served by the yoga practice you’ve engaged in. Not every body should do every thing. You may have a health or skeletal, soft tissue or muscular issue that warrants caution. Even those of sound body can be at risk engaging in the wrong practice or becoming overzealous. Innocent people have suffered at the hands of unskilled or thoughtless teachers as well. Here’s my sincere advice for new and old students: Stay in Your Own Lane ~ move at your own pace and do the best you can without overreaching. You might research range of motion often referred to as R.O.M. Everyone’s is different but there are normal ranges. Are you practicing for a circus career? Can you be content not putting your foot behind your head like the guy next to you? Take a good look. Do you really want to look like that? No. It’s damn unattractive and you don’t. Pay Attention ~ this is the fruit of staying interested and the two are co-dependent. Don’t space out or move by rote. Notice everything about sensation. Take your time. Notice everything...
by Hilary Lindsay | Apr 19, 2015 | anatomy, Asana, nashville yoga, Yoga, yoga class, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
In the last inquiry post I wrote that the body and mind collaborate through an unspoken language. It is a system of organization by automatic pilot that moves you in the right direction if all the signals are clear. But what happens if the signals are not clear and your organization goes offline so to speak? Will you be able to willfully remember and retrieve data so that you can manage yourself manually? Most of us have had the experience of changing computers or programs and losing automatic access to a site that had “remembered” our password for us. If we’ve forgotten or lost our password we’re now locked out. It’s important to keep the muscle memory of our secret keys. I was a dancer. My muscle memory allowed me to move with grace. It was automatic. Now I have a damaged hip and a fused lumbar spine. I cannot automatically move according to the data that worked for a healthy system. I must input unique passwords to retrieve healthy movement. Otherwise what follows the first flawed motion will take me down a bad path. It’s called compensation and it’s a useful way for the body to organize in emergencies but it’s just for emergencies. When it is used as a permanent fix, things can go badly. They went badly for me. I was intense and too impatient to heed injuries so by the time I noticed them I was already in the weeds. I’ve had to retrain muscles that would not fire. I am trying to encourage opportunity for damaged nerves to...
by Hilary Lindsay | Mar 13, 2015 | anatomy, Asana, nashville yoga, Yoga, yoga class, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
Study a photograph of your face cut down the middle and notice that the two sides are not identical. The naked body will reveal the same thing. Most of us are uneven. When I started teaching yoga I saw a room full of people. As I became more seasoned I saw a room full of individuals. How would I teach them all with their disparate unevenness! I explore sensation with my own body, examine the process of dealing with my own pain and pleasure and begin with the assumption that no one is even. I can only offer what I know for fact. Insight and experience give me the confidence to teach through the template of my own crooked being and all it has done to right itself toward an experience of quality. New students are usually less sensitive to imbalance and it gives them the opportunity of awareness. My most uneven students are teachers or experienced students who reap tremendous benefit from this approach. People who are fairly balanced have the opportunity to work with more precision. Here are a few explorations of potential imbalance that might lead to harm if not considered in a yoga practice. Inquiry # 2: Sitting ~ Contract your buttocks. Does one side contract faster than the other? If so, contract the slacker side first when doing symmetrical strength postures or exercises. Standing~ Bend your knees. Does one knee bend faster than the other? If so, drive the heel of the foot on the side that is slacker harder into the floor as you proceed....
by Hilary Lindsay | Dec 1, 2014 | Asana, Feldenkrais, nashville yoga, Yoga, yoga class, Yoga Philosophy, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
Injuries surfaced a dozen years ago; injuries that told me my career as a teacher was over but that’s not me. I kept going, changing my focus, my message, my style, my mission. Screw defeat. Vacillating between discipline of form and giving it up altogether to find my own circuitous path in a bi-polar vortex of pain and pissed, I’ve learned a couple of things. I’ve come all the way back and been completely broken again. I could not get up off the yoga room floor the day I was sure all my injuries were gone. Superman met kryptonite that day as I came down confidently from the impossible height forced by a block under my sacrum and could not even move a finger. Shithead. You are paralyzed. You forgot your fragility in the ecstasy of a whole strong spirited body again. But you are not that. Now you know. Back I crawled into my Feldenkrais womb of acceptance for all that is true about this body on this day, this age: Crawl crookedly as I am and find myself in my circuitous path born of instinct and survival. Bring it back to the yoga floor and try again. But if I stay a crooked path with a crooked body, won’t I get more crooked? I feel sure that is true and work to strike the balance again. On days uninspired by a willing body I strike out with alignment from my Iyengar toolbox as a weapon against a blank page that refuses to be written. ABC is familiar and safe. Except when the letters...
