Daily Meditation Series



A few years ago I found a deck of meditation cards on sale and bought them.  I have never actually used them so I thought I will explore and share them on here so we can learn together :)  There are a few different types of meditations in this deck.

10 basics
9 daily meditations
30 visualizations


So for the next 30 days I will combine 1 visualization with a mix of 1 basic and daily meditation (these will repeat but I will random them to change it up)

Day 1

Basic Meditation

Meditation is a tool that has een used for centuries to promote inner peace and health.  Modern scientific sutdies have shown that regulare meditation can help reduce hypertension and stress.

1. Find a quite place.  Turn off the phone or move to silent.  Find and devote a comfortable place in your home for your meditation practice.  Pillows, boolsters, blankets, your mat, or nothing can be used.  This is your practice.  Come to a crosslegged seat with your back supported and spine long.  Allow for the legs and knees to become heavy.  Releasing tension you are holding in your body.  Take a deep breath in through the nose and out of the mouth with a sigh.  Allow the shoulders to draw down the back, neck long (repeat 2x)

2. Allow your eyes to gently close.  Notice your breathing.  As you focus on the inhaltions and exhaltions of your breathing you will notice it will start to even out.  Same count inhaling as exhauling.   If distracting thoughts come up, let go of them.  Acknowledge them and then shelf them for later.  Return your focus to your breathing to help keep the mind from wandering.  This isn't easy right off the bat.  Living in a fast paced world and asking our brains to slow down from that pace is hard.  Over time you will find your mind calms easier.

3. Too keep focus, set an intention.  Use of a mantra or mudra also help.  This also helps the further your meditation but incorporating these two.  Mantras can be spoken verally or mentally to oneself.

4.  Allow for enough time for yourself to meditate.  Meditation should not have a short time limit if a time limit at all.  The intention isn't to meditate and move on like we do with majority of things in our life.  Meditation is a time and practice set aside for you.  The opporutnity to turn inward and be present.

Daily Meditation

You can bring the concentrated energy of meditation into a simple act of nourishment.

After completing your meditation, pick out a large juicy fruit of your choice.  Feel its texture in both of your hands.  Close your eyes and roll it around your hands.  Inhale the fragrance.  Smell the sweetness of the fruit.  The ripeness.  Slowly peel or cut the fruit feeling the texture change.  Break off a peice of the fruit, smell it, then put the fuit in your mouth.  Allow the sense to full engage.  The smell of the fruit combining with the taste.  Roll your tounge over the fruit.  Chew it as slow as possible noticing each different taste.  Sweet?  Bitter? Tangy?  Imagine all of the nutrients deeply feeding your body.  Providing the building blocks of life.  Finish the rest of the fruit in this manner.  Remember, it isn't about eating the fruit as fast as possible.  But truely enjoying the fruit.  Slow down and enjoy the fruit for what it is and what it does.  It isn't just a peach or an orange.  It is the sustinance the body needs to survive as it should in nature.

Visualization

Your wise self is part of your that can help your find solutions to challenges you come across in this jouney.  Take the time to Meet Your Wise Self

After meditating, imagine you are going to a beautiful meadow at the top of a mountain, or a beautiful place you feel safe.  The beach.. the woods..

Sit comfortably in your place.  Imagine golden light coming toward you.  Feel its warmth start to grow as it grows brighter while moving closer.  As it grows bigger, allow it to fill your heart space.  Allow this to relax you and feel the positivity and light.  When the light is upon you, it can take any form that comes to you or stay as light.  Allow yourself to be and be present in that very moment.  Stay as long or as little as feels right. 

Write down any thoughts or feelings that may have come to you.  This can sometimes stir up or bring forth things we forget that maybe be painful.. but can also bring forward some of our most cherished forgotten memories.

Meditation is an ever evolving practice.  Each person's meditation and experience is unique and different from the next.  Take the time for yourself each day.

Namaste
Ash

Pitta Kapha I am

One of the beautiful yogis that I practice under at Blissful Yoga emailed us a Ayurveda Questionnaire to gauge our Doshas.  After sitting down and honestly going through the lists I am a Pitta Kapha. :)

Lets talk about what Ayurveda and Doshas are:

Ayurveda, in sanskrit, translates as "knowledge of life".  Ayurveda dates back 5000 years to the sakskrit texts of the Vedas.  Ayurveda is a way of healing through our doshas, or physical constitution, emotional nature, and spiritual outlook.  This is also the sister science to yoga.

Doshas are defined through vata, pitta, and kapha.  Each one of us is a unique combination of these three forces.  Although we all have a bit of each dosha in each of us, most people tend to have an abundance of one or two of the doshas.  This combination is uniquely determined at the time of your conception.  This is your own personal blueprint or prakriti (nature).

Marsha, during last week's Sunday Restorative, explained the 3 doshas too us.  Your doshas change as you age.  Kapha is child, Pitta is young adult/adult, and Vata is adult (55)/senior.  For women vata starts when menopause begins.

Here are overviews of the 3 Doshas:

Kapha types have strong frames and are naturally athletic as long as they are actively exercising to manage and maintain a healthy weight.  They also tend to gain weight easily.  The influence of the earth and water elements makes them innately stable, compassionate, and loyal.  They do things in a methodical way, and prefer a regular routine in their personal and professional lives.  When imbalanced Kaphas can become unmotivated, stubborn, and complacent even when change is nessesary.  Their metabolism tends to be slow and their appetite for both food and stimulation is less intense then with vata or pitta.  Kaphas also benefits from exposing themselves to new enviornemnts, people, and occasionally fasting.


Pitta types are dominated by the element fire, which makes them innately strong, intense, and irritable.  They have a medium build body with endurance and powerful musculature.  They often have freckled skin that reddens easily in the sun, during physical exercise, massages, and blushing.  They are strong willed and are good at doing what they thing is right.  Pittas approach work and play with the same intensity and competitiveness.  Pittas are natural leaders and quick learners whose ability to comprehend and master a new skill and concepts can make them judgmental or impatient toward people they feel are slow or less focused than themselves.  They have strong digestion and intense appetites, both for food and challenges.  If they miss a meal they are likely to be crabby.  It is common for Pittas to suffer from health conditions such as inflammation, rashes, acne, and loose stool.  For balance, pittas need to manage their "fiery" tendencies, channeling them in productive ways and learning to recognize their destructive power.


Vata types are lanky and thin.  Thy are very mentally and physically active and enjoy creative endeavors, meeting new people, and traveling to new places.  When Vatas are balanced, they are flexible, have lively imaginations, and are original thinkers.  When Vatas is imbalanced they can get anxious, ungrounded, and flaky.  Vatas tend to run cold and dry while enjoying warm, humid weather.  It is common for Vatas to experience cold hands and feet, constipation, dry skin, and cracking joints.  The influence of the element air in their constitution causes their energy, mood, and appetite to fluctuate dramatically.  For this reason Vatas often fail to eat and sleep regularly, swinging from eating heavy foods to ground and sedate themselves, or ingesting stimulants like coffee and sugar to sustain intense mental and physical activity.  Insomnia and low immunity are very common problem for the sensitive vata person.


With all that being said... I am a Pitta Kapha.  The dominance is in the Pitta.  And reading through these descriptions its on the money.  It was amusing to read and be like "yup i'm that.. that one too.. yep... ooh def that one".. but also very informative.  Made me a little more aware of myself even more.  I have become much more aware of myself in the physical aspect of life by practicing yoga 4-6 times a week.  My body now "craves" the things it needs.  I find myself craving salad or veggies sometimes after a period of heavy foods.  So I am now ready to listen to my body and give it the natural things it needs to be balanced.

I have also attached the survey that Marsha sent out to find out what Dosha you are.  Take the Quiz, Find Out What Dosha You Are, and Let The Healing Begin!!

Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti Aum

Namaste Ash :)



(click on them.. they get bigger!)

That Sweet Soreness

Is what I look for in my practice.  If the pose is easy and aligned I take that as my body's indication to challenge myself further. A day after a dynamic wall yoga class by Rosa on Wednesday; my back, sides, biceps, and core are sore. That "muscles are full of blood and you worked the hell out of them" kind of soreness.  I took two weeks off from yoga in a combo of week vaca and then a week of rest. My body just wasn't feeling it and the moon cycle was a rough one.  But that sweet soreness pulls me back.  My body craves the movement, the challenge, the opportunity for my mind to be clear and in the moment.  And the ablitiy to push myself in directions I never thought I would get to.  And continue to do so!

I have now been practicing at least 4 times a week consistently since the first of May.  5 months of practice translates in my life to 28lbs lost and counting, a clearer calmer mind, accountability, being healthy, physical strength and stamina, and growing my practice further.  I plan to take the YogaWorks 200 RYT and teach in the community.  I want to share and give back the beautiful energy and guidance I have received from the Yogis I practice under :)

SatNam

Align Those Hips!

Lately I'm finding I need to work on my hip alignment.  To me, my hips feel aligned, but the teachers in the classes I go to are constantly adjusting my hips.  Last time I went to the chiropractor they took xrays and saw the my hips were already at an angle from favoratism of my right leg all the years I played soccer.  I sprang my ankles many a time on the right side and compensated for it on my left side thus throwing my hips off!  I love that the teachers align my hips for me.  It helps me become conscious of how the alignment feels and making the change in my asanas.   Standing in high lunge I find myself not know where my hips are all while making sure that my knee is over my ankel and my lower belly is in and my shoulders are down while breathing ;)  So here is an awesome article from Yoga Journal that I found to start helping me find my hip alignment.  Shanti!

Intuitive Alignment: Tadasana Hips

If you adjust a student in Tadasana (Mountain Pose), she will be aligned for a moment, but if you teach her how to feel Tadasana, she will be aligned for a lifetime. Tadasana is the root of all yoga postures, so improving it can revitalize a student's entire practice. Although it's simple in concept—just stand up straight—it's often a challenge for beginners because they can't see themselves in the pose. As teachers, we instinctively act as an extra set of eyes for our students, observing them from various angles and suggesting, through word, touch, or example, that they move one body part this way, another that way, until they line up better. This works for some students, but for others it can be an exercise in frustration—it can be hard for them to reproduce your corrections accurately on their own. What they really need is to learn what Tadasana alignment feels like from the inside so they can create it from scratch whenever they want. In this column, we'll focus on ways you can teach your students to feel a crucial element of Tadasana alignment: accurate placement of the pelvis and hip joints. In next month's column, we'll expand on this technique and apply it to teaching alignment of the whole body in Sirsasana (Headstand).
Before we launch into specifics, let's acknowledge that there is more than one path up the mountain. One excellent way to teach Tadasana that will not be covered here is to have your student stand with her back against a wall, make various adjustments, then maintain these adjustments as she steps away from the wall and re-establishes the pose. This can be very effective, but once your student is away from the wall she no longer gets ongoing sensory feedback from it about her body position. The techniques below are intended to teach your student how to get that kind of feedback from her internal sense organs. Once she has learned to listen to these sensations in Tadasana, she will be able to do the same in many other poses.
Before you can teach a student how to align her hips in Tadasana, she must position her feet and legs properly. Make sure she starts by:

pointing her feet straight ahead

distributing her weight equally between her inner and outer feet

extending (straightening) her knees completely

lifting her kneecaps and pointing them straight ahead.

With her feet and legs in place, you can teach her the four elements of positioning her pelvis and hips in Tadasana:

equalize hip height

neutralize pelvic tilt

neutralize front-to-back placement (whole pelvis not too far forward, not too far back)

point pelvis straight ahead (don't bring one hip forward of the other).

 

Equalize hip height: Unless your student has an anatomical abnormality in her feet, legs or pelvis (such as a difference in bone length between her left and right legs), her hip joints will be at the same height as one another when her pelvis is centered between her feet. If her body is symmetrical left and right, her feet will bear equal weight when her pelvis is centered. So, in most cases, even though your student cannot see her own pelvis in Tadasana, you can teach her to equalize the height of her hips simply by instructing her to shift her pelvis left and right until she feels exactly the same amount of weight on her two feet. Students who have structural anomalies may require more complicated instructions that are beyond the scope of this column.
Neutralize pelvic tilt: To help your student place her pelvis in a neutral (non-tilted) position, first have her place her fingers on her left and right pelvic rims (iliac crests) and trace forward along both rims until she locates the foremost point (the anterior superior iliac spine, or ASIS) on each side. (For an anatomical illustration that identifies most of the landmarks mentioned in this section, click here). Next, while she keeps her fingers on the fronts of these spines, have her bring her attention to the position of her pubic symphysis (the junction of the two pubic bones at the midline of the front of the pelvis, often incorrectly referred to by yoga teachers as "the pubic bone"). Have her tilt her pelvis backward (moving her ASISs backward and her pubic symphysis forward) or forward (ASISs forward, pubic symphysis backward) until the ASISs and the symphysis lie in the same vertical plane. In other words, the pubic symphysis should be neither in front of nor behind her two anterior superior iliac spines. For most students, this will create a neutral pelvic tilt. When she achieves it, your student will have a moderate inward curve in her lower back.
Neutralize front-to-back placement of the pelvis: The instructions in this paragraph involve whole-pelvis movements, rather than tilt. They will help you teach your student to feel for herself how far forward or backward to place her pelvis relative to her feet. When she finds the right spot, her pelvis will balance naturally atop her legs. For some people, the optimal balance point is where the hip joints line up exactly above the ankle joints; for others, the ideal hip position may be a little forward of this.
 
The technique described here will only work if your student's pelvis is in the neutral (non-tilted) position (see previous section). Note that as she experiments with different fore and aft positions of her pelvis it will probably tilt a little out of neutral. She will need to correct this to finalize the pose.
To teach front-to-back hip placement, you will first show your student how to use palpation (feeling with her fingers) to identify the position she wants, then have her graduate to using internal sensations alone to guide her self-adjustments. We’ll explore ways to teach this from both the front and the back of the pelvis.  Here's how to do it from the front. First, starting in Tadasana, have your student lift one foot, flexing her hip until her thigh is parallel to the floor and her knee points straight ahead. Have her trace one fingertip up the midline of the front of her lifted thigh until she reaches the crease at the junction between the front of her thigh and her pelvis (her front groin). Here, she will find the tendon of her contracted rectus femoris muscle or the nearby sartorius muscle under her finger. (Note that the tendon will bulge out, interrupting the crease at this point.) Instructing her to keep her fingertip on this spot, have her lower her foot back to Tadasana and find the same "front hip crease" spot on the other side with the corresponding fingertip of her other hand.  Once she has her fingers in place, ask your student to press firmly inward (toward the back of her body), indenting the flesh enough to notice how springy it feels. Then have her deliberately shift her hips well forward of the Tadasana position (see photo, middle panel, but exaggerate the movement more) and notice what happens. The flesh will harden under her fingers as the rectus femoris and sartorius muscles stretch. Next, have her shift her hips backward so the front hip creases deepen (see photo, bottom panel). The flesh will soften under her fingers as the muscles slacken. Have her repeat the forward and backward shifting of her pelvis, reducing the range each time, until she can feel how slight movements produce subtle differences in the firmness of the muscles. Instruct her to find the position where the flesh under her fingers feels exactly half way between hard and soft. If she has not lost her neutral pelvic tilt, this halfway point will be the Tadasana position of the pelvis.  The next step is to teach your student to do the same thing without using her fingers. To do this, she will need to notice the internal sensations of stretching and relaxation that accompany the adjustments. She can follow the instructions below with her fingers in the same place as before at first (as a transitional step), then repeat the actions with her arms at her sides in classic Tadasana position. Have her shift her hips forward as before and notice the sensations of stretch that arise at the rectus femoris and sartorius. Then have her shift her hips backward and feel that the stretch disappears. As before, have her shift her hips alternately forward and backward, reducing the range with each repetition, and noticing how the forward movement creates a feeling of stretch and the backward movement creates a feeling of laxity. Instruct her to find the position where the muscles feel exactly half way between stretched and soft. This will be the Tadasana position.  It's very useful to teach your student to make similar adjustments from the posterior (rear) side of her body as well. In Tadasana, ask her to put her fingertips on her sitting bones (ischial tuberosities), slide them about one-half inch toward the floor, then press into the flesh immediately below the sitting bones. She will be pushing on the tendons of her hamstring muscles. With her fingers in place, have her tip her pelvis and trunk a few degrees forward at the hip joints as if starting to go into Uttanasana. She will feel her hamstrings contract, making them bulge slightly under her fingertips. Next, have her return to the upright position and shift her pelvis well forward of Tadasana. She will feel her hamstrings relax and recede under her fingertips. As she did when she was palpating her front hip creases, have her alternately shift her hips forward and back, making the movements more and more subtle until she finds the point of neutrality (hamstrings neither bulging nor receding, neither hard nor totally soft under her fingers). Once she can feel this balance with her fingers, help her make the transition to feeling it from the inside by noticing the internal sensations that arise just below her sitting bones as she moves her pelvis forward and backward in ever-diminishing oscillations.
Once your student has learned to feel the internal sensations from both the front (hip creases) and back (hamstring origins) that signal neutral front-to-back alignment of her pelvis, have her neutralize both areas at the same time while practicing Tadasana. With practice, this will enable her to recreate the optimal position of her pelvis whenever she wishes without the help of a teacher or a wall.
Point the pelvis straight ahead: Preventing the pelvis from turning to one side or the other is one of the most difficult aspects of Tadasana alignment to feel from the inside. To teach it, you'll have your student use a combination of palpation and internal sensation at first, then internal sensation alone, as you did with front-to-back placement.  First have your student identify the location of her ASIS and her greater trochanter on one side. The greater trochanter is the large knob of bone that protrudes from the outside of the upper thighbone (femur). While standing, your student can feel it just beneath the skin on the side of her thigh, a little below the level of her hip joints. Have her trace a line on her skin from the ASIS to the greater trochanter, and locate the midpoint of that line. Then, have her press the tip of her index finger firmly into the skin about one half to one inch in front of that midpoint. Ask her to press the same spot on the other side of her body at the same time. Her fingertips should end up a couple of inches to the outside of and slightly higher than the "front hip crease" points she pressed to feel front-to-back alignment (described above). Anatomically, she should be pressing on the anterior (front) part of her left and right gluteus medius muscles.  Once she has her fingers in place and pressing inward, ask your student to compare the "springiness" of the flesh and the internal sensations she feels on one side vs. the other as she alternately turns her pelvis left and right. Have her to notice how, as she turns to the left, the muscle under her left finger grows firm and there is an internal sensation of contraction, while on the right the muscle softens and the sensation of contraction disappears (and vice-versa when she turns the other way). Teach her to find the point where both her finger sensations and her internal sensations feel exactly balanced between the left and right sides. Finally, have her repeat the exercise with her arms at her sides in Tadasana position, using only her internal sensations, not palpation, to judge the point where the sensations are the same on the two sides. With practice, she should be able to align her pelvis so it points quite precisely straight ahead using internal sensations alone to judge her position.  All this subtle up-down, front-back, left-right adjustment of the pelvis is a lot for a student to process. It's a good idea to divide your instruction on the various aspects of Tadasana hip alignment into several separate lessons. Ultimately, the techniques described here will empower your student to find her own Tadasana. When she does, she will have a deeper understanding of alignment she can apply to every yoga posture.

Roger Cole, Ph.D. is an Iyengar-certified yoga teacher (www.yogadelmar.com), and Stanford-trained scientist. He specializes in human anatomy and in the physiology of relaxation, sleep, and biological rhythms.

Up in the Mountains

I've been  on a bit of a hiatus the past month.  We went up to Colorado for a bit and spent a lot of time in wonderment of nature.  It was rather magical :) Every night ended with the fire pit going by the river and smores a makin!  Most excellent way to spend a week with my hubby :)

And a little hiking/yoga/exploring too ;)

Ash