Roxtar Yoga

kick your own arse May 26, 2009

I do yoga so that I can stay flexible enough to kick my own arse if necessary.  ~Betsy Cañas Garmon

Ha!  I love it!  I found this website with some fun little inspirational yoga tidbits.

I participated in yet another awesome yoga workshop at Smiling Dog Yoga with Kira Ryder who has a studio in Ojai, California called Lulu Bhanda’s.  I had just returned from traveling and was super sleepy and lethargic and it was THE MOST PERFECT solution to my travel woes.  My favorite tidbits…

• She said that people who are cronic teeth clenchers should do lots of lunges.  A great one is known as “thigh torture.”  My students definitely know and love it, it’s great for runners and cyclists, but she did a new variation I really liked.  I will try to come back and document with photos, but it’s when you take your shin up a wall, with your knee on the floor or a blanket and your shin going up so your foot is near your hip.  She had us sink into a deep lunge while in this position which hurt oh so good.  Usually I do this trying to get my hips to the wall, then my shoulders.
• Kira has a lovely soul.  You can tell she has spent a lot of time just being on her yoga mat and learning about herself.  She is one of those teachers who teaches from her heart and experience.  The more yoga I do the more I realize that these are the best teachers.
• She spotted me into a drop back backbend (where you go from standing back into the backbend with no wall or laying on the floor)!  She made it so I felt it in my body for the first time which was so exciting.  I have been playing with walking down the wall for a while and it was fun to try something a little scary.  There is just a point where you have to let go of your legs and just fall onto your hands.
• I also loved doing big toe hold after intense backbending.
• She challenged me, yet didn’t kick my ass.  It was nice to be reminded that yoga (and probably all things in life) can be challenging in a slower, loving way.  I wonder where the concept of challenge became intermingled with painful, ass kicking, dramatic in my brain.  I think it is my practice in life to learn learn that less is more and that I am still taking good care of myself even if I don’t hurt myself in yoga class and can walk the next day.  I don’t have to do 50 poses to have a solid yoga class, nor do I have to make my classes so ass kicking power yoga like, flinging our bodies through so many sun salutations but never really feeling the energy the way I did in her class.  I don’t have to cry or hurt to have breakthroughs.  I have been reminded that there is a reason the tortoise beat the hare.

what would shiva do? March 24, 2009

As I sit in LAX sick with yet another cold I am feeling a little less patient than usual. I wondered to myself, what would shiva do? What would she do if she was sick, stuck in an airport? I imagine her with her puffy white coat and her son starting a dance party. I imagine many options, but writing this on my blackberry has made my thumb hurt and exhausted me. More later.

a girl from south detroit March 10, 2009

Today I was given an article, Requiem for Detroit, from Rolling Stone Magazine.  It asks, “Does the decline of the auto industry mean the end of Detroit?”  It made me feel sad for the city I grew up in that I still love like a loyal little puppy dog; sad for the people who are struggling to survive there, sad for cities like this all over the world and the people they’ve left in their wakes.  I wonder what we can do to prevent such decay and despair in our urban centers.  Can we do anything at all?  Should we?  Will Silicon Valley have it’s day of decay?  Are we really so disposable; our cities, cars, houses, old people?

In the article the author admitted “I don’t really feel sadness or rage or much of anything.  It just feels normal.  For people my age and younger growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder that the best ended long ago.  Our parents could mourn what it used to be and tell us stories about the wonderful downtown department stores and the heyday of muscle cars and Motown.  Bur for us, those stories are pure fable.”

The lack of the author’s connection to his home town, his apathy, made me think he sounds like a spoiled little brat. I may not know what it was like when my grandma took the bus downtown with her mother to spend a day shopping at Hudson’s, but I feel her when she talks about it. I’ve heard about Motown. Listen to those songs, how can you not feel something? Rosa Parks? Every old person has stories about the hey days, but what kind of people are we when we can’t relate to their stories in some way? It’s amazing to me that 90% of my immediate family was born and raised within a few square miles of Detroit, right near the original houses my ancestors lived in after they arrived from Germany. That kind of history creates culture and soul, no matter what happens to the factories, landscapes, and jaded youth who get more and more violent and pissed off. We had Bobolo Island. I feel comfortable in those streets, driving by deserted Fort Wayne on the way to Canada. I have my memories too and never felt like the best had ended long ago. I actually feel blessed to have grown up there and experienced a youth that wasn’t so freaking sterile that I can’t think outside of myself.

I want to know where the conversation is asking how we can prevent such decay and despair in our urban centers. Are we really this disposable? Because we are letting cities of people die a long, slow, depressing death and not giving too much of a crap to stop it. Maybe it’s industrialized societies turn?