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Scrolling through Facebook I can’t help but notice when I see a stock yoga photo of students doing some ambiguous pose attached to some well-meaning article titled something like “Yoga Poses for Better Sex” or Sleep or Weight Loss or pick your favorite “it” topic. I squint down and think to myself “what on earth are they doing?” I study the pose and as far as I can tell, it seems to be an unhappy marriage between Upward Facing Dog and Cobra Pose. The hips rooted to the floor, shoulders are crunched up by the ears, elbows locked straight, hands planted several inches in front of the shoulders and neck is cranked back as far as physically possible. I briefly cringe and wonder - “does that even feel good?” Usually, that’s where it ends, I scroll on and actively try to not think about the potential cricked neck or torqued lower back that might result from such a pose. I actively try to forget it until the next class when I teach Upward Facing Dog and someone across the room is doing an exact replica of the pose I was cringing at in that stock photo. Cue me tearing across the room to triage the situation. If there is one thing that I believe in as a teacher of yoga asana, it’s finding strength and mobility within poses that is born out of the specificity of proper alignment. Under normal circumstances, a healthy spine should be able to move in any direction at will. More often than not, the one direction of movement that has the most fear and misunderstanding associated with it are backbends. Backbends are an integral part of any asana practice, and are especially prevalent in a Vinyasa Flow practice. Upward Facing Dog is a core pose in Surya Namaskar A (Sun Salutation A) and portions of Surya Namaskar A, including Upward Facing Dog, are used as a palate cleanser of sorts between standing poses during many a Flow class, which means as a student you will have a plethora of chances to give your Up Dog a go. I am a teacher who believes in specificity, which to me means that I am a teacher of individuals, not just of poses. Therefore, it is understandable, even EXPECTED that not every student in the class will practice Upward Facing Dog pose every time it's offered, there might even be some students who will never in their lifetime practice Upward Facing Dog, despite it's tenure within the Vinyasa catalogue. This choice, to me, is a sign of a sophisticated practitioner. It is not about what backbend you choose to practice in your Vinyasa, but instead practicing with specificity whatever one you do choose. One of my favorite quotes about what yoga, something that keeps me excited about teaching alignment and actions to the students who walk through my classroom door, comes from the Bhagavad Gita: "yoga is skillfulness in action." Skillfulness in action isn't blowing through your practice trying to get from Pose A to Pose B as quickly as possible. Skillfulness in action isn't about showing off how high you can lift your leg or doing the backbend the neighbor on your right just did because anything they can do you can do better. Skillfulness in action is introverted, it is inquisitive, it is asking your body, "what makes sense today?" and waiting for the answer and moving in a way that is mindful and aligned. Which brings me to why I am even writing this post, a big part of that skillfulness is knowing what options you have available to you. If the only backbend you've ever seen is Up Dog but you aren't able to yet do it in an aligned way, that can be frustrating and isolating. Below are some backbends that can be easily folded into your Vinyasa Flow practice along with their alignment and essential actions. As Sir Francis Bacon famously coined: knowledge is power. This knowledge can make the difference between a frustrating, pain, and fear-filled practice and one that is aligned and satiating. Do what makes sense, and leave what doesn't.  Low Cobra - this pose is a great way to start to practice all of the actions needed in either Up Dog or Cobra but under less dire circumstances. Start laying on your belly, big toes pointing straight back. Place your hands beneath your elbows and squeeze your elbows in towards the midline of your body and on an inhale roll the shoulders away from the floor, aiming for your arms to land in about a 90 degree angle. Press down through every toenail, including your pinkie toes, engaging the fronts of your thighs until your knees start to get light off the floor. Spin your inner thighs to the ceiling as you firm your outer ankles in, keeping your big toes parallel pointing straight back towards the wall behind you. With every exhale try to root down through the tops of your feet, with every inhale roll the shoulders back and away from the floor as you squeeze the elbows towards each other. PS. you can intensify this pose by lifting and hovering your hands just above the floor, it's an awesome way to build up back strength without putting a lot of strain on your low back. Still work to keep the hands under your elbows and fight to keep your elbows pinned in towards the midline.  Upward Facing Dog - Start laying on your belly, big toes pointing straight back. Place your hands beneath your elbows and squeeze your elbows in towards the midline of your body. Root down into the tops of your feet vigorously until the fronts of your thighs engage and knees lift up off the floor. Focus on spinning the inner thighs to the ceiling, and as you do firm your outer ankles in to keep your big toes parallel and are pointing straight back. From here press the hands and feet into the floor equally and straighten the elbows. Stack your shoulders directly over the wrists, lift your thighs and knees off the floor as you allow for the hips to hammock forward and down. Push your shoulder blades towards your collar bones so you are pulling your chest forward and up through your upper arms. Roll the heads of your upper arms away from the front of the room as you continually push the floor away with both the hands and the feet. PS. If your Low Cobra is well-aligned, Up Dog is built to be a direct relation to Low Cobra - all you need to do from Low Cobra is straighten the arms and lift the thighs while the hips hammock forward and down.  Cobra - Start laying on your belly, big toes pointing straight back. Place your hands beneath your shoulders and squeeze your elbows in towards the midline of your body. Root down the tops of the feet and start to push the hands into the floor peeling the front of the torso away from the floor. Keep the elbows into the midline and roll the heads of the upper arms back and down away from the ears. Hips and thighs maintain on the floor.
PS. Cobra tends to be a stand alone backbend as opposed to one you "flow" through like Low Cobra or Up Dog. Mainly because it requires a different hand/shoulder alignment than the other backbends so it doesn't really lend itself to following Chaturanga. xxx
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 I promise I will post something more
yoga-y soon, but these last few weeks I have been consumed with doing lot of behind the scenes work. If you haven't heard, I have my first retreat coming up this October! Workshops are in the works for outside the Boston area, and I am always working on developing and maintaining my curriculum for Down Under Yoga's 200 hour Teacher Training (there's one coming up this Fall, info session on May 22 at 1:30!) Along with all of the other behind the scenes moving pieces, I've also been preparing for an in-studio photo shoot that is happening tomorrow. In anticipation of this shoot, I've been trying to eat really carefully. So I present to you, my lunch! Usually I am all about rice. Would eat it exclusively, with butter of course, if I could. But in an effort to be healthier - I've switched things up by substituting riced cauliflower. A great way to get more veggies in without sacrificing the general texture and mouthfeel that rice provides. what you'll need:
- heat up skillet with olive oil, cook garlic, onion & asparagus - stir in riced cauliflower - season with butter, salt, pepper or what ever else your heart desires - add shrimp in during the last 2 minutes to warm through ENJOY!  as a yoga teacher, i don't pretend to be a chef. (heck, i'm not even that good of a cook)... but, i am also someone who is always appreciative of easy and delicious recipes that satisfy. these caramelized tomatoes are the absolute best. this is a recipe i've made about 5 times in the last week, and every time i do - they are gone by the next day, i just can't seem to keep them in the house! we gobble it up with just about anything, crackers, mixed with brown rice, into eggs, on bread, or my personal favorite - right on a spoon.
what you'll need:
- pre-heat oven to 425 degrees - mix olive oil, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, salt & pepper together - add tomatoes to a pyrex, pour olive oil mixture over tomatoes, mix to coat - put tomatoes in oven, check and mix every 15 minutes or so. total cook time is about an hour to an hour and a half, whenever the tomatoes are caramelized - let cool, store in a wide mouth mason jar - if it lasts that long! enjoy!  I've been working on cleaning up my eating habits. My goal is to use more real food and less ingredients in my dishes. Here is a very clean, healthful, and quick lunch or dinner (or hey, even breakfast!)
what you'll need: - 1/2-1 cup brown rice (or quinoa!) - 1 avocado - 3-4 pearl tomatoes (baby roma works too) - 1 tablespoon coconut oil - pinch of sea salt place brown rice into bowl - add coconut oil dice up avocado in rind and spoon out, coarsely chop up tomatoes and add to the bowl. add sea salt to taste and enjoy! Here is the quote I read during savasana during the Thanksgiving Day Flow at Sweat and Soul Yoga:
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” - Melody Beattie A delicious, FAST and easy to make (vegetarian) dinner. Stir fry kale, squash and heirloom tomatoes in olive oil to desired softness add Trader Joe's Coconut Green Curry Simmer Sauce and serve over a bed of brown rice. Enjoy! 
My challenge officially comes to a close tomorrow. And I have lots of sore muscles and a few new discoveries in my practice to show for it.
few observations from my month of consistent practice. To start if off, here's a quote that stuck out to me over and over though out this month:
As a yoga teacher, I firmly believe that incorporating a steady practice can and will benefit your life for the better. That being said, even after embarking on this challenge, that I would be lying in bed trying to go to sleep and realize that I hadn't "practiced." For the purposes of this month, I went ahead and did some chill out in bed (or on couch) yoga. Supta Virasana or Viparita Kirani being the two favorites. One thing that yoga does whether you like it or not, it opens you. It opens muscles of course, but also it opens your subtle body, your hidden most feelings and desires and failures. All of that can and will someday come pouring out on your mat... and to be honest... there are some days where I just couldn't deal with the possible unraveling of myself. And that's okay. While this avoidance isn't advisable long term... it's okay to let something marinate and to not release it just because you don't want to. That's your choice. But know why you are making it. And remember that your problems will be there waiting for you with or without practice, so someday you might need to "bite the bullet" so to speak, and face those feelings and start to unravel some of the knots of your subtle body. In that same breath - yoga doesn't solve everything. It simply gives you the tools to ride out the waves that life hands to you. Yoga will not increase your paycheck, get your roommate to finally clean the bathroom, keep your boss from aggravating you, stop your mom, dad, brother, sister, boyfriend, or girlfriend from nagging you about that one thing that just sets you off. But what it will do, is give you the tools of awareness and breath to guide you through those experiences. No one is perfect and we all can, and will, react to things with displeasure when they happen, but yoga can give you that chance - that chance of a second breath to realize while you have no means to control the actions of others, you can and are more than able to control your own actions. Yoga is more than asana. While asana (the physical expression of yoga poses) is what brought me to this practice, as it does so many of us, yoga is anything you want it to be - it is bringing your breath, body and mind into harmony. And, as I briefly touched on, sometimes "yoga" needs to be the exact opposite of asana. Sometimes it is just sitting and appreciating your breath, letting the melting pot of this world continue to swirl around you without your hand in the proverbial pot. Lastly, and probably the most important thing I am taking away from this experience, is that a practice can be anything you choose it to be. You do not need to practice 90, 60, 30, or even 15 minutes for it to count. If swinging your legs over the edge of your couch for 5 minutes calms your mind and deepens your breath... that's a practice. Anything that brings you closer to your authentic Self, the Self that is there despite of any external expectations or illusions that might be present in everyday society, is a practice. Above all I hope this is the one thing I take away from this experiment, and if anything I hope it can serve helpful to any readers out there. A yoga practice needn't be long or particularly difficult, or even effort-full. It is something you absolutely can incorporate into your life with minimal time and dollop of presence of mind and effort to do so. Even as this month closes, and thus completes my challenge, it is my goal to continue to post here photos, stories or any other little something that comes up as I continue to maintain a practice on a daily level. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions as I move forward with this blog. I appreciate your reading and wish you nothing but light and love. xxx. "You'll never know if you don't try."
Now, I am generally not one to employ cliche motivational sayings... but, as luck would have it today that is just what I have to write about. This week I had the opportunity to help a fellow yoga teacher, the lovely Brenna Matthews, with a yoga photo shoot. The photographer, one of my dearest friends, Omar Robinson, who has done many shoots for me so I invited myself along for the ride under the guise of helping direct Brenna's poses and holding big shiny reflectors to help Omar control the light. As Brenna and I chatted about the poses she was thinking of doing, I began to realize she was planning on doing poses I was no where close to getting. Which is fine, as a teacher I am able to explain a lot of poses that I cannot yet execute but, because of my understanding of what needs to happen, have had my students do so. I must have told Brenna how one pose in particular, chin stand, had eluded me. I have had many students rock out in class and, I have to admit I have attempted to get into it a few times, and failed spectacularly. After that chin stand got put into a little corner in my mind, the one where I keep many other poses that I have deemed as something that just doesn't work for me and my practice at this point. Brenna shook her head at me - "you can do chin stand" ... I shook it off saying "well I guess I will have to come to one of your classes so you can teach me how to do it" and left it at that. The next day while I was practicing in my room before teaching, I heard Brenna's words echoing in my mind and I figured - what the heck... can't hurt to try. I came into down dog, extended my right leg and rolled forward into three legged plank. Keeping the right leg high I tapped my chin down on the floor and took a few hops with my left. By the third hop I was shocked to realize - I was balancing. without a wall behind me. Sometimes all it takes is just a bit of space from a difficult pose, and after a month or so checking back in... and you might be surprised. But, you'll never know if you don't try. One of the most encouraging and amazing things about a yoga practice is that it is always evolving. With a consistent and steady practice little by little your body will open, strengthen and prepare you for your future practice. Even if you don't constantly practice inversions or arm balances, by working more "simple" poses like plank, down dog, and warriors with precision and intention you may be surprised the next time you check in with those more "advanced" asanas. So take a chance, yeah you might look silly but so what? At least you tried and who knows... maybe you will sur I am, among many other things, a creature of habit. I order the same food from the same restaurant, I buy the same groceries, I go to the same classes. Like many others, I find comfort in routine. My teaching is no exception. While I pride myself on working different areas of the body with each sequence and providing a creative flow within each class... there are just some poses that I hardly ever omit while planning a sequence. Lately I have been noticing that I have a gravitational pull to Warrior 2 and Extended Side Angle. I LOVE them. These two poses externally rotate your thigh from the hip feel really great on the body and they are huge multi-taskers in terms of sequencing: they open the outer hip and the inner thighs, they strengthen the legs and open the shoulders. Depending on what I am looking for in my sequence I can almost always use these poses to help my students get whatever I am hoping them to (ie. outer hip opening, oblique strengthening, inner thigh lengthening). It makes perfect sense that I would teach poses that I love to practice, theoretically that means I can bring a certain amount of understanding and finesse to the instruction of said pose.
But of course, never being one to rest on my so-called "laurels", this week I decided I was going to plan my Sunday class this week with absolutely no externally rotated standing postures. As I stepped on my mat with my notebook open and ready for my sequence to start pouring out... I drew an absolute blank. Every pose I wrote down seemed to have to be yanked from the very depths of my mind and with my 5pm class just hours away I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I closed my eyes and in that moment all I wanted to do was go back to the drawing board. Go back to a sequence style that I knew and loved. Who likes change anyway? As the next breath came through me and my eyes opened, I pressed back to down dog to start to find a flow and much to my surprise, Warrior 2 didn't come out.... neither did side angle. I started to explore lunges and creating dynamic actions within those lunges and before I knew it... a new sequence laid before me. I am feeling some pretty significant feedback from parts of my body that I don't usually get into (which is always a good thing). ((**special thanks to my Sunday yogis at Sweat and Soul Yoga for being my test subjects - you guys rock**)) Now I can't promise that I won't order the same flavor tea from the same cafe or eat the same thai food from that same restaurant across the street from my apartment... but I can say that I will start to question my sequences more. To try more and more to expose myself and my students to new ways of doing things. Yoga is not a one size fits all, if a pose, class or teacher doesn't work for you today... try something else and maybe tomorrow you will be surprised to find that pose, class, teacher, that you once avoided is now offering something that today you needed. Take a breath and open yourself up for the journey - you might be surprised at what you discover. (And maybe... just maybe I will try a new restaurant... in the spirit of discovery). With gratitude. Random side effect of practicing asana every day, even your dreams start to become steeped in yoga. Last night I dreamed of doing astavkrasana on a mound of rocks... maybe it is some sort of foreshadowing to some upcoming photos I will be doing in the next week or so... We shall see. In the meantime, here is a photo borrowed from the Yoga Journal website :)  |
Kate HeffernanYoga Teacher based in Boston, MA. Teacher of Yoga Teachers. Committed to teaching anatomical, alignment & action based yoga asana that is rooted in mindfulness, skillfulness, & specificity. Archives
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