Health Tips

Break Up With Stress – Part Three – Release Tension & Relax

Pandiculation, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, and Guided Savasana: Besides being a new word you can impress your friends with, pandiculation is good for you! It’s like nature’s reset button to relax your muscles and reboot your brain. I imagine you have seen a cat or a dog jump off the couch and do what looks like a full body yawn. It’s a simple move that we humans and nearly all animals have been doing since the beginning of time. It results in more relaxed muscles while having greater muscle control and coordination. There are three steps to pandiculation: 1. a voluntary contraction 2. a slow lengthening 3. complete relaxation So what does this do? It resets the length of your muscles, not just in the muscle fibers but also at the level of your brain. It’s different from stretching because it is active, not passive. Lengthening a contracted muscle sends a message to your sensory motor […]

Break Up With Stress – Part Two – Abdominal Breathing

Break Up With Stress Week Two, Abdominal Breathing: In order to release stress you must turn on your parasympathetic nervous system so your body can down-regulate. This is often referred to as “rest and digest.” There are several ways to dump stress, this week we cover one of them, abdominal breathing. These days most people live with their system on overdrive. One reason is the tendency toward quick, shallow breathing, primarily in the chest area. This elicits a “fight or flight” response. You can you learn to use your diaphragm to slow down and deepen your breath and stimulate the “rest and digest” response. Anatomy of the Breath: Your diaphragm is a dome shaped muscle that lives in the base or your rib structure. It separates your heart and lungs from your internal abdominal organs. When you inhale your diaphragm is supposed to move down into your abdomen. This causes the […]

Break Up with Stress – Part One – Soften Your Eyes

Did you know that your body responds to stress involuntarily by tensing your muscles? Over time tightness builds up, restricts your movement, and causes you not to feel free in your body. Holding on to that stress around for a while starts to wear on your nervous system. It’a a heavy load for your body-mind to carry around. It affects your breathing pattern, your mind’s ability to focus, and your ability to sleep soundly. All these things inhibit your health and well-being. The good news is that you can teach your body to unwelcome stress from sticking. Welcome to my four part series, “Break Up With Stress.” Each week I will share techniques you can use to discard stress and improve your health and well-being. This newsletter series leads up to my annual Summer Solstice workshop, Dynamic Rejuvenation. Join me for a practice of active restorative poses on […]

Manage Your Stress

The word on the street is that yoga can help to reduce stress in your life. But stress is a complex topic, and there are a lot of different kinds of yoga out there. So you may wonder, how does it all work? Stress is caused by the release of a hormone in your body called cortisol. When life circumstances become difficult to manage, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) kicks in and releases cortisol to heighten your awareness, pump blood to your limbs, and focus your brain to get the task done. Later your parasympathetic nervous system (PSN) is supposed to help you recover by bringing you back to a state a relaxation. If you spend a lot of time in a state of stress, it is common for the PNS not switch on, and when you don’t fully recover stress is compounded. To find the most effective tool to manage stress and triumph in […]

Four Keys to Well-Being

In teaching yoga my goal is to help you to to be your best self. That means educating you about your body, helping you to listen more deeply, and empowering you to make choices for your body and your life that are healing and promote well-being. This is achieved through some basic physical things that all my classes, workshops, and other programming are planned around. Here are four things that I have come to believe are the most important to your health and what I hope you gain from your regular yoga practice: 1. Better, more effective breathing. Breath is life. Many of us live with dis-functional breathing patterns because of tight muscles, poor posture, and stress. Releasing the muscles of respiration and creating better breathing habits are crucial to the body’s overall health. 2. The ability to shift from states of stress to states of relaxation. There is no doubt that life is busy. But how effective […]