My Best Yoga

Yoga is one of the best forms of exercise one can perform. It works well to ease both the body and mind and consists of great stretching movements that can keep you not only fit but aligned. There are specific types of yoga that offer an even greater challenge or more fun like antigravity yoga, acroyoga and restorative yoga.

Antigravity yoga is a fun and challenging fusion that involves techniques that are performed in an aerial mode. It was developed by former gymnast and dancer Christoper Harrison. The techniques give you a great deal of typical yoga stretching that work to strengthen your body in a way that doesn’t put strain on your joints.

Typically, antigravity yoga has an individual using a hammock for support while they are performing postures while suspended in air and working out the abdomen and legs in particular. Anyone who has a problem area in their midsection and has had an interest in yoga but don’t want to put a tremendous amount of strain on the joints should opt for antigravity over working out with weights.

Acroyoga combines yoga, Thai massage and acrobatics. In this form of yoga, two people partner together to perform therapeutic and acrobatic movements combined with traditional yoga. The practice of acroyoga was invented by Jason Nemer and Jenny Sauer-Klein in 2003. Typically, one person lays flat and supports the other while they are suspended in the air. Acroyoga is a fantastic exercise routine that couples can enjoy together or parents with their children. What kid doesn’t like to be lifted up like Superman?

Restorative yoga utilizes props to support the body. These items help individuals to have a better ability to hold postures for a longer stretch of time. Generally, restorative yoga sees people using items such as blankets or blocks to help them to avoid extra straining while performing their exercises. This form of yoga is very relaxing and soothing, while at the same time gives the muscles a good stretch. It puts very little if any strain on the joints, making it one of the most ideal exercise routines and types of yoga for senior citizens.

Many hospitals and nursing homes offer restorative yoga sessions to promote exercise and reduce stress. Since aggressive cancers like Pancreatic and Mesothelioma cancer are tarnished with a low life expectancy and harsh treatments, integrative cancer facilities promote the use to help improve moral after being diagnosed.

No matter what the reason or type, pick a type of yoga and have at it. Not only is it fun and toning, it is a great way to get out, meet friends, and promote a better well-being. So leave your troubles at the door and head into a local yoga studio.

Author: Allison Brooks

I hope you enjoy your visit at mybestyoga.com.

This website is a labor of love for me – I have a real passion for Yoga and would like to share that passion with as many people as I can – Here you will find a great selection of “My Best Yoga” videos, news and general information that I have chosen. This website is a work in progress and there will be more useful Yoga related information added regularly. So, please keep coming back to see what is new in the world of Yoga.

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Namaste!

Now some young enthusiasts are trying to bring their peers to yoga by promising that it can make their social lives more wholesome, too. The idea is that yoga and a sober dance party go together much like raw chocolate and organic peanut butter.

One such event, a “yoga rave” on a Thursday evening in early spring at Pacha, a nightclub in west Midtown Manhattan, was organized by the Art of Living Foundation, a 30-year-old organization with centers around the world and a mission to promote peace through yoga and meditation.

Shephali Agrawal, a lawyer and a volunteer director at the Art of Living center in New York, explained the connection between the foundation’s mission and a club party.

“Meditation is really discovering the love and the bliss that can be inside, and dancing is such a natural expression of that,” she said. “Just connecting to the pulse, to the music, it allows that energy that’s inside to explode outside.”

Unlike the usual club party, this yoga rave started at 7 p.m. When I arrived at 8:30, a group called Bhakti Band was onstage, singing yoga chants over a deafening rock beat. Some people were dancing; others stood around eating Indian food or drinking nonalcoholic cocktails. The crowd seemed to be people mostly in their 20s and 30s, with many casually dressed, but a few others in business clothes.

By the time the crowd had been led through a brief, guided meditation, and a group from Buenos Aires, the So What Project!, took the stage, people did seem ready to explode. They jumped up and down to the beat of what the band called its “rock mantras.”

The two men of the So What Project!, Rodo Bustos and Nico Pucci, came up with the idea of the yoga rave five years ago because they wanted to offer their party-happy friends an alternative to the smoke, drugs and alcohol of the club scene. They held house parties at first, then moved to larger sites.

“We realized that so many people want a different place, want a different orientation to have fun,” said Mr. Bustos, who is an Art of Living instructor, in a phone interview.

At the Pacha event, which is part of a seven-city tour of the United States, Tom Silverman, the founder and chief executive of Tommy Boy Records, marveled that such euphoria was being produced without drugs.

“They’re acting the same as they would if they’d taken a bunch of pills,” he said of the crowd.

Mr. Silverman saw potential.

“I could see this being 10,000 to 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden,” he said. “There is no alternative like this where you can go and not drink, and still be in bed by midnight.”

Actually, out in the bohemian refuge of Bushwick, Brooklyn, a group of 20-somethings recently offered a similar alternative — though on a smaller, mellower scale — to their friends in the D.I.Y. music scene.

In a former welding shop that they fixed up by hand, they have opened what they call the Body Actualized Center.

One of the founders, Brian Sweeny, 28, an artist and event producer, described it as “a hipster improvement center,” a place to do yoga, listen to live music, talk about New Age spirituality and generally cultivate a “healthy hedonism.”

At the opening party, on a temperate evening in late March, men in ironic T-shirts and women in vintage dresses and ankle boots stood around a fire pit in the backyard, while musicians played inside. The atmosphere was wholesome, but not dogmatically so; the dinner was raw and vegetarian, but some people were drinking beer, and there was a scent of something other than fire smoke in the air.

Another founder, a 26-year-old yoga instructor and artist who said her name was Angelina Dreem — “I’m going to roll with that for a while,” she said — suggested that the goal was partly to redefine post-college socializing.

“We want to coexist socially with people, and in a city,” she said, but also “to be healthy and to eat well and to not have to drink all night.”

“I mean, I was an alcoholic for a while,” she said. “So for me it’s like being social and being active and being creative, but being healthy and having a safe space.”

On weekdays, the center offers at least four classes a day. On Sundays at 5 p.m., it hosts a Cosmic Yoga Party, featuring live music and raw food.

More conventional yoga studios are also incorporating music and parties into their programs. Jivamukti Yoga School, near Union Square, hosts live shows by Bhakti Band and other groups frequently. Laughing Lotus Yoga Center, in Chelsea, holds a class every Friday from 10 p.m. to midnight that is set to either live music or a D.J. It has also started holding a monthly dance party.

Still, it would be hard to capture as much of the spirit of a New Age revival as the Body Actualized Center did at its opening party. The actual yoga portion came late, around 11 p.m., by which time the main room was too crowded for anyone to do more than a very cramped downward dog. The instructor, Amy Jenkins, 24, dressed in flowing white pants and a white tank top, with glitter on her cheeks, instructed the participants, who stood in mountain pose, to run their hands over their bodies.

“We never touch ourselves in public; we never breathe,” she said, wiggling as she moved her hands over her torso. Then she instructed everyone to rise up into tree pose and lift their arms above their heads.

As people raised their arms in the tight space, she told the group, “If you touch someone … touch them again!”

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Sharon Austin leads her yoga class through some exercises near the pond at Rotary Gardens.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Sharon Austin leads her yoga class through some exercises near the pond at Rotary Gardens.

JANESVILLE — Sue Rummelhoff walks to stay fit, and she practices yoga.

When she learned PranaWalk yoga would be offered at Rotary Botanical Gardens, she thought the combination would be fun.

It’s enjoyable, she said, but the outdoor class in the botanical gardens isn’t what she expected.

“With this yoga, you’re moving more and doing things while walking. In the other (traditional) yoga you’re more stationary,” the 64-year-old Janesville woman said after finishing her second weekly class.

“PranaWalk is a unique way to combine walking, yoga and stress management techniques into one simple routine that can be used daily to keep you healthy, balanced and strong,” according to promotional literature by instructor Sharon Austin.

Austin has a degree in psychology, is a certified herbalist, aroma therapist and massage therapist and owns and operates a yoga therapy business. She said her creation of PranaWalk is an adaptation of the Breath Walk book and Kundalini yoga combined with her love of nature, hiking and yoga.

“Prana is the life force that resides in the breath and bringing all the pieces—mind, heart and body—in alignment and together,” Austin said.

One class was physical. Another was more philosophical. An upcoming class will involve meditation in the gardens.

“Every class is different,” Austin said.

“It depends on the energy. It depends on the weather. If we’re happy, we walk. If we’re stressed, we do a lot of breathing patterns,” she said.

Kris Koch, who is in charge of programs and education at Rotary Botanical Gardens, participated in the first PranaWalk class and admits it was harder than she thought to focus on breathing, being centered and targeting muscle movement all while walking.

“Rotary Botanical Gardens has tried regular yoga in the past, but since we’re not an exercise studio, our indoor spaces haven’t always lent themselves to Zen-like experiences,” Koch said. “However, our gardens are really special, and it’s kind of amazing how different one’s experience can be out there. Prana Walk is a unique class. There’s no doubt about it.”

“It’s very empowering,” Austin said. “It doesn’t have to be hard. It’s simple but not easy. So many layers of awareness take a lot of focus.”

IF YOU GO

What: PranaWalk

When: 8 a.m. Wednesdays, with new sessions starting each month

Where: Rotary Botanical Gardens, 1455 Palmer Drive, Janesville.

Cost: $32 for the general public or $28 for Rotary Botanical Gardens Friends members

Weather: If class is canceled, it will be posted at facebook.com/fullbloom.yoga and twitter.com/fullbloomyoga

Suggested: Comfortable clothing and walking shoes

Janice De Jesus, an East Bay freelance arts and features journalist, is out of control.

It’s a deliberate act — a public display of private emotion shooting to the surface in the pages of her first nonfiction book, “Omstruck, Healing Heartbreak Through Yoga and Meditation”.

When a recent, long term romantic relationship ended, De Jesus found herself paralyzed by pain. She’d been through the cycle before and had “recovered” through the usual means. She focused on friends and family, leaned on religion, engaged in physical transformation and self-administered tough love I-can-go-it-alone-who-needs-a-man admonishments.

This time, love’s labyrinthine path led De Jesus inward.

“I knew that to heal and survive, I had to do more than just get over the heartbreak; I needed to discover who I was, what I really wanted in life and truly love and appreciate my authentic self,” she writes, in an introductory chapter.

In an interview, De Jesus says she originally began studying yoga to relieve stress from her former job as a Contra Costa Times calendar editor.

“I didn’t know that yoga was more than a physical practice,” she explains. “Since then, it has become a spiritual healing journey. There are a lot of lessons to learn on the yoga mat that you can take with you off the mat.” Number one on her list?

Letting go of control.

“When I’m in a pose, there’s no need to be perfect. You only deal with your own body,” she says.

“Yoga teaches me that every day is different: I can be on balance one day and off the next. The challenge is being compassionate toward yourself and honoring that, respecting it.”

Still, lotus positions and downward dogs were not enough to raise De Jesus’ soul to the higher level of recovery she sought.

Telling herself that she had “the right to heal and the write to heal,” her thoughts turned to writing.

“At first, I thought of writing a ‘chick lit’ novel about my experience,” she confides. “I wanted to keep emotional distance between what had happened and myself.”

As an intensely private person — and a professional journalist with a laster of fine arts degree from Mills College in Oakland who teaches writing courses to others–de Jesus was well-schooled in the “just the facts” category.

“It became evident to me that I wanted to write my personal story. I wound up writing about this isolated experience, which I then found out was not so isolated. While revising and editing my book, I realized anyone with any type of loss could benefit from the healing tips, tools and techniques that I shared. There was a higher calling: to reach out to others,” she concludes.

Compelled to establish the universal truth buried in her individual tragedy, De Jesus insists that heartbreak, left untreated, is a serious ailment. Helping others to avoid heart attacks and other debilitating diseases has become her mission.

“Grief is stress and heartbreak all rolled up into one,” she says, and unfurling that yoga mat is a first step in relieving the pressure.

“Omstruck” is published by Karen Mireau’s Berkeley-based Azalea Art Press.

“I wanted to have person-to person-interaction,” De Jesus explains, about her selection of the small, independent publisher. “I wanted more than email (correspondence]). The book was so personal, it was important that I wasn’t just a case number.”

She also surrounded herself with live bodies while writing the book.

“My writing routine for ‘Omstruck’ was to write during the day. I’d take myself to a coffee shop. It’s cliché to say writing is a solitary endeavor, but actually, writers make it solitary. I find I can drop into my internal world, despite the busting energy of a cafe.”

Written in journal form, her accounts of attempting to align her body and her mind in proper form extend warmth — like a “best girlfriend” who answers her phone even at 3 a.m., or the “best man friend” who knows a silent round of golf is the best cure for a man’s broken heart.

Resources and a suggested reading list extend the book’s messages of survival and transformation.

“Compassion is where it ends,” she likes to say, about a book and a journey she is only beginning.

‘Omstruck’ signing

Janice De Jesus will sign copies of her book “Omstruck” Saturday, May 19 at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square in Orinda, beginning at 2 p.m. All are welcome

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May 16, 2012 1:53 PM

93-year old Tao Porchon-Lynch was just named the world’s oldest yoga teacher by Guinness World Records. CBSNews.com’s Nick Dietz reports.