With the recent snow storm, you might have found yourself cooped up indoors for a lot of last week, which can affect your mood and your body in lots of different ways. If you’re surfacing back into the world today and you’re back to your regular work-week, your muscles might be a little tight. Here are a few simple yoga poses you can do anywhere to get your body moving again and refresh your mood. Shoulder rolls – this is…
If you’re new to yoga and joining mixed level classes with more experienced yogis, it’s normal to feel unsure of some of the postures when a teacher cues them to the class. Here’s a cheatsheet with 3 commonly used yoga cues and how I interpret them. Chaturanga In flow classes, you’ll usually have a lot of ‘chaturangas’. This is when you flow down from a plank position to slowly lower your body to the mat on the exhale. Keep your…
We all hear the teacher tell us to inhale, and to exhale, and we follow along. We then get to a standing posture, or a challenging posture – and what do we do? We stop breathing. Whether it’s holding our breath or going back to shallow breathing, we lose the rhythm of the breath that we had at the start of class. So what’s all the fuss about? What differentiates yoga asana from most other forms of physical activity is…
Anxiety. We’ve all been there – sweaty palms, racing thoughts, quickened heartbeat. Anxiety can strike before a big presentation, an important meeting or a first date. Or sometimes it can creep up on you when you’re tired or under-slept. When it surfaces, anxiety can rob you of the joy of the moment, and it can zap your energy. So here’s one simple, discrete yoga pose to have in your ‘yoga tool belt’ when anxiety strikes, depending on where and when you…
Downward facing dog is one of the most common yoga poses, and it would be pretty rare to have a class without it, for many reasons. It’s one of the best overall body stretches you can do, as well as strengthening key muscle groups, and helping to reduce stress and anxiety. So if you’ve been doing yoga for more than 10 minutes of your life, more than likely you’ve been told to ‘relax back into downdog.’ However, when I started…
We all – or a lot of us, anyway – love the idea of morning yoga. Starting your day off with a room full of like-minded yogis, flowing on your mat, and connecting body and breath. Heaven, right? Except sometimes – especially when it’s still dark when the alarm goes off and you can hear rain pouring outside – that idea just doesn’t become reality. Much as we might want it to! So here are our top 5 tips for…
As the weather sets in for autumn, you may notice your body and your mind being swept up with the change. After an active summer, it may be hard to slow down to the pace of autumn. As the late sunny nights of summer die off, the feeling in the air is more of introspection and getting cosy and snug indoors. Check out the following poses for helping to stay grounded and joyful through the transition: Cow Face Pose –…
There are so many people who start yoga with the intention of gaining flexibility. While this is a huge benefit from keeping a consistent yoga practice, it’s not the only thing thing that your body will gain from learning asanas and yoga sequences. Would you believe that, in terms of keeping a sustainable, healthy yoga practice, strength building is equally as important as gaining flexibility? There is a saying from a book written more than 1,700 years ago in regards…
Muladhara The root chakra, or Muladhara, is located at your tailbone, and extends to include your legs and feet. Representing the beginning of your spiritual development, the root chakra is literally your root, your base, there to ground you. Representing who you are at your core, who and what you trust, and your sense of belonging and tradition, the root chakra’s desire is survival, self-sufficiency, and stability. It governs how we deal with things like family, money, basic needs, and…
8 Ways to Cultivate a Home Yoga Practice You asked – and we have provided! Last week we asked what topics you Yogahubbers would like to see more of on the blog, and a surprising amount of you expressed an interest in learning more about how to more effectively cultivate a home yoga practice. While there’s nothing that can quite replicate attending your favourite class or a certain teacher’s weekly flow, sometimes we simply cannot make it into the studio…
