Three Part Series – Part 2: Sleep

Approximately one third of all adults have trouble sleeping through the night, whether your insomnia is related to stress (covered in part 1 of this series), or too much stimulation (foods, activities), it’s important to give your body the rest and time to heal it deserves during sleep. Adding yoga into your routine can help ease stress and help you fall asleep at night.

Our bodies are designed for sleep to come effortlessly. Here are some tips to help you get there before we jump into the yoga part:

Create an Environment that Will Help You Sleep – your bedroom should be tranquil and inviting. Make it comfortable and conducive to sleep. Eliminate ambient light and any noise that could disturb your sleep. If possible, conduct other activities like reading, work-related material, TV and bill paying outside of the bedroom. In time, this will create the body’s expectation that the bedroom is where it goes to relax and rest.

End the Day with a Calming Routine – Try to go to bed at the same time every night, and create a routine that prepares you for sleep. A pre-bed routine helps communicate to your subconscious that it’s time to sleep. Be sure your routine is relaxing rather than stimulating. The point of setting a routine is to calm your mind and quiet your nerves prior to bed-time.

Do a Relaxation Exercise – Taking some time to do a short relaxation exercise just before getting into bed is an excellent way of letting go of stressors. It doesn’t have to be hard or elaborate. Simply lying on your back in corpse pose (savasana) with your eyes closed – breathing, moving your breath through the body start at your scalp and move toward your toes. Soften your forehead, eyes, face and jaw. Continue relaxing each area of your body until you reach your toes. Surrender to gravity.

Stay in this relaxed state for a few minutes, letting the floor support you. Focus on your breathing, releasing all other concerns. Let your breath come from deep in your abdomen, and let it flow smoothly, slowly and evenly. This simple exercise is a way of telling your body it is okay to stop thinking, stressing and working.

Enter the yoga part. Exercise is essential to a well-rested body. Much of our day is spent working our brains, not our bodies. To balance this, it is important to also work your body. Doing yoga not only prepares your body for sleep, but it helps achieve the balance that our bodies crave to sleep well.

Stepping on the mat helps clear the clutter in our heads, unwinding your mind and calming the nervous system (all attributes of a yoga class) will help you sleep better.

Self-reflect on the mat during class rather than before bed time. This will help create the habit in the body that bed time is not for self-reflection and to do lists, rather it’s for restorative sleep. Learning to quiet your mind comes with a consistent yoga practice, and can be useful to you in many other aspects of life. Think of your time on the mat as balance. There is a time to practice, a time to think and a time to rest.

Three Part Series – Part 1: Stress

Stress kills. Literally. (I know that’s a downer, but it’s that serious)
Chronic emotional stress makes plaque buildup twice as fast in the coronary arteries that feed the heart. Stress also causes the coronary arteries to constrict, reducing blood flow to the heart. It makes platelets stickier and more likely to form blood clots that may precipitate a heart attack. Yoga is perhaps the most effective stress-reduction method ever invented. Yoga increases your resiliency to stress and, by extension, to heart disease.

Yoga helps balance emotions. Studies suggest that yoga helps diffuse emotions such as anger, hostility and impatience—all linked to heart attacks. A regular yoga practice helps introduce the tools to manage these feelings by increasing the length of time between stimulation and response. Many times a situation will arise that upsets you, the time between the upsetting instance and your response is critical. It means the difference between a “reaction” and a “response”. Managing your emotions between the stimulus and response has a direct link to reducing stress and negative feelings. Not to mention how beneficial this skill is to your interpersonal relationships! The more awareness you cultivate in your yoga practice; the better you will respond to those around you.

The reason yoga helps in this way versus an aerobic workout is the connection between mind and body. Some poses are likely to cause a strong sympathetic nervous system reaction, but as you learn to hold the poses with a calm mind, focused on the breath, the poses becomes the training in how to remain calm in stressful situations. Yoga also trains the nervous system to return to balance quickly after a challenge response. In other words, the physical challenge of a pose becomes the equivalent of a stressor. If you do aerobic exercise, which has no direct breathing or mindfulness component, the physical challenge can trigger a full-fledged stress response in the body.

By alternating strenuous poses with gentler ones, yoga conditions you to move easily between states of challenge and rest. Letting go of all effort in Savasana (corpse pose), for example, seals in this flexibility, because the pose teaches the nervous system to let go once the challenges of your practice have been met.

1. Stay positive: Yoga gets my mind off of problems and helps focus my energy into positive energy. It’s very difficult to concentrate on moving your body when you are harboring negative energy; yoga helps me let the negative energy go in the form of movement. There are times in class that I’ve been reminded that I’m healthy and able which makes my daily problems seem minute and helps me have perspective when I need it most.

2.  Suffering is optional: We may not be able to control everything around us, and to me that is a huge discomfort; but we do have the ability to choose how we respond to those things. Yoga helps me slow down and respond rather than react. The difference is, before yoga my responses to life’s difficulties were reactive: anger, sadness, etc. Now after practicing yoga consistently, my responses have been more manageable and not so quick to react with whatever base emotion the situation brings about, I’m able to take the time and assess why I’m so upset.

3. Everything is temporary: It is easy to get lost in a moment and feel like it’s taking over your life. It’s important to remember its all temporary. Life is temporary. Pain is temporary. Happiness is temporary. Dwelling on how we wish things were different only inhibits us from enjoying the present. It helps me remember that without bad things, it would be hard to enjoy and realize the good things.

4. Knowing my strength: Beginning yoga can be challenging in and of itself, sometimes the hardest part was simply getting there. Knowing that once I walked into the studio I would be in a place where it was all about me working on my strength (both physically and mentally) helped give me the push to walk in. Yoga poses are always different from day to day. You may have had a class yesterday where you felt like your body mastered certain poses and today you can’t even stand still in them; these days are why my practice is so important. The constant challenge of my strength and my ability is what keeps my practice fresh and new even in the most simple of poses.

5. Discomfort is tolerable when you breathe: The most significant lesson I’ve taken from my yoga practice is breathe! Let your breath relax you and guide you. If you are feeling uptight; breathe. If you are feeling upset; breathe. It’s the thing that has served me best both on the mat and in the world.

“When the breath wanders, the mind is unsteady, but when the breath is still, so is the mind still” – Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Breathing is life. It is one of our most vital and basic functions. One of the five principles of yoga is pranayama or breathing exercise which promotes proper breathing or breath control. In a yogic point of view, proper breathing is to bring more oxygen to the blood and to the brain, and to control prana or the vital life energy.

In our respiration process, we breathe in or inhale oxygen into our body, going through our body systems in a form of energy to charge our different body parts. Then we exhale carbon dioxide and take away all toxins from our body. Through the practice of pranayama, the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide is attained. Absorbing the energy through breath control links our body, mind and spirit.

Life is full of stress, because of daily work, family, financial pressures, etc.; we tend to ignore our breathing. Thus, it tends to be fast and shallow. The use of only a small part of your lungs results in lack of oxygen and may lead to complications such as sleep disorders, fatigue or heart disease. The negative energy of being restless and troublesome leads to less energy inside the body. The practice of deep and systematic breathing, through pranayama, reenergizes our body.

Meditation is the answer. I know you are thinking “please! I can barely sit still as it is”. Meditation can heal all the dis-ease of your body, and the dis-ease of your mind. All it takes is a few quiet moments per day with your own healing energy directed inward. Here is how, why and when to meditate:

Why Should I Meditate?

Meditation gives our brain the rest it needs to properly organize thoughts and priorities so you can go about your life in a much more efficient way. It also helps maintain that blissful state you feel after yoga. The best part is it requires nothing more than you and can be done anywhere, anytime.

How Much Time do I Need?

In the busiest of days, even two minutes of quiet mediation can set the tone for the rest of your daily interactions.

What do I Need to Start?

The essentials of meditation are simple: a good seat, a timer (I use my watch, as smart phone timers can buzz or ring and throw you off your meditation) and a few quiet moments are all you need.

Step 1: Get comfortable. Be in a seated position. You can sit cross-legged (add a block, pillow or towel under you if your hips are tight), or sit on your shins in a kneeling position. You may sit on a block or towel here too if this position bothers your ankles.

Step 2: Settle in. Place your hands on your thighs with your palms open in a receiving gesture. Close your eyes and let your jaw be soft, lips soft, and tongue resting behind your teeth.

Step 3: Scan and breathe. Begin to breathe through your nose and do an internal scan checking on your physical body for about 30 seconds. Begin to watch your breath in your body and where your breath falls, gets stuck or deepens for another minute.

Step 4: Focus your breath. Exhale all of the breath out and when your lungs are empty, begin to inhale to a slow count of five, hold the breath at the top for five counts, exhale for a count of five, then hold the breath at the end of your exhale again for a count of five. Continue this same breath work to a count of six (inhale for six, hold for six, exhale for six, hold for six). On the next round, try for a count of seven. Now that you’ve worked up to a count of seven, go back to five, this time making it a continuous breath without holding. Continue that five count continual cycle for about 5-7 minutes. When thoughts begin to pull you away, as they will, watch your breath go in and watch your breath go out. Acknowledge the passing thought and push them away. Just this alone can calm your nervous system and help bring about a sense of composure that can extend into your day.

Step 5: Go easy on yourself. It’s important to know that your mind may pull you in different directions, negative chatter or distractions of a “to do list”. It’s ok. Remember to focus on your breath going in and out. Just like muscles, you are training your breath and this change won’t happen overnight. Time, patience and practice will help you with your meditation just like with your yoga practice.

“Your mind is your instrument. Learn to be its master and not its slave”.

Welcome to Hot House Yoga’s Asana of the Week. It’s important to Hot House to deepen our understanding of yoga and the human experience everyday. With the Asana of the Week we extend our knowledge and help you build poses correctly and build your technique. Everytime you step onto your mat, your practice can be challenging in different ways and it’s the same for instructors as well. Here is the space where we walk through a pose step-by-step.

We are making the Asana of the Week fun and local by filming in different locations around the city. Simply click on the picture and guess the location and be the first to name it in the blog comments and you win a prize. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

Welcome to Hot House Yoga’s Asana of the Week. It’s important to Hot House to deepen our understanding of yoga and the human experience everyday. With the Asana of the Week we extend our knowledge and help you build poses correctly and build your technique. Everytime you step onto your mat, your practice can be challenging in different ways and it’s the same for instructors as well. Here is the space where we walk through a pose step-by-step.

We are making the Asana of the Week fun and local by filming in different locations around the city. Simply click on the picture and guess the location and be the first to name it in the blog comments and you win a prize. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

The first thing you need to get is a juicer. We have an Omega juicer, and it’s great. It doesn’t matter if it’s hand pump or automatic, but with the automatic you can juice other things like carrots, etc a bit easier.

Second, you need to buy wheat grass seeds. They can be found online.

Also, make sure you have the following on hand: soil, paper towels (the thinner the better because you don’t want them to soak up all the water), a growing tray (plastic tray with holes in the bottom), and a tray to catch the water that will leak out from the bottom of the growing tray.

Our tray is about 2’x1’, so we use 3 cups of the seed for one batch. If your tray is larger or smaller, you will need to add or subtract seed. 

We wash the seeds then soak them in filtered water for 24 hrs.  After the allotted time, wash the seeds again. Fill your tray with about 1-2” of soil and spread the seeds on the top of the soil.  Spread them evenly across the soil and leave them on the surface (don’t try to plant them). Cover the seeds with 4 layers of paper towels and water thoroughly. Continue watering every day leaving the paper towels on until the wheatgrass pushes up about 3-4” tall (this will make them stronger). Remove the paper towels at this point.

Keeping air movement around the growing grass is important. Some mold will build up at the base of the grass. This is natural but can be lessened with a fan or if it’s set next to an open window.

When your wheatgrass has grown about 6” or so, it is time to harvest! Cut the grass at the base and wash thoroughly.  A one ounce shot is usually about a 2”x12” plot worth of cut grass from the tray.  Put the grass through the juicer tips first. Drink immediately and swish before you swallow (it’s good for your gums). The first batch will be the tastiest. After that, somehow it has the opposite effect of a “beer tolerance”. Enjoy! 

Welcome to Hot House Yoga’s Asana of the Week. It’s important to Hot House to deepen our understanding of yoga and the human experience everyday. With the Asana of the Week we extend our knowledge and help you build poses correctly and build your technique. Everytime you step onto your mat, your practice can be challenging in different ways and it’s the same for instructors as well. Here is the space where we walk through a pose step-by-step.

We are making the Asana of the Week fun and local by filming in different locations around the city. Simply click on the picture and guess the location and be the first to name it in the blog comments and you win a prize. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

Welcome to Hot House Yoga’s Asana of the Week. It’s important to Hot House to deepen our understanding of yoga and the human experience everyday. With the Asana of the Week we extend our knowledge and help you build poses correctly and build your technique. Everytime you step onto your mat, your practice can be challenging in different ways and it’s the same for instructors as well. Here is the space where we walk through a pose step-by-step.

We are making the Asana of the Week fun and local by filming in different locations around the city. Simply click on the picture and guess the location and be the first to name it in the blog comments and you win a prize. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do!