My Page: Brooke Hewes
Yoga On & Off the Mat
Try Yoga This Holiday Season
The contrast is startling. First, it’s Thursday, a day for giving thanks — for relaxing with loved ones and filling plates with local harvest. Then it’s Friday, “Black Friday,” a day when shoppers rush against each other and the clock to fill their carts with marked-down merchandise and check off page-long wish lists.
In Missoula, on the Friday following Thanksgiving, 40 eager shoppers slept outside Best Buy and endured 0-degree C temperatures to cash in on early-bird specials. After one eager shopper missed out on a screaming deal — 60 Toshiba laptops were priced at $229 — he surmised that other, more successful shoppers would hop on eBay and resell the laptops for $1,000, thus robbing his kids “of a good education.”
Likewise, the spirit of Thanksgiving seems to have been robbed — in less than a day, we go from grace and gratitude to pushing and purchasing.
From light to “black,” we enter the holiday season.
Yikes.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Being Grateful for Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. A full day dedicated to gratitude -- someone had their thinking cap on when they declared this emotion worthy of its own day! Twenty-four sweet hours to celebrate family, friends and food. Twenty-four hours to feel grateful for the blessings and hardships that shape our lives and build our spirits. Twenty-four hours to notice how gratitude affects our bodies, minds and relationships.
Thanksgiving also lends an excellent excuse to begin (or revive) a gratitude ritual.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Divine Connections: Astrology and Yoga
Yoga and astrology are both ancient traditions practiced popularly across the globe. Yoga — sometimes called a philosophy, sometimes a science — offers several paths toward Enlightenment (samahdi), the Universal Consciousness. Astrology — sometimes called an art, sometimes a science — is concerned with how celestial bodies (stars, planets, constellations) affect human beings. Yoga is Bhakti , Hatha, Jnana, and among others Purna. Astrology is Vedic, Chinese, Western or Evolutionary. And in their different forms, yoga and astrology each offer insight into the nature of suffering as well as ways to see (and live) beyond it.
Most interesting, however, is how these traditions — as Missoula astrologer Deb Clow so succinctly puts it — “are doing work shoulder to shoulder.”
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Observing the Moon
Every month, twice a month, Ashtanga Vinyasa yogis celebrate moon holidays. On the full and new moon, Ashtangis don’t engage in their regular asana practice. Or at least they’re not supposed to, though I know many yogis who roll out their mats rather than rest anyway.
Abstaining from one’s asana practice during the full and new moon, however, is a tradition for good reason. It is a time to take rest and pay attention to how personal rhythms interact with universal rhythms. It is a time, in our busy lives, to slow down — to even rethink those cultural and individual tendencies to push, pull and generally plain ol’ produce despite natural cycles urging otherwise.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Be Like A Corpse In Savasana
Savasana (corpse pose) signals the death of our asana practice. Lying on our back, we relax our body and mind to disengage and detach. Symbolically, we die. In actuality, we say goodbye — goodbye engaged body; goodbye engaged breath; goodbye asana practice; and, finally, goodbye judgment and attachment to body, breath and posture.
Be careful, however, that “goodbye” is not “goodnight” (as the intonation might suggest). Savasana is a time to relax, not sleep; in fact, falling asleep misses the mark, and misses an opportunity to truly rest.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Back Pain the Sarno Way
Like millions of Americans, I’ve suffered through bouts of back pain during my adult life.
Also like millions of Americans, I’ve looked to yoga for relief. I’ve tried asanas and sequences to strengthen postural muscles along my spine; I’ve practiced poses to build core muscles; I’ve lengthened my hamstrings and opened my hips. Sometimes this helps, sometimes it doesn’t.
One method that has worked more often than it hasn’t, though, is another mindbody practice -- what I call the Sarno Way.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Yoga Snobbery
One morning a couple weeks ago I was greeted with the question “Are You a Yoga Snob?” in my inbox. Apparently, Yoga Journal wants to know about my relationship with yoga. This email, followed by recent conversations with friends and colleagues on the subject, followed by this week’s comments, got me thinking.
What is yoga snobbery, after all, and why all this fuss about it?
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Missoula’s Newest Yoga Studio: Down Dog
John Squillante lays it all out on Down Dog’s website. First, what the newest yoga studio in Missoula is: gentle, welcoming and affordable. Second, what the studio is not: competitive, snobby and inaccessible.
And sure enough — once you get past the neighborhood that looks more like the set of the Truman Show than western Montana (the studio is behind Home Depot in the Hellgate Meadows development) — the space is simple and unpretentious. Pleasant music fills the airy, naturally-lit room, whose wide east-facing windows look over Missoula toward Hellgate Canyon and Mount Sentinel.
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
Interview with Yin Yoga Instructor Paul Grilley
Paul Grilley is a yoga instructor in Ashland, Oregon, and the author Yin Yoga, Outline of a Quiet Practice. In addition to his book, he’s produced three DVDs: “Chakra Theory and Meditation,” “Yin Yoga” and “Anatomy for Yoga.”
Grilley has practiced and studied yoga for more than 25 years and specializes in human anatomy — of both the physical form (muscles, bones, ligaments) as well as the energetic self (meridians, chi/prana). It is where these two systems of the body overlap, in the connective tissue, that is the focus of Yin Yoga, or what Grilley calls Taoist Yoga. (See last week’s article for a description of yin and yang.)
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Yoga On & Off the Mat
The Yin and Yang of Cats and Dogs“Luna!” I scream at the top of lungs, again. And again, and again until frustration fills and reddens my face. “Come, Luna,” I say once, twice and then yell about five more times until I see her stop, stare at me with her tail and head erect, then bolt in the opposite direction towards my sacred, dog-free zone: the garden.
Despite her naughtiness, Luna is very lovable. Half lab, half wire-haired pointer, her black coat is as soft and shiny as her eyes deep and brown. She explores the world with insatiable curiosity, and when she tilts her head and looks at you with such earnest expectation, she is down-right irresistible.
Let it be said, however, that I am a cat person, and currently the proud and protective mother of two.
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