shoulder and neck-savers, and raw foods!

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January 2008 Newsletter>

shoulder and neck-savers, and raw foods!

January 20, 2008

hi there yogis and yoginis!

it has been an amazing first month of the year for many of
us, including myself. I have been teaching at a whole lot
more locations than usual this month, which means that I
have got to play with many more people!

In this newsletter, which I hope to put out about once a
month, I will try to give you a few fun yoga sequences to
try at home, and some other goodies that you can hopefully
use.

This month, I have noticed an increase in requests for
shoulder and neck work in my classes...maybe it's due to
all those heavy winter coats :)

here are some hints for alleviating this area in your yoga
practice:

FIRST, we'll look at variations to incorporate into your
sun salutes to help these areas out.

in your forward bends (as in uttanasana in your sun salute
sequences), try holding your hands behind your back in your
forward bends. Doing this will hold your shoulders back and
prevent them moving too close to your ears. aaahhh!!

you may want to skip chaturangas altogether, or practice
them with your knees down. If you do choose to practice
them, be sure to engage that area between your scapula,
squeezing from this area IN toward your spine...this will
engage the correct muscles to take a lot of the weight OUT
of your arms, hopefully giving your shoulders a break!

In your lunges, use blocks to rest your hands on...giving
yourself a break here can really prevent stooping or
hunching in the upper body to reach the floor (not that i
am advocating stooping and hunching ordinarily!) If you
don't have blocks, improvise with a couch, a bed, or
chairs. Alternately, you can bring your hands up to rest on
your thigh in your lunge, or just substitute Warrior 1
here.

In your down dogs, pay extra attention to your weight
distribution....ideally, about 60 percent of your weight in
Down Dog should be back in your LEGS! Most of us hold much
more of our weight in our arms than this! Allow yourself to
bend your legs as much as you need to in order to feel the
weight sink back into your legs here...heels are absolutely
allowed to be OFF the floor! If Down Dog is feeling too
much for your poor aching shoulders, allow yourself to
practice a nice modification: simply bend forward while
placing your hands on a wall in front of you! Play with
this position to obtain a yummy stretch for your
back....and focus on pushing your sitbones away from the
wall while you do this. After all, one of the nicest
benefits of down dog is supposed to be the stretch that
your spine experiences.

try practicing cobra with NO HANDS! You heard me! by taking
your hands out of the equation here, your shoulders won't
be bearing any of your upper body's weight...the
responsibility of lifting your weight up will be redirected
to your core muscles. You could even see what it feels like
to clasp your hands behind you in this pose!

When you come up to mountain pose, give yourself permission
to incorporate some of the poses below before you do more
sun salutes...all of them benefit this area:

eagle pose
crescent moon pose
chair pose
simple shoulder rolls

IN ADDITION TO SUN SALUTE VARIATIONS, pay special attention
to heart-collarbone opening poses at this time of year when
we all tend to feel a bit more slumpy...

king dancer pose will work wonders for your shoulder, as
your legs do the work here...while holding on to your leg
or foot, you push your foot up behind you...the arm and
shoulder come along for the ride, giving them a nice
passive stretch.

this same principle works well in bow pose....holding onto
both legs or both feet, both shoulders get a nice stretch
at the same time.

Allow yourself to drop your arm beind your back when you
perform side angle stretch, and to keep your head facimg
the floor instead of up..be extra kind to your neck.

MY NEW YEAR's RESOLUTION

After experiencing energy akin to that of the fabled
Energizer Bunny after a sumptuous raw foods dinner just
before Christmas, our family is integrating much more raw
into our food intake. I'll keep you all posted as I
experiment with this... but here are some of the most
amazing factiods I have learned in the last month or two
about raw foods in general:

Back in the day, actually in the 1940s, Dr. Francis
Pottenger performed a well-cited study comparing two groups
of cats, numbering about 900 in total...one group was fed a
raw-foods diet and one fed a cooked diet. the raw foods
cats (and they were fed their natural foods....meat and
milk) were very, very healthy by all accounts. The cooked
food cats were a different story. They actually started to
suffer from many of the same degenerative conditions that
are currently plaguing modern man, including heart dieases
and the dreaded cancer, dental cavities, arthritis...you
get the picture. The experiment was carried for several
kitty generations. The lineage produced from the raw foods
cats continued to exhibit excellent health, but, again, the
cooked food cats were a different story...their first
generation litter were sickly, and even deformed, the
second generation were diseased and even stillborn, and
those females that survived were not healthy enough to live
to reproduce further. Wowzers. I have one text that further
cites the study, writing that some of the sick kitties were
then put on the raw diet, and, amazingly and seemingly
against incredible odds, became healthy...really healthy,
to the point that there was really no discernable
difference between these healed cats and the group who had
been eating raw all along!
You don't have to look far to find amazing stories of
humans being healed by a raw foods diet, either.

Other cool raw facts:
cooking destroys 100 percent of our food's enzymes, along
with a great deal of the vitamins and minerals.

Coconut water is used in a lot of raw foods diets. Coconut
palms take 9 months to filter water up through the tree and
into the coconut. In World War II, doctors used cocnut
water as a substitute for plasma in a pinch. It is nature's
perfect isotonic beverage.

Raw foods can save the planet!!! Just imagine all the
energy/carbon emissions that we would save if we all
committed to eating a raw foods dinner just one night a
week! No more heat needed from your oven, etc etc. ALSO,
you can save a great deal of water by eating raw....dishes
aren't nearly such a chore, as you have no cooked-on mess
to scrub off. How's that for a "what can i do besides
change my lightbulbs" idea?

Well, that's all folks,

tune in next month for more!
Thanks for reading

Laura :)