"Now just lie back on your mats and place the two balls under the very top of your trapezius muscles. That's right.... Now slowly push up from your feet, lifting your pelvis off the mat..."
It all sounded so easy as Amanda, our Yoga instructor, gave the directions. Easy until the pain set in!
"Holy s_ _ _ that hurts!" was all I could think. Just like having a massage therapist's magic fingers dig right in. Fortunately, I could use my body to control the level of discomfort.
That's the genius of Yoga Tune-Up technology - using Yoga balls to mimic a great massage up and down your back or pretty well anywhere else you need it. And it's a lot cheaper than massage therapy, that's for sure!
The yoga balls are basically small rubber balls the size of a tennis ball. If you squeeze them, there's certainly some "give" to them, but they do have a definite firmness.
I sure found a lot of knots to work out of my muscles - hence the pain factor for me. Of course, it didn't help that I'd done my weight routine just before Yoga class either - I'm sure that contributed a few knots!
As the class went on, we gradually moved the balls farther down the back, hitting the rhomboids, erector spinae, latissimus dorsi, and "the gluts". At the end, we really did feel very relaxed (and not just because it felt so good to stop!).
The beauty of Yoga balls is also that you don't have to know much at all about traditional Hatha Yoga to benefit from them. If you need to relieve the physical and psychological tensions built up in your muscles, you can do it right away with just about no training.
Have a Look at this Excellent Demo:
Here at Global Resilience Solutions, we're always looking for easy-to-use tools to help you improve your health, dissolve your stress and relax you more. And Yoga Tune-Up's ingenious little balls are a prime example. No need to wait to see a massage- or phsyio-therapist to get those knots out of your muscles. You can do it anytime!
It hit me almost as soon as I got out of the car... a very subtle aroma of fine incense. Entering the reception area, a young lady handed me a clip board with a health questionnaire to fill out and told me where to go next.
However, this was not my acupuncturist's office or any other kind of medical establishment at all. It was about to be my first Yoga class in at least twenty years...
How It Started
What was the attraction? Well, aside from my constant drive to test out new-to-me and different forms of training in personal resilience, I'd been really wanting to expand my hip and leg flexibility for a while and summer is the ideal time for this kind of work (the heat and humidity facilitate safe stretching). And what better way to stretch out of your comfort zone than Hatha Yoga?
Indian Hatha Yoga is what people in the West usually think of as Yoga - the use of interesting and sometimes challenging postures that you hold for periods of a few seconds to a few minutes. In reality the idea that Hatha Yoga = Yoga is like saying that the pre-game warm-up = the Superbowl. Yoga is a vast subject.
Anyway, after changing into my conspicuously un-Yoga like exercise attire (I would have fit in perfectly with a Tai Chi class ;-), I took my mat into the appointed room and made myself at home... in a nervous kind of way.
As more people entered, they all sat quietly and never acknowledged each other by more than a passing smile. It was then that I noticed I was the only one wearing shoes - major breach of etiquette apparently! Who knew??
All this describes the first of two Yoga classes at different studios I attended last week. The first was an hour long beginner's class and the second a 90 minute class for all levels. In both cases I was already resigned to my fate as the class klutz, convinced everyone else would have rubber-like joints and glide effortlessly into scarcely believable positions.
Here's a great video to help you get started... and you're NOT a dummy!
What I Learned
I'm really happy to say in retrospect that I emerged from both classes with my dignity intact. Apparently I was already at least in the mid-range of flexibility and even the instructors (who both did an excellent job) didn't come off as having an unlimited range of motion.
One thing that really surprised me was how good a cardio workout these classes were! I shouldn't have been surprised, though, because people make that same comment about Tai Chi and Qi Gong all the time. Just because something appears to be slow, rhythmic and gentle does not mean you're not working your ass off ;-)
And the sweat! It was pouring off in buckets like I've seldom seen before. In the second class I was actually running out of dry T-shirt space to wipe my forehead with so the sweat would stop running into my eyes! And that's a good thing, because sweating is a superb detoxification process. Have a really good sweat and, as one health professional told me today from her own experience, "you'll feel like a newborn baby."
Before my first class, I was a little afraid the instructors would be calling out Sanskrit names of postures one after the other, like "Adho Mukha Svanasana!" and that everyone else would assume them easily while I'd be sitting there stunned, thinking the more polite equivalent of "WTF?!". Fortunately, instead of the above string of incomprehensible Sanskrit syllables, the words "Downward Facing Dog" echoed through the training hall. Now that I could understand! It really helped that during a couple of recent business trips I'd picked up copies of Yoga magazines in US airports and refreshed my memory about which postures were called what... at least in English!
And here's some more advance stuff I was NOT doing last week. I include this not only so you can see a beautiful demo done by a beautiful woman on a beautiful sandy beach, but also to underline the fact you don't need to do the advanced postures to benefit. As with most disciplines, 90% of the benefit comes from the more basic practices - fancier is not necessarily better.
The REAL Take-Away
It's easy to go to a Yoga class, have a good stretch, feel energized and then go about your day just as you always do. It's quite another to maintain your Yogic grace, poise and awareness all day long, to say nothing of delving into its deeper aspects in terms of physical health, emotional self-management and spiritual development.
This is where the vast majority of people doing Yoga lose out. And you can substitute Qi Gong or Tai Chi or any number of other profound disciplines for the word "Yoga" in the preceding sentence. If your practice ends when the class ends, the benefits won't be far reaching or really transformative in your life.
Yoga is capable of profoundly reconnecting your mind and body, detoxifying your system, boosting your immunity, calming your nerves and taking your life to a new level. Going to class is a great starting point, but there's so much more to be savored and enjoyed.
Now, if only I could get into the splits (without screaming) and sit painlessly in that damned full lotus pose!
Internal exercise is much different than what most Westerners think of when they talk about going to the gym or getting in shape.
Internal exercises are different because they've been designed with the whole person in mind, because they reintegrate mind and body and because they are sustainable - in other words, they lead to long-term health and, unlike some forms of exercise, they're not prepared to sacrifice that for the sake of short-term gains.
Hatha Yoga
What's the opposite? Have you ever seen someone running on a treadmill and watching TV at the same time, with their body doing one thing and their mind another? There you have it - a recipe for limited results, where you're treating your physical life and your emotional / spiritual life as unrelated.
Tai Chi
What are the classic internal exercise forms available to you today? Chinese Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Bagua Zhang, Xing Yi Chuan, and Indian Hatha Yoga are all viable options if they're taught properly. Granted, Bagua and Xing Yi are the least common; however I thought we should list them in case you come across them!
Bagua's circle walking exercise
The Short List of What Internal Exercise Can Do for You
Helps Your Heart: improves your aerobic conditioning, oxygen uptake and endurance, while lowering resting heart rate.
Improves Your Flexibility: May not seem that way at first, but you'll become much more physically flexible doing internal exercises like Qi Gong, Tai Chi or Hatha Yoga. This will reduce your stress, release trapped tensions and help you become more flexible emotionally.
Banishes Your Worries: Chronic worry and anxiety can increase your cortisol levels, which unfortunately correlate with elevated blood pressure, depression, weight gain and increased insulin resistance.
Improves Muscle Tone: Contrary to popular belief, these exercises build muscle like crazy. This superior muscle tone helps protect you from injury, back pain and even arthritis. Moreover, these exercises target deep core muscle groups vital to many aspects of your health and promote the flow of blood, oxygen and energy (qi or prana) throughout your system.
Takes Off the Pounds: Internal exercises burn far more calories than most people think and, even better, as a practitioner you're more likely to improve your nutrition. This will help you drop even more weight, if that's your goal, or at least arrive at your optimum weight sooner.
Lubricates Your Joints: To keep your joints healthy, internal exercises take them through their complete range of motion. This bathes the joints in nutrients they might not otherwise get, keeping them healthy, pliable and resistant to injury.
Balances Your Blood Sugar: Internal exercises promote better sugar metabolic function, improve cholesterol balance and decrease risk of diabetes and its related complications, such as kidney failure, heart attack, blindness and limb amputation.
Kicks in the "Relaxation Response": That's an expression coined by Dr. Herbert Benson. Internal exercise brings your breath, movement and mental attention together, calming you automatically and shifting your nervous system over to the restorative parasympathetic circuit.
Builds Those Bones: Because they favor weight-bearing exercise, internal systems tend to build up bone density and stave off osteoporosis. Moreover, some systems have special methods for keeping the bone marrow healthy and the bones resilient.
Improves Balance and Coordination: This is a function of mind-body integration and translates into fewer injuries and accidents as well as enhanced mobility.
Circulates Your Blood Better: Vitality is partly dependent on efficient blood circulation. Internal exercises wring the venous blood out of your nooks 'n crannies, reduce the workload on your heart and also thin your blood naturally, reducing the likelihood of clot-induced heart attacks or strokes.
Builds Mind-Body Awareness: As you practice, you become more and more sensitive to how you use your body - your balance, weight distribution, the places you habitually hold tension and the psychological resistances you've built to life that translate into physical manifestations of stress. And once you're aware of these things, you can change them consciously!
Immunizes and Detoxes You: Internal exercise postures move your lymph fluid quite efficiently, boosting your immune system, destroying pathogens (including cancer cells) and promoting a natural detoxification of internal organs in general and the lower digestive tract in particular. This release of toxins and improved immune system functioning provides a solid basis for long-term health and longevity.
Deepens Your Sleep: By circulating blood, energy and oxygen more efficiently, reducing your stress and inducing a never-before experienced level of control over your own organism, how could you help but sleep better?
Instills Happiness "Software" in Your Mind: If your practice goes beyond just doing the routine to "get some exercise", you're in for a treat. Internal exercise systems are holistic tools for cultivating mind-body harmony and happiness at levels you've probably not felt before. And these systems often have or are connected with meditative systems that can revolutionize your life (in fact, that's what they've been designed to do).
Ramps Up Your Relationships: As you become calmer, more flexible and more connected with the core of your own being, other people will more often crave connection with you. Internal exercise helps you become more compassionate, more approachable and more balanced - secrets you can share with your loved ones and anyone else who will listen.
Spiritualizes Your Romance: Internal systems are indeed holistic - they have or are connected with repositories of expertise on conjugal relations that can show you how to deepen your emotional connection with your spouse, master your sexuality and spiritualize sexual union.
Needless to say, there's lots more! Of course, none of these benefits come without regular and consistent practice. The deeper benefits only come if you make the effort to build your lifestyle on these practices and the principles that underlie them.
If you'd like to learn more about one form of internal exercise, Chinese Qi Gong, and its origins in the world's most successful tradition for cultivating health and longevity, just go here.
Over the course of human history, fasting for spiritual purposes has been at least as widespread and quite probably much more so, than fasting for better health. We also need to remember that non-Western and pre-industrial cultures did not tend to divide life into categories of "physical" and "spiritual" as we do out of (bad) habit.
Goals of Spiritual Fasting
There are many different ones. As I write this, tens of millions of Eastern Christians are beginning their Holy Week fast leading up to Pascha (Easter). For them the goal is to become more open to divine influence and to actually participate in the events they're celebrating. Of course, there are many different spiritual reasons for fasting:
To become more open to divine influence
To receive divine guidance on a particular issue
To receive healing, whether physical, emotional or spiritual
To help someone else receive what they need, whether healing, guidance or protection
To prepare for a spiritually difficult task
In reality, of course, the majority of people who would say they practice spiritual fasting seem to do so on a semi-conscious level at best. They often think they're fasting, when they're simply practicing a form of abstinence, or they're not clear on how fasting works or exactly what they wish to achieve.
Is fasting a form of sacrifice that God demands imperiously? Is it a form of punishment for human sin? Well, if you read the ancient Christian spiritual sources carefully, such as the various collections of "sayings of the desert fathers" from the fourth and fifth centuries, it's quite clear this isn't the case.
What emerges is a bit more complex. Because fasting cleanses the body, it also makes the mind more lucid. If you consider that the desert dwellers who pioneered Christian spiritual fasting were totally dedicated to remaining in an unbroken state of inner "prayer of the heart", this lucidity of mind was very important. The bottom line from their experience is that abstinence from heavy foods and periodic fasting will enable you to maintain focused inner attention and will cut down on the inner dialogue, swirling emotions and physical symptoms that ensnare your attention. That's obviously a vital consideration for any sustained program of prayer or meditation, and explains why spiritual fasting has been so widely used worldwide for millennia.
So if we ask how spiritual fasting works, it's clear the explanation bridges the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual planes of our being, creating a cleansing and unifying effect. It's not simply a matter of fulfilling an abstract divine commandment; it has to do with how your mind-body organism is intended to function. This is something that Orthodox Christian ascetics, Kriya Yoga practitioners and many native American medicine people, to name just a few, will tell you.
Here's a really interesting video on spiritual fasting that also ties in the health aspect in an admirable and well thought out way. Be sure to pause it to give yourself time to read the text, in addition to listening to the excellent commentary:
A Spiritual Warrior's Explanation
Without contradicting any of the foregoing, the Coptic Orthodox Monk, Matthew the Poor, offered this explanation of fasting. When he uses the word "self", he is using it in the sense of the "ego" or "false self":
"[When we fast] we must reach a state of accepting not the partial, but the complete annihilation of the self, and this can only take place by an act of deliberate volition. In other words, if we begin by any exercise, such as fasting, which brings us to the partial overcoming of the self, we need to supplement the feeling of satisfaction that comes from accepting this state with an acceptance of the total destruction of the self. This is obtained by the mental acceptance of death itself, with no dismay or restraint. 'But we received the sentence of death in ourselves' (2 Corinthians 1:19).
"When our father Abraham offered Isaac his son, he did so partially with his hands, but totally in purpose. When Abraham proved his willingness to offer Isaac, his only son, God did not leave him to carry out the slaughter; when the offering had been only partially made on the physical level, God considered the sacrifice to have been actually carried out. This, and only this, is why God redeemed Isaac with a ram - a symbol of Christ - who was to redeem the souls of those whose self was destroyed partially by their actions, but wholly in their intentions."1.
In terms of spiritual fasting, that's certainly "food for thought"! Think about it. Better still, try it. Just remember, though, as with fasting for health, the same advice and warnings apply here, so go back and read the previous post before you start!
Many years ago I was out taking a walk with a friend of mine, a woman, when we suddenly found ourselves face to face with a fence. Without a second thought, I hopped over the fence and said, "Well, are you coming?" Her jaw was almost on the ground and she said, with an awe that quite surprised me, "You're SO at home in your skin!"
For me it was the first time I realized that not everyone is "at home in their own skin." And today, some 25 years later, I could hop that fence every bit as easily as I did it that day.
Flexibility is one of the great keys to becoming a resilient person. Physical flexibility is the foundation of mental and spiritual flexibility, of your ability to adapt harmoniously to any situation, even the most extreme kind. Trust me; if you aren't physically flexible, you're not mentally flexible either.
Of course, there are some other really compelling reasons for building your physical flexibility:
- It improves the circulation of your blood, lymph fluid, spinal fluid and qi - It protects yours soft tissue from injury - It greatly relieves psychological stress - It boosts your overall health, immunity and longevity
So how do you go about getting more flexible? There are lots of ways, of course; everything from calisthenics to certain types of dancing, to Yoga to Qi Gong and many more.
Here's a great video I came across that can give you some ideas. It contains some innovative warm-up exercise used in the pioneering Russian martial art known as "Systema" (meaning "the system", as if you hadn't guessed ;-), as it's taught to members of "SpetsNaz", the Russian special forces.
http://bit.ly/28snit
(Note: as with any program of physical exercise, you should only engage in this with your physician's approval, particularly if you have any existing health concerns. Use common sense.)
This may seem like a strange thing for a priest to say, but nothing turns people into emotional wrecks quite aseffectively as religion. It's true. Of course, you have to keep in mind I've defined "religion" in a particular way (in my book, The 5 Pillars of Life) and that "religion" is not thesame as an "authentic ancient tradition of self-trans-formation".
This comes from Philip, one of our members, who sent in this excellent question, preceeded by a couple of paragraphs from an article he had just read. Be sure you read it through first, then go to the bottom and turn up your speakers to find out the answer:
---------------------------------------------------------- This morning, I was leafing through a yoga magazine in anacupuncture waiting room when I came across an article that interested me. It was about guilt, and in it, the author distinguished 3 kinds of guilt: natural (feeling guilty about something immediate and specific, which can be repaired), toxic (festering of natural guilt, nagging, non-specific) and existential (not about anything we've done personally, or about the state we're in, but rather about the state of something external (the poor, the environment, etc.)). I'll reproduce what the author had to say about the second category, "toxic guilt":
"Toxic guilt is what happens when natural guilt festers. It manifests as a nagging feeling of pervasive but nonspecific badness, as if your whole life has something wrong with it. This type of free-floating guilt is the hardest kind to deal with, because it arises from lingering patterns, of samskaras, lodged in your subconscious.
"How can you expiate your sin or forgive yourself for something when you don't know what it is you did - or when you believe that what you did is essentially irreparable? To some extent, this particular type of guilt seems to be an unintended by-product of Judeo-Christian culture, a residue of the doctrine of original sin.
"Tantric traditions especially are known for looking at the world through a lens that sees all life as fundamentally divine. Your attitude toward your guilt will undergo a huge change when you begin to follow a spiritual teaching that - instead of assuming human beings are intrinsically flawed - teaches you to look beyond your flaws and helps you to know your deeper perfection."
(Philip goes on to say) I'm now reading "The Way of a Pilgrim" (an Eastern Orthodox spiritual classic from 19th century Russia, currently published by Shambhala). In it the author frequently refers to himself as "a sinner" and as being "unworthy". According to the yoga author's viewpoint, it would be hard to see his spiritual state as a healthy, evolved one, but rather it would seem benighted. At the same time, this character experiences life as wonder and joy, shows resilience to hardship, and never seems to feel sorry for himself, or "spiral into a pattern of self-destructive action".
So what's the truth here??
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Now turn up your speakers and I'll tell you the TRUTH about all this. And it's not likely what you're expecting to hear ;-)
~ Dr. Symeon Rodger
Warrior Coaching International - transforming your mind, body and spirit into SOLID STEEL......wrapped in cotton ;-)
Rather than repeat my official bio, I thought I'd write something more personal here.
Simply put, my whole life has been taken up with the search for how life is really meant to work; in other words, RESILIENCE.
And in that 35 year search I've been very blessed to make some amazing discoveries and meet some of the most remarkable people alive - most of whom are happily anonymous to the world at large.
You really CAN have tranquility, control, health, love and security - the 5 things everyone wants and seldom has. Of course, you have to be willing to pay the cost of acquiring them - and that's life's grand adventure.
This blog deals with applying the most effective RESILIENCE strategies to YOUR life... and then enjoying the amazing results!
