Moms & Babies!

Happy gorgeous gorgeous Wednesday everyone!  A short entry today - again.  I have to admit, I haven't been feeling very inspired to blog the way I always thought I "should" be blogging.  When I started this a few years ago I had a very definitive idea that I'd have brilliant musings and insights on all things yoga every single week and that I'd be brimming with ideas and creativity...and yes, there are times when I have more ideas than I have time to write.  Everything comes and goes in waves, though, and I'm just having more of a fallow season I guess!

The good news is that I have something awesome to share on the blog today!  ABC News came to Karma Kids a couple of weeks ago to film one of Shari's Mom & Baby classes and their story is now up and available for viewing here.

I happened to just come from teaching a Mom & Baby class at The Yoga Room in Long Island City this afternoon.  Today most of my regular moms weren't there but I had a whole bunch of brand new moms - including one who had just moved to New York from Amsterdam.  I also teach a Friday morning class at 9:15 at The Giving Tree, and I sub Mom & Baby at Karma Kids whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Mom Catherine and baby Raphael (Rafa) chill out
in Legs Up the Wall at the end of class at The Giving Tree

This class is easily one of my all time favorite of all of the different populations I teach.  There is something so particularly rewarding about seeing moms connect with each other, relax in a safe environment where no one cares if their baby screams the whole time, and maybe even grab one or two rare moments of zen.  They leave feeling stronger and usually sure that they'll get a great nap out of their baby after class!  From the selfish end of things, I know teaching a baby class is a guaranteed way to lift my spirits if they're sagging for whatever reason.  It is absolutely impossible not to be in a wonderful mood after teaching a Mom & Baby class.  Interacting with all the different little ones and seeing how extraordinarily fast (too fast!) they grow and creating my own little bond with them is unbelievably rewarding.

If you have any friends who are expectant or new mommies, no matter where you live, see if you can find a Mom & Baby Yoga class in your area.  It's something that has brought so much to so many new moms I've seen and worked with!

It's Science

Big shoutout to the lovely Cassie Naatkgeboren for not only having the coolest last name ever, but for providing me with a link for today's blog!  Also, bonus points to anyone who can tell me the preceding sentence to the Anchorman quote ending in, "It's science" that inspired this post title...

I had planned a big, contemplate-y post about the amazing Orange is the New Black (but I'm only on episode 4, so no spoilers!) and the character of Yoga Jones.  She says some really interesting things about impermanence in the first episode, but alas, as is wont to happen to me these days, time has gotten away from me.  How is this happening - it's August, for goodness sakes!  Time is supposed to be growing on trees.  Oh well - just got to go with the flow, I suppose.

What's really cool about this link is that instead of just being written by any old schmo with a blog (like yours truly) there are some really fantastic scientifically based images and explanations around these ten pieces of advice that we've all received, and probably given, a zillion times over.  It puts it all in a different perspective.

Enjoy, everyone, and happy Friday!

My Prenatal Guru

This brilliant woman has been one of my heroes since I started my yogic journey - specifically when I started teaching Prenatal Yoga.

In honor of my 4 Prenatal classes I'm teaching tomorrow, I'd love to share some of her wisdom with you.  Ina May Gaskin is repeatedly described as the "mother of modern midwifery," and she truly is.  She's the author of several life changing (to me) books (my favorite being Ina May's Guide to Childbirth; her latest is Birth Matters which is an unbelievably important read!) and helped found The Farm Midwifery Center, which is the place where if I had my druthers, I'd have all my future babies!

There's so much I love about Ina May, but one of the main things is her dogged determination to quell fear and ignorance with knowledge and humor.  Birth is a wonderful, horrible, peaceful, excruciating experience depending on who you are and what your experiences are (sometimes all of those things at once!).  The more you know about it, whatever your experience winds up being like, the better off you'll be going into it - and the better prepared you'll be to throw all preconceived notions out the window when the time actually comes.

Obviously, for me all of this is second hand.  While I haven't yet experienced this for myself, and so in a sense am as ignorant as can be, I hear birth stories from my students constantly, as well as from my own mother and mother-in-law (both of whom are strong advocates for epidurals!)  From my students I hear experiences that truly run the spectrum - natural, epidural, c-section, wonderful, terrible, challenging, a breeze.  Each one is as unique as the woman who lived it.

I always encourage my students, as my teacher Juliana encourages me, to never take anyone - even Ina May's! - word as gospel and to always find their answers through as many avenues as possible.

Spare about 15 minutes to watch this - and get a load of the staggering statistics toward the end comparing the national US C-section and instrumental delivery rate versus the rates from births on The Farm!

 

Mala Madness!

I've written in the past about malas and about a japa meditation practice - a mala is typically a necklace of 108 beads used for meditation practice.  You choose a mantra, sit in your meditation posture, and thumb through each bead, repeating the mantra silently or aloud 108 times.  It's an ancient practice, and one very common among yogis.

Mala with a Ganesh charm; the remover of obstacles

One of our former teachers (and hopefully future...?) at Karma Kids, the lovely Camy Zachofsky, started making her own malas a few years ago after feeling like there wasn't a lot of variety or personality in many of the malas she was seeing at various studios and stores.  Camy has put a tremendous amount of thought into her designs, work into finding the best materials, and care in creating malas designed to support certain chakras, or energy centers, and different intentions for the person who will inevitably use that mala for a japa practice.

We had an incredibly fun workshop with Camy last week - Mala Madness, also the name of her company - where she taught us how to make our own malas as well as teaching us more about a japa practice.  Mine is a beautiful blue sodalite mala with a lovely copper key charm at the end.

I encourage everyone to check out Camy's website and facebook page and see her stunning malas for yourself!  They're great as a gift to yourself, to a yogi friend, or even to someone completely new to a yoga or meditation practice.  Enjoy your own mala madness!

Love Where You Are

I didn't write an entry last week as it was a semi-vacation week.  I worked every day except for the actual 4th of July, but I had an overall lighter schedule than usual and took full advantage of the time I wasn't working!

This coming week is much busier with both work and play - Marc's show opens on Thursday (Buy your tickets now and come see him!  Tickets are selling so fast!) and my wonderful in-laws are coming into town on Friday to see his awesome work as Macbeth.  I'm also doing a refresher course on Prenatal Pilates on Sunday, taking up what's often my day off.  I'm incredibly excited for it, but definitely hunkering down today and preparing for a crazy and hopefully please lord slightly less hot week.

Today's entry, at the bridge between last week and this week, will serve as the entry for both, and I want to share the little phrase that started rolling around in my head at the start of last week and has become my July mantra:

"Love where you are."

In yoga there's constant talk about "being present" and "staying present," but it can be hard to grasp what that actually means and what it feels like.  We can touch it from time to time but it's often fleeting in our practical, everyday life.  I think a lot of people often feel (I know I do!) that no matter where you are, you can't stop thinking about the past or the future.  When I'm at work, I think about what I'm going to do when I come home.  When I'm home, I think about what I'm going to do at work.  When I'm at a yoga class, I'm thinking about coming home and making dinner (it is a bit frightening and crazy how often I'm just thinking about food and cooking).

The thing is, though, even when I'm not enamored with where I am (waiting on a stiflingly, disgustingly hot subway platform for example), I do know that I have the ability to find at least a little bit of peace or even joy no matter what.  Even if it's just the perspective of having a moment of gratitude for the subway system, however imperfect, allowing me to live in my lovely neighborhood and work with relative ease in Manhattan.

The idea of loving where you are instead of just being there makes it a little bit more actionable - achievable if you will.  It's giving us something to do instead of trying to grasp at that ever elusive idea of simply being.  Maybe it can serve as a gateway - who knows.  So far, though, it's been a really great phrase to keep in my back pocket to give myself a reality check - or a reminder to put down the iPhone during an evening with Marc or lunch with a friend.

Let me know if this idea resonates with you - try repeating it to yourself whenever you catch yourself wishing you were someplace else or immersed in facebook during work.  Is it helpful?

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!


P.S.

In totally unrelated news, I was on a mission this weekend to keep my tradition going of making treats for the shows that Marc is in for the cast & crew to enjoy.  I came upon this recipe and blog and my life will never be the same.  Check it out!

Easier said than done

A short and sweet entry today, because someone else took the thoughts from my brain and put them down much more simply and succinctly than I think I am capable of!

Thanks to the lovely Lisa Feuer, of Yogini and Bambini, for sharing the link I'm going to share with you all today.  It's a list of things to give up "in exchange for" happiness.  I like that the title is "in exchange for" rather than "to find" happiness.  Every single thing on this list is easier said that done, but man are they worth doing. These concepts are often common knowledge, but they actually work if you're able to put them into practice.  The trick is to recommit every day and know that you are going to fail - a lot!  It's just about being mindful, having the intention to live well and give yourself a break, and pick yourself back up from one moment to the next.

Okay - enough vagueness from me.  Enjoy a nice "top 10" style blog from Tamara Star!

10 Things to Give Up in Exchange for Happiness

Happy last-week-of-June, everyone!

Yin (Yoga) and Yang

From my personal life to my professional life, this past week has been an absolute doozy - in a great way!  But as I've said many times on the blog, however, even positive stress still counts as stress.  If you're flying high for a couple of days, you're bound to feel a let-down - physically, emotionally, or both in the following days.  It's just how we work as human beings.  Consciously or unconsciously, we're always striving for balance.

A week ago today I was promoted to Assistant Manager at Karma Kids, which I'll start July 1st.  I'll have some big shoes to fill as we bid our current Assistant Manager bon voyage as she starts an exciting new adventure in Portland, OR, but I am so excited and feel ready for the challenge.

Then on Saturday, I finally told my sister how I'd been mulling over and toying with the idea of running a full marathon.  Between running my first half, what happened with Sandy and this year's New York Marathon, the Boston bombing, discovering the best running podcast ever (Two Gomers Run for Their Lives - check it out!), and feeling GREAT in my second half marathon...I finally decided that running a full marathon is something I have to do in my life.  And when I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I have to plan it and do it RIGHT now!  My sister had continuously floated the idea of us running a full marathon when we were doing the half, but I've always, always said no to the idea.  Well...suddenly we were making plans, and now we are both officially registered for the 2014 Walt Disney World Marathon in January! And we are also insane.

Once it got to be Saturday late afternoon, I was getting ready to take a yoga class for myself after a morning and afternoon full of teaching (and constant texting and emailing with my sister during breaks about marathon possibilities!).  The past couple of days had been incredibly exciting and my mind was buzzing nonstop with what the future held.

Normally, the Saturday class at The Giving Tree had been taught by my wonderful friend, a BRILLIANT yoga teacher by the name of Joseph.  Sadly for me, he's no longer teaching that particular class, but as strange luck would have it, it's being taken over by the lovely Jennifer, a fellow Mom/Baby/Kid yoga teacher!  We're working together as I sub a Mom & Baby class at The Yoga Room this summer, and it's always so nice to meet fellow teachers in Astoria.

All of this is a giant lead up to say - I was feeling tired but very, very wired as I laid my mat down to get ready to practice with Jennifer.  The class is called Weekend Serenity, which Joseph tended to structure as half to 2/3's hatha-vinyasa yoga, and half to 1/3 of total restorative goodness mixed with his incredible wisdom and humor.

I figured her class would be similar to his, but Jennifer's first question as I was setting up was, "Have you ever done Yin Yoga?"

And then I got REALLY excited!

I've always wanted to try Yin Yoga - the amazing Masako offers workshops on it a lot at The Giving Tree and I've never been able to go.  Yin Yoga is essentially holding poses for a much longer period of time than usual - about 5 minutes or so - to deeply stretch not only the muscle but the supportive connective tissue around the muscles/joints.  It might seem totally counterintuitive to stretch the connective tissue, but it's meant as a gentle stretch and release to ultimately make it stronger.  It's also not meant as a sole practice on its own but as a complement (a yin complement, perhaps!) to more yang activities, whether it be vigorous vinyasa yoga, running, weightlifting - regular NYC life of fast walking and stair hopping.

Just as with Joseph's class, we spent the last half hour or so in total restorative postures (where your body doesn't have to do any work and you shouldn't feel an active stretch) but for the first hour, we held simple poses - forward folds, pigeon, low lunges - for a long period of time each.  We moved very slowly and did only a single standing pose.  If it sounds like scary torture - it's not, I promise.  I was pretty nervous for the first three poses, especially when halfway through standing forward fold, I got pins and needles from my knees down to my toes!  It was my mind more than my body, though, that was having a tough time adjusting to this sloooooow and steady pace of the class.  It was exactly what I needed.

After class, my body felt like one giant noodle and my brain felt about the same!  I was able to tap into a deep physical relaxation that allowed my mind some genuine rest.  The sequence of hip opening, shoulder opening, and especially hamstring opening was really thoughtfully put together to promote ease in the practice and not force.

As a planner, as a New Yorker, as someone who, though I'm 90% employed by Karma Kids, is technically an independent contractor who sets her own schedule - it can be extremely hard to slow down my mind and body.  Being a yoga teacher doesn't mean it's easy for me to actually keep up with my own personal practice - in some ways it makes it harder!

The Saturday class at The Giving Tree (and by the way, it's from 5:15-6:45 should you ever want to join me there!) has been my end-of-day treat for a long time.  I was very sad to see Joseph go (but if you're around in the morning, he now teaches at 10:15-11:45!) but change is the one constant in life, and I'm really excited to embrace this one.  Life these days tends to be highly yang - fast, aggressive, intense - and without a little soft, slow yin to find balance, we'll burn ourselves out before we know it.