Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. Or very soon. But eventually. During the recent Level 1 Teacher Training in L.A., an excellent question was posed by one of the outstanding Yoga Tune Up® Teacher trainees: I have fabulously tight psoas. Wouldn’t warming…
My manfriend accompanied me on my recent trip to New York City for the YTU Integrated Embodied Anatomy training. We were both excited – you see, we hail from small town, Canada and we had big plans for our trip to…
Here’s how I apply my deconstruction principle to teaching a pose. Before I teach Vasistasana, I take my students through a step-by-step process that prepares the body-mind for the classical pose. Each gradation can be the final destination if the previous…
I have always been fascinated with the “under layer”. This fascination later became central to my approach to helping students understand the complex movement patterns and poses found within the Hatha Yoga repertoire. As a child, a favorite activity of mine…
Many schools of yoga have their own formula or recipe of “cues” to get students into Tadasana/ Mountain Pose. The purpose of Tadasana from a strictly anatomical perspective is to teach proper postural alignment, i.e. a biomechanical neutral position of the…
During many yoga classes I have attended, the teacher would continually tell us to “open your heart” and “bring your shoulders back and down.” In Pilates reformer classes, the cue was to “place your shoulders in your back pockets,” or just…
[See the first half of this article here.] Snow globe yoga: Shake it up! Inspiration comes in many forms. One of my favorite ways of practicing is to pick a pose, any yoga pose, and then imagine that pose in a snow…
When I first started teaching yoga in 1978, I was 26. I was born flexible. Strong and athletic, I found yoga at 17 and it fit me like a glove on all levels of my being. I never suffered from pain,…
On day one of the training, the trainees reminded me what it was like to be new to anatomy: they were hearing strange words and working hard to give them context, sometimes finding themselves totally confused, and occasionally discovering moments of clarity and comprehension.
