Eddie Stern has offered up two private yoga classes and a one-year membership to Ashtanga Yoga New York as part of a fundraiser for the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Here’s the link to the bidding location. By the way, the estimated value? $4,200. As of this posting, there’s no bid yet. So get at it!

Here’s more:

Learn from the master during 2 private yoga classes with Eddie Stern in either your New York City home or Eddie’s studio in Soho. You will also receive a 1-year membership to Ashtanga Yoga in Soho, New York.

Eddie has been teaching yoga since 1989, and is very active in bringing yoga to youths in public schools and at-risk communities in collaboration with Donna Karan, Deepak Chopra, Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Mike D. Your 2 private classes will include yoga tailored for your needs, breathing exercises, meditation, and a routine for you to follow after the 2 sessions are complete.

If y’all in New York and its environs don’t bid soon, I might have to — I’m going to go right now and figure out the cost of a plane ticket and a hotel room, and then I’ll factor that in. How Hollywood of me to make Eddie come to my hotel for my yoga classes.

So be a friend to him and save him from that fate by bidding. The clock is ticketing — you only have hours to bid from right now.

Posted by Steve

Sit back and enjoy, and think:

Posted by Steve

Army 1st Sgt. Chris Montera, who lost both legs above the knee and suffered third-degree burns over 60% of his body in a mortar attack in Afghanistan, is doing a headstand, guided by yoga instructor Sunny Keays.

“It takes a lot of pressure off my back and spine,” said Montera, 33, who was on his fourth combat tour when he was hurt. “It helps with the pain.”

[snip]

To help military personnel overcome the physical and emotional wounds from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hospitals run by the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs are increasingly turning to the ancient Hindu practice of yoga and other alternative therapies, including tai chi, transcendental meditation and Reiki.

Although not a cure-all, such therapies can be helpful when used in conjunction with Western methods of counseling, medication, and physical and occupational therapy, according to military officials.

Preliminary military studies have found that the calming effect of yoga can assist PTSD patients in dealing with the hypervigilance, flashbacks, depression and anxiety common to the condition. For veterans with traumatic amputations, yoga can help strengthen muscles and increase flexibility, the studies suggest.

The story goes on in the way these do: It probably will feel thin to you, who knows perhaps too much, but for those who don’t it offers a quick bit of insight. Oh, and isn’t there something else going on in San Diego involving yoga that this might be a counter to…? Although the instructors in this piece are Iyengar teachers.

Posted by Steve

Posted by Steve

Partly, it’s a new point of view, I’m sure. Steve and I have a new, freshly-painted room in our house just for practice. The angle on things changes when you have a dedicated place to ponder.

So it was my last practice when I reached down and took my big toe in padanguthasana. The voice of Tim Miller popped into my head (as it often does): “Grab that thing like you mean it.”

I’m a firm believer in the magic of the mudra on the big toe: First two fingers meeting the thumb. It gives me a sense of security and connectedness. It’s the big toe that was the key to my happiness in Ashtanga. It was also the key to a lot of injury-wisdom.

When I first started practicing, I was (as so many are) hamstring-obsessed. I was convinced that there was only one way and one way only to open up my hamstrings, and that was by grabbing my big toe every chance I got and giving it a good solid and continuous (well, for five breaths, anyway) yank. In the Primary Series, there are a lot of chances to do this: padanguthasana, trikonasana, prasarita D, utthita hasta padanguthasana, paschimottanana A, supta padanguthanana, etc. Much attention paid to that toe in the Primary.

The result of all my pulling was pretty predictable. I tore my right hamstring at the insertion point. Five times.

On the up side, I did gain hamstring flexibility. On the down side: Five times. It’s probably the most common Ashtanga injury, and I wonder if that isn’t partly because of all the chances a beginner has to use the leverage of the arms, shoulders and back muscles while holding the big toes. And the fact that holding the big toe is such a tangible goal to reach for (so to speak)–at all costs.

Be kind to your big toe and it will be kind to you. Via healingfeet.com.

However, it was also my gustha that saved me. After six years of struggle with that hamstring, I was in utthita hasta padanguthasana A when something else I’d learned from Tim came back to me: “Mula bandha begins in the big toe.”

I had looked this up in my trusty yoga anatomy books, tracked the fascinating set of connections that run all the way up the internal muscles of the thigh, but I’d never really made that extra connection with intention—that I could actually go after mula bandha by using my big toe.

So I did. Like magic, this solved my hamstring problem, redistributing the work away from that poor, overused insertion point. I became aware of the connection my big toes have to internal rotation. I began sending energy down (or out) through my big toe.

The ultra awesome thing about that is that once you locate mula banda this way, you stop yanking, and access a whole new set of muscles to bring yourself forward (or to bring it closer to you). You begin finding the earth in all sorts of unexpected places (like virabhadrasana B, for instance).

Hallux, it’s called in anatomy: Old Latin for “the great toe.” And so it is. So put your hastas together for the gustha.

Posted by Bobbie

Anyway, here’s what this app features:

While it takes discipline and dedication to practice Ashtanga Yoga, this unique app is designed to remind you to smile, have fun and enjoy the flow of the practice.

Features;
•Learn sanskrit pronunciation of poses
•Key points
•Benefits
•Modification
•Retina ready
•Contraindications

Ashtanga apps aren’t really our thing, we’ll admit. Books can even feel like they are pushing too far away from the proper student-teacher relationship.

But you can’t stop progress.

Posted by Steve

Today is Bloomsday.  James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of those books — heck it may be that book. Here’s one description of it, from a recent Daily Beast piece on books every college student should read before graduating:

We all could use a little of that, right?

Posted by Steve

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

We saw this as the week rolled to a close:

Caffeine, that most-benign seeming drug of choice that keeps so many of us fueled through the day, is now the basis of two official diagnoses in the mental-health bible released in May, with a third brewing for consideration. The latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly referred to as DSM-5, includes both caffeine intoxication and withdrawal. These conditions are considered mental disorders when they impair a person’s ability to function in daily life.

I obviously can report that these conditions never impair our abilities to function. That may be because we are careful never to hit withdrawal stages.

Beyond this news — caffeine intoxication already had been an official disorder, with withdrawal in the last version still up for more “research.” That research bumped up its status this time around, which is noteworthy because “caffeine use disorder” — essentially when someone has side effects from caffeine but can’t quit — is now undergoing more research, so it could end up an official disorder in the future.

Here are some smarty-pants as quoted in the Wall St. Journal article:

“Caffeine intoxication and withdrawal both occur fairly frequently but only rarely cause enough clinically significant impairment to be considered a mental disorder,” said Allen Frances, who chaired the task force that developed the previous version of the DSM and has been a vocal critic of the latest version. “We shouldn’t medicalize every aspect of life and turn everyone into a patient,” he added.

Alan Budney, a member of the DSM-5 Substance-Related Disorders Work Group, said the research in support of caffeine withdrawal as a diagnosis is substantial. It is a “clinically meaningful” diagnosis that could be useful to psychiatrists and other health-care workers seeing someone experiencing such symptoms, said Dr. Budney, a psychiatry professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.

“The symptoms [of caffeine withdrawal] overlap with a lot of other disorders and medical problems,” said Laura Juliano, a psychology professor at American University who advised the DSM-5 work group. “We’ve heard many times people went to the doctor for chronic headaches or because they thought that they had the flu and it turns out it was caffeine withdrawal and they didn’t even know it.”

The story also notes that while caffeine is addictive, it has shown all those benefits we keep passing along to you. It also gives you all the details on what just defines intoxication and withdrawal:

To be diagnosed with caffeine withdrawal, a patient must experience at least three of five symptoms within 24 hours of stopping or reducing caffeine intake: headache, fatigue or drowsiness, depressed mood or irritability, difficulty concentrating, and flulike symptoms such as nausea or muscle pain.

[snip]

Caffeine intoxication is defined as having five of a dozen symptoms. Among these are restlessness, flushed face, nervousness, insomnia, muscle twitching, irregular heartbeat and rambling flow of thought and speech. Again, these symptoms must make it extremely hard to function at work or home. Intoxication can occur at levels in excess of 250 milligrams of caffeine, according to the DSM. But experts say most cases of intoxication result from much higher doses.

And, yes, those two paragraphs basically describe situation normal with us.

Posted by Steve

Clearing up some earlier writings, Virginia GOP lietenant governor candidate E.W. Jackson said in a Wednesday news conference that he doesn’t, in fact, believe yoga leads to people following Satan.

Here’s bits from CNN’s coverage:

Wednesday, he said firmly: “”I do not believe that yoga leads to Satanism.”

“One of my ministers is a yoga instructor,” he continued, according to the Times Dispatch. “What I said was that Christian meditation does not involve emptying oneself but filling oneself … with the spirit of God. That is classic biblical Christianity.”

You might recall that Jackson wrote differently in a 2008 book. We covered that here. He wrote:

When one hears the word meditation, it conjures an image of Maharishi Yoga talking about finding a mantra and striving for nirvana. . . . The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. . . . [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. That is why people serve Satan without ever knowing it or deciding to, but no one can be a child of God without making a decision to surrender to him. Beware of systems of spirituality which tell you to empty yourself. You will end up filled with something you probably do not want.

Apparently, Jackson has seen the light in the past five years. Or at least he started running for public office. One of those.

Posted by Steve