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Are you more right-brained or left-brained while you practice yoga?

Right-brain? Left-brain?

Do you associate more with the right side of your brain while you practice yoga or the left side of your brain?

The two hemispheres of the brain have fascinating connections (Photo credits: Simeon Schatz)

Creative vs. logical

The right-brain/left-brain theory grew out of the work of Roger W. Sperry in the late 1960s, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. The cerebral cortex controls rational functions and is made up of two halves, connected by masses of nerve fibers which pass messages between each other. These halves, or hemispheres, are commonly referred to as right-brain and left-brain.

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How Yoga Robin was born: Why private yoga instruction?

Private vs. group yoga

Many people drop into their favorite group yoga class, with usually a number of studios, teachers and times to choose from. With an unlimited membership at a studio, why would a student choose private instruction instead?

Robin in Death Valley 108 degrees (image © Simeon Schatz)

How I began teaching yoga

I started teaching private yoga exclusively

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Headstands and how they benefit you

Five-minute headstands

I used to do 5-minute headstands every day. They influence pure calm and also reverse the aging process, as the blood flow switches directions. Headstands require arm strength and balance.

Protect your neck

Staying up in a headstand at all costs is not a good idea though—the neck needs to be protected with safe technique.

I, indeed, learned the hard way. One morning I woke feeling hospital-bound; the day before I did a 7-minute headstand, and felt my shoulders sinking in the last 2 minutes but did not listen to my body. Sadly, I allowed my ego to guide me instead.

It was through the several weeks to follow that I remembered the articulate words of my austere—and very experienced—teacher. I remembered all of her demonstrations before headstands to properly place the hands, lift—pull-down, although inverted—the shoulders, setting up before inverting (and keeping that structure no matter what). I remember all of the partner exercises surrounding this. I also remember rolling my eyes, believing that I didn't need any of that "beginner instruction."

I was wrong. I did. 

Act with a "beginner's mind"

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The medicine of yoga and herbs

Energy or emotional boost

While hatha yoga stretches out your body, lubricates the joints, pumps blood and healthy fluids through your body while also reducing inflammation, what can you do—outside of yoga—to aid the process? When you could use an energy or emotional boost, a cool-down, or even stress management, how can you gain some holistic assistance?

Herbs.

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This wondrous life

image by simeon schatz

A poetic thought

A pose is just the life force concentrating on its next move... Held steady within the vessel body, our minds are free form as time becomes unified without limit or boundary.

 

© 2012 Yoga Robin®

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The secret of breath

Stop what you are doing now

 

Stop what you are doing now, no matter what it is, and for 15 minutes do nothing but close your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to breathe using ujjayi breath used in Ashtanga yoga or Pranayama meditation.

Make sure that you don't cheat yourself on your inhale or your exhale. Make them equal in length. Try 5 second inhales and 5 second exhales all through your nose, breathing through the back of your throat.

This breath is like an ocean with waves ebbing and flowing slowly. With your eyes closed you can even imagine waves moving to the rhythm of your breath as you look with the eyes of your soul.

While working a busy day, living a stressful moment at home, or feeling anxiously happy, this will be like transporting yourself to the beach...

You will be releasing toxins from the body and mind with this practice.

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Darkness found in your yoga practice

Are you scared to face something?

If you are scared to face something within yourself, you may sometimes feel that time is against you or that you cannot fulfill your wishes because of your fears.

The answers might be in your dark sides that you refuse to see. Yoga can have the potential to be the place to confront what's most deep inside you. This means that you have the power to confront your darkest side of you in your yoga practice.

A place for the bold... But ask yourself, "What am I scared of?"

We hide our darkest parts within our bodies

Deep within our bodies. The best parts stay locked up in our joints and tightest places: hips, necks, shoulders, backs, and even feet. When moving through yoga with deep breath, these gems—as secrets—can become free...

In a big way.

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Chill

find the answers in stillness

Chill.

The beauty of solitude.

Magic.

Finding your soul.


Inviting your self.

The answers are coming.

Just lie here.

You will know what to do.. soon.

Ommm

photo by Ricky Tran

 

© 2010 Yoga Robin®

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Find the right work-life balance: The key to happiness, health, well-being

 

Do you balance your life?

Are you a workaholic? Do you work extra hours because you really need the money, or do you believe your job really needs you, and that it's ok to take care of your job more than yourself? Or do you, for one reason or another, find yourself addicted to your computer whether it's work or personal?

Staying busy all the time does not help you

You do know that if you are working too much, you are acting like you are not very important.

Maybe, without knowing it, you are covering up something basic in your existence and doing it through your work. Staying busy all the time with a task that does not cultivate your soul can be like a drug that you continually allow to drive you. But you can beat it if you recognize who you truly are.

Nurture yourself

If you need rationale outside of yourself in order to ease up on workaholism, remember that no one really gets the best of you if you don't nurture yourself first.

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Coming into wholeness

coming into wholeness

Coming into wholeness. Feel your peace. Be in love with your path in life.

Find it inside you. Let go of all that makes you worry. Be free.

Access this freedom any time! The truest side of you coexists with the emotional mind...

an advaita vedanta metaphor

Imagine 3 buckets of water. 

The sun is shining in all three, and they each enjoy the sun equally. One is muddy, one is stirred up, one is still and clear.

Reflection in bucket #1 is dim and dull, in bucket #2 is agitated, and in bucket #3 is peaceful. 

Sun is the Self, water is the Mind, reflection is the Ego (mis-identification)

Some conclusions...

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Diving deep, where are you my fears?

go to the edge

I am now wondering where my fears are, going off the edge to find them in myself, in the depth of who I am. If I am bold enough and I don't turn back, I will be able to renew my patterns. This action will set me free.

In the dark shadows, I imagine I will sail through my depths as if a dream and find the silence I need and have searched for all my life. I know that the best stuff is at the very bottom.

gems and secrets are beacons

More conspicuous and offset against the darkness, the gems and secrets are easier to see and feel. Sometimes they shine with luminosity like a beacon, with my name on them!

The bottom must be a bed of soft sand which I can dig my bare feet into and feel rooted, maybe for the first time. The ground of my soul. To touch this part of me is to release all that I previously imagined was hidden.

Transforming itself, no longer in the dark, I will invite it to be a part of my waking life.

freedom lies in our minds and bodies

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Whispering words to your soul

poetry of the body

As yoga speaks the poetry of your body, words speak the poetry of your soul. Yoga and words complement each together. Any type of activity can also be a way of living your yoga.

there are no mistakes

No stranger to a community of poets and those who like to verbally relay their words to others? Many have a vibrant and active lifestyle to go along with this love of words.  

Like the wind off a clear blue lake blows its answers to the mountains, take time to whisper the secrets to your heart. Listen to every touch with your sacred ears. Sit with the words as they write themselves. There are no mistakes. It is all yours. You write it to share, so that you can touch something other than the normal, regular you. 

As you move the prana in your body, and work through the chakras, you experience your purpose in the moment. Through your desires, your energy and your heart, you will most likely find the soulful words whispering to you gently. 

continue moving

Continue moving and you eventually can surrender to that which you've activated, feeling it clear out all that gets in the way of knowing your true intuitions and spirit connection.

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Savasana: A true art

Reflection

Savasana, the final pose of any decent yoga practice is the place where you reflect upon your entire practice as it comes before your eyes from a distant cloud.

Savasana is one of the most important poses in yoga, reflecting true peace as the culmination of your practice.

This final resting pose, otherwise known as Corpse Pose, is a pose in which to wrap the fruits of your labors, your joys of movement, and your love for your body.

Wring out toxins

After moving the precious prana within your body through movements that flow through you, twists that wring out toxins, and peaceful moments in between that take your breath away, savasana is a time to celebrate and smile within. It's a place for stillness.

Celebrate

Celebrate your life force. You may have a tendency to ignore it as you move along in your busy day.

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Receive your gift in silence

what is your intention?

We go to yoga class. We start the class by making an intention. Then what?

Do we hold true to its energy every second of the class? No. We tuck it away in our heart and let it speak its own words to our soul.

be patient for the prana to do its work

For, the energy of a wish comes from within us and can hardly hide its wings when we are allowing the prana to circulate as we move our bodies in twists and waves.

What we feel comes from within. Before the words even articulate themselves to our being, we know what it is we are trying to say.

sometimes no words

Sometimes we are silenced. Sometimes this is a blessing. In this inability to find words, our soul is telling us to go deeper. Look into the still pond of your being. Do not always rely on words. Look to the swirling space that doesn't want to hear your words and give it your thanks.

There is more to living.

Namaste.

 

© 2010 Yoga Robin®

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Follow the mist

Keep your mind opened to possibilities

Ever-changing, I seem in this moment to be in the middle of a silent breath between states.

Just as there are many forms of life, I notice that it is common for people to tag a style of being in the world, which then closes them off to other inspirations that could come spontaneously, from afar or from within.

There is a misty quality to knowing I am on the right path, regardless of the unknown.

I follow the mist........

follow your own truth

There are uncountable ways to grow and evolve. Each has his or her own way, and to follow another's way is to not fully engaging with one's own inner guidance. I am influenced by many modes of thought but always, in the end, I follow my own visions. 

In fact, my yoga practice has taught me this as well.

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Discipline: A spiritual practice

disciplined mind

I just returned from a Bikram yoga class. What sticks with me is not the power of enduring the heat, but the power of discipline to control the mind.

Bikram yoga, unlike the Vinyasa Flow yoga which I have 13 more years of experience with, has many rules that are not necessarily inherent in many people. In my life and in my yoga practice I am used to living organically, letting my life take me in a flow. When I am practicing yoga alone, I have no plans in advance for my practice. I let my yoga practice take me.

Sure, there is discipline required with many styles of yoga, such as Ashtanga. But the movement inherent in this active style, where you generate your own heat, and move your own prana makes for a more organic practice inately.

Back to Bikram. What I feel in these classes is the necessity for discipline, as I'm led along a distinct path and how the discipline itself becomes the spiritual practice.

 

stay present

It is important to notice where the mind goes in any yoga practice, but in Bikram it is more about needing to stay with the group, listen to the teacher on cue, not close your eyes, drink water only when told, rest in savasana over and over, to name a few

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Do follow my heart that lives in silence

i cherish when my mind is still

I cherish the point in my yoga practice where I no longer have to tell myself:

"O my mind, you talk too much. Do follow my heart that lives in silence." ~ Sri Chinmoy

Then I am free. It's like shooting stars have just gone off to remind me I am here in this sacred space... 

When I’ve reached this place, I no longer know that I had a goal to get here in the first place.

It is then that I am able to truly see and feel the transpersonal. It is in the stillness that it all comes to me as the primary channel of my experience, making the most sense to me in an energetic form that cannot be described in words. 

ineffable feelings find expression

The ineffable feeling gets articulated within me, from a heartfelt space, in a poetic form. I have been given a gift with this mode of expression. It is what flows through my veins

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An inquiry into my true nature: Self exploration

life force fuels

On my jaunt through life I have contemplated the truth of my nature. I have always felt most comfortable knowing that there is an ultimate source permeating us all, and at times I have felt a unity with this source. At other times I have felt completely alone. It was my yoga—vinyasa flow, ashtanga & meditation, in particular—that saved me from this quandary and answered many questions for me.

My search, through poetic expression, led me to this present moment as I move into my desires to use their creativity and life force to fuel me.

Taken as an excerpt from my poem yoga, what you do for me, I speak to you, yoga, inside me as you are me: You help me find my pure state of mind, you help me change energy into fuel, you help me find the deepest parts of myself without fear, you help me believe in magic and you taught me how I can do whatever I put my mind to.

In studying the histories of Sankhya-Yoga, Advaita Vedanta and Participatory Spirituality I have found inspirations from each to aid me on my path.

sankhya-yoga

Although Sankhya and Yoga are different systems, they work together and support each other so have been combined together as one unique system called Sankhya-Yoga.

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how lucky we are… best vinyasa yoga around

San Francisco is blessed to have Stephanie Snyder for yoga

How lucky we are to be able to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and practice the most amazing Vinyasa Flow yoga around!

We have access to classes such as Stephanie Snyder at the Urban Flow Yoga. What a better way to end a Tuesday or Thursday evening, or savor a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

As the warm yoga room fills with 80-100 people, and the music is playing loudly, you walk in to find yourself in an energetic scene before the class even begins. You find all of the same people there every class because they all know that the special secret to their lives is to attend this class regularly.

If you are one of the regulars you know before starting how you will feel when it's over. It is a given, as this class is a sure thing. You can even begin your experience before Stephanie arrives by lying on your mat, amidst the social chatter, with a towel on your face and feel as if a solo boat on the open sea letting the bliss that will follow enter you in that moment, as if time is irrelevant and it is already happening.

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Hiking as a path to your self: Living yoga

Living yoga via hiking

Hiking on a sunny day... turning to sunset. It is my favorite time up on the mountain.

image @ Cora Varnes

I can watch the day sunlight culminate from warmth to secretive, from life-giving to artistic. With that change comes a change of heart too.

Hiking is a type of yoga for me, as I pay attention to my breath in the same way as I do on my mat. Living yoga outside of yoga class is the true test of a healthy yoga practice anyway. Hiking is part of having a well-rounded yoga life for me.

If I take an intention with me, it unravels with every step. I can even go through the various chakras as I climb, balanced together with music of the soul. What's most important in order for me to make my hike into a yoga adventure is silence—not necessarily inner silence but literal silence (i.e., no orating any words). This can be done with a partner as long as this is agreed.

Another important factor is breathing through my nose, using what we call in yoga the ujjayi breath. It is done throughout an Ashtanga practice. This breathing is done by making a sound in the back of the throat. Some people like to refer to Darth Vader from Star Wars when describing it.

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