Recent Posts

• May 20, 2012 at 4:43pm

  Another 105 minute yoga session earlier today. I think, this late in the day, my sequences get influenced, subconscously by this Cameron Gilley. Yet, I feell finally I am not cross-training for a led yoga class online or anywhere else. Decide I have a history worth rewriting. Despite living in Surface City.

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• A Feel-Good Practice

  May 19, 2012 at 6:53pm

  Sometimes great luck comes in being logged off unknowingly (again) from My Yoga. My post went straight to alphabetheaven (first, being intercepted by social media--but rejected-for-posting there by me). But life goes me one better. I've got a much better post in this one. I'd since my first try at posting, gone shopping at Trader Joe's (I hadn't been to a Trader Joe's in years)--I/m now boycotting Whole Foods Market and needed the best-tasting (and even less costly) alternatives to what Whole Foods offers.

  So, it seems that my day has gone swimmingly--literally--me feeling at least as good as when I used to swim laps. So centered, mind-blown and worked-out ... and the feeling lasting about six or eight hours. Food temptation issues? Gone during that time. I can credit my yoga fusion practice. When I transitioned (actually mostly renamed) it, I took out some of the pilates moves and used yogadownload.com and my Patricia Moreno dvd as springboards to creatively infusing my mild and soft vinyasa practice with necessary anahata chakra work. .... Oh, how my main influence for the yoga part of my practice, being a Dharma Mittra derivate did address heart opening, as well. But not with the alignment-orientation I might like.

  Alignment stays less, when you don't do yoga as frequently as you used to because you now dance... (unless it's ballet, I would suppose) ... so I have to be reminded by My Yoga, or yogadownload or whichever teacher does not neglect alignment ... contrary to popular belief, when the medium is online ... MOST of them do not neglect alignment ...

  So, now my dance class has to be the one in Greenwich Village ... get there next Sunday (?)

  Will I be grooving with a lot of tourists?

  Greenwich Village is a world-class part of town.
  The teacher has an international reputation.

  Tourists to NY are cool. Cooler if they dance.

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• Tried my New Sequence within 105 minutes Practice

  May 19, 2012 at 10:41am

  Some of it was overkill ... but at least I succeeded in blasting my heart center open. No teacher or downloaded sequence could have done what transpired for me this practice, some of the time.

  It did nothing for my strength or balance. I will remove a little of it. I am but an experiment of one:

  http://www.dailyspark.com/blog.asp?post=have_you_started_your_experiment_of_one

  Plus I dance too much these days ... halfway not doing yoga where once I did ...

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• Hoping a Former Yoga Teacher of Mine, who'd Underestimated Me, does not See This

  May 18, 2012 at 9:07am

  In my practice script now appears:

  Optional sequence for Hanumanasana or Koundinyasana:

  (Hold 3 Breaths each):

  Do left side, then right side

  Phalakasana
  Kapyasana
  Utthan Pristhasana
  {Repeat 2x more if in Sequence for Koundinyasana)
  Hanumanasana (leave out, if in Sequence for Koundinyasana)
  Utthita Utthan Pristhasana
  Eka Pada Koundinyasana (try to hold whatever expression, for 2 breaths) & (leave out, if in Sequence for Hanumanasana)
  Phalakasana
  Rajakapotasana Variation
  Kapotasana
  Phalakasana

  Must be the influence of this site and the download site ...

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• Sequencing a Yoga Practice has its Own Edge ... which is beyond the Comfort Zone

  May 17, 2012 at 8:25am

  Okay, it's been a long while that I have been away from my own self-sequenced practice of yoga.

  Came back to it last night for the first time in 3 weeks.

  I think I suddenly, due to the influence of the half-dozen favorite online yoga teachers I have now, I again dropped my yoga self-practice upside the head for the first time since 2009. It's not as if I have a live yoga class I have to cross-train and prehabilitate for.

  Nobody is teaching me yoga live. Thus, nobody in the near future will observe my yoga or care (this is not to say that it would not "show" its "results" in better ability with ecstatic dance, however) ....

  In keeping with its nautical and millenarian theme for the first time since 2009 my recently-renamed practice I call S.E.A. Change .... actually has me slowly sailing past my edge ... raising the prana ... though, again, kinda not feeling centered afterwards ...

  So, at my age, with less than 5 years regular yoga practice under my belt, why don't I (in the words of Dylan Thomas) just "go gentle into that good night"?

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• Wanted to be DONE with a Baptiste podcast (a long one) that got old ...

  May 13, 2012 at 5:42pm

  Only mistake was not doing the pilates/yoga fusion one (excellent audio podcast with a phenomenal teacher, not on this site) again first (but it had been more important for me to attend my satsang last night ... need a lot of BRAIN FOOD) ...

  Doing this lengthy podcast, with its talky, popularized, updated take on the yoga sutras (don't they ALL act like that?), I was - in my head, anyway - anticipating the next line of the script.

  I never had much of this kind of problem, with other exercise modalities way back, the movements got old looong before the script ever did ... I can see why freeform yoga is so popular because of this.

  Freeform yoga is not aimed at the advanced practitioner. If someone is that advanced, they could make their own yoga practice and change it every single day ... or approach the repetitive ashtanga mysore with beginner's mind and go deeper (mentally and/or physically) ...

  Was not going to say this, but i feel the same about ecstatic dance ... which is why I really liked the more freeform take on 5 Rhythms I'd gotten last weekend, and why I must change classes because of this ...

  Anyway, I'm done ...

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• Okay...I think I like 4 Teachers on Here for Heavy Rotation. My self-sequenced being the Heaviest ...

  May 12, 2012 at 7:31am

  That 4th, mystery teacher, whom I have not mentioned before is none other than Armand Sagredo ....
  It was love at first soundbite with him.

  With him I take yoga nidra class.

  Supposing I could mention him to people in my satsang ... since yoga nidra is mentioned a lot over there.

  The others are: David Magone, Cameron Gilley and Coco Finaldi. I've got my reasons, some of which are informed by a pilates practice that kicks major butt ... and just a sense of wonder at the universe, which is unselfconsciously embraced, but also that seems to emanate from possession of a genuine "old soul" ...

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• drumbeat Wants to Learn

  May 9, 2012 at 7:56pm

  Well, I revisited Coco Finaldi GYY Part 1 tonight. I had been under the illusion that I would do some dancing afterward, but it got plenty late and my muscles are plenty sore right now from the practice.

  It actually included for me kakasana, and so much in the way of vasisthasana, one round of prep and one round of a side-arm balance variation that I do of the unfancy expression of it.

  I GET and like this practice now (though it had impressed me before and I committed to it with having the download (have no choice since I can't stream), it was a strain and I could not keep up and that bothered the floatingness of this drumbeat ...

  So, this new development is actually probably the result of:

  1. Hitting that 2-Hour, 5 Rhythms class over the weekend
  2. More frequent yoga the past week or so
  3. Pilates is beginning to re-enter my life again ...
  4. What do you know? Chained to my desk at work, it finally occurred to me to do triceps dips on my office chair ..., and leg lifts too ... maybe some day I might raise myself from the chair, straight legged like as if this were a low-slung Captain's Chair apparatus ...

  I left out ancillary benefits of the Qi Gong and other kinds of stuff ...

  The sky is the limit now ...

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• My Yoga Practice helped with Knee and Hip Adductor Pain

  May 6, 2012 at 6:01pm

  I chose a yoga practice off of a download site that lasted about 70 minutes. Audio download.

  I modified parts of it down to my level, as I went along. It really stirred up prana, but this particular teacher does not teach the drill sergeant stuff as a switch-off job (unlike the other one who teaches Qi Gong-Yoga fusion)

  Seriously, I can't even do the Intermediate Arm Balance (as stated in my blog of a few weeks ago), yet; so there is no way I am going to do Parsva Bakasana, no matter how expertly she teaches it ...

  Unlike the other fusion flow audio, I actually was present for the entire class.

  Down the road I suppose I will dance better ... the arm balances probably help with balancing out the body, including adding to core strength - anywhere along the path ...

  What I really love about this teacher is, when instructing prasarita padottananasa, she is the only non-hatha style teacher who does NOT pretty much say ... if your head can touch the floor in this pose, go into a wide-legged headstand if you can ... (mine can't unless I am seriously out of alignment, taking up the width of the mat in this pose; and even then it only did it twice) ... she actually says: if your head can touch the floor in this pose, shorten your stance ... keep challenging yourself in your journey ...

  AHHH, but not by powering through ....

  Middle path rules!

  Back to the dance ... that class had especially been high energy ... I gave it 5 stars on the blogsite ...

  • 
    floating-drumbeat

    I can't stay for an entire class download if the class is much too hard for me and not modifiable down by a few levels ... sometimes, I'm too much about the sequence ...

    about 2 weeks ago in New York City, US

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• Procrastination Solutions: Last Night I Snuck in a Yoga Class by dvd ...

  May 5, 2012 at 7:39pm

  Normally, if I have a big day ahead of me, where I intend to arise at 5:59 a.m. to commute to an important movement class that starts in the early a.m. - the class being 5 Rhythms (Waves instruction) ... or any kind of class in the a.m. on a weekend day, I generally do not do yoga the evening before. I was also running out of spirulina blue-green algae supplement, which is my ace-in-the-hole ...

  But not LAST NIGHT

  I recently won membership from My Yoga Online. Two years ago I'd won a copy of the DVD, Yoga Burn by Rodney Yee. (I'd not used that one in a little over a year ...) From a Facebook drawing (ask me why I did not quit Facebook yet ...) No, I did not give Yee's Gaiam Yoga Club any business from my stroke of luck as a result of his stroke of goodwill, but I DID purchase a DVD by him called "Intermediate Yoga". If it makes him feel any better about this, it just sits on my shelf. Pincha, handstand and classical-arms headstand--don't and/or can't go there ... and the practice is not nearly as mash-up-able as Jonathan Urla's Advanced Yogilates ...

  Well, this story is not about reluctance to do my neck and/or shoulders in with Mt. Everest postures that my body is not ready for, after 5 years of regular yoga practice.

  It is totally about solutions to Procrastination. I had a proviso that I would quit the practice after 10 minutes. Closing in on what it felt like was T = 30 minutes, I said to myself, okay: ten-minute warning and I am outta here ... I remember the break-point at T = 40 .... but I stayed ... for the whole thing ...

  I fared so well, slept better than I could have predicted. Went to the class. While not having quite the poise and grace I may have liked, I had a lot of fluidity and my hips felt quite a bit looser (no mean feat for me) ... with all the yoga I did in the few days preceding. There is something to be said for doing full length yoga sessions several times a week ...

  What I once had been ... two short years ago ... honed, energetic ... was a chapter that needed to be closed ... I was nearly a year later found to be having trouble concentrating on my job at work ... I was getting a bout of mild depression, brought on by lettuce bingeing when combined with nearly inhumane living conditions in the pre-gentrification version of a tenement apartment.

  My co-worker had hardly noticed it, but my boss had nearly sent me on a permanent vacation ...

  So, if "SPRY at Age 58" were a game, I went into default for the greater good of my economic survival.

  That said, I had a blast at my 5 Rhythms class. There were a dozen "tribe members" (that is their jargon), along with a teaching substitute ... a truckload of energy in the room. Which always happens when there are young men taking the class.

  Unlike a typical yoga class in New York City, there was about a 50-50 gender mix.

  Unlike a typical yoga class, even though this is a conscious, mindful, spiritual practice; the 5 Rhythms teacher could let loose with the f-word or the s-word, in the service of instruction, and not use them gratuitously. I don't generally myself speak using those words; I certainly rarely get that angry or feel that aggressive so as to do so ...

  More on this later ...

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• Last Night's Yoga-Plus Session had Been Cardio, Enervating, Fun and little Strain ...

  May 3, 2012 at 9:25pm

  Well, it comprised one dance session and nearly all of a yoga session ....Of course, the dance had to be highly stylized .. I get the freeform dance stuff on Saturday morning, G-d willing ...

  Now, the dance was Hemalayaa's Bollywood Workout from on here ...
  And the yoga was that OTHER surfer dude who also teaches power yoga (well, the yoga is more on the vinyasa side, though) ... Yes, he is not Eoin Finn. There is more than one bounteous boarder in the yoga limelight.

  This one's name is Oliver Reinsch ... and he got into yoga through his interest in surfing and meeting a practitioner on the beach ... I own his dvd ... but I had not done it in two years.

  I mostly have done my own S.E.A. Change practice system all that time ... lol ...

  Anyway, in all this time I cross-trained, usually WITH added ambient heat; and this time, was able to approach the practice much more deeply ... particularly in twists, backbends and the demi-inversion known as downward facing dog.

  Oliver had me sweating bullets ... I was mopping my face ... the sweat got in my eyes ...

  Now, a day later, I don't have much D.O.M.S.

  The practice system I invented for myself is harsher in its slower execution ... I don't sweat as much

  Why am I cheating on David Magone with this surfer dude?

  
  

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• Focus Yoga and Bellydance Session

  May 1, 2012 at 9:06pm

  Did Flowing Practice for Weight Loss [David Magone], followed by about 3/4ths of the Belly Dance Express ...
  Allowing for lack of good sleep last night, I fully maintain that the Yoga for the Young at Heart Basic #3 really did open up my heart center enough to do justice for the first class and to gracefully execute belly dance isolations.

  I look forward to the first 5 Rhythms class in many months on Saturday through Meetup.com.

  I am a member of no gym and no yoga studio. The dance space attendance is only once in a while ... wondering if belly dance and Bollywood dance moves and techniques picked up this online way would translate to a live situation and teacher notices (have not seen the same students twice at this class)

  There is actually research done: Virtual Transmission, Visceral Practice: Dance Central and the Cybershala; http://guitarheroresearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/virtual-transmission-visceral-practice.html and I seriously study my online dance lessons from here ... I know for a fact that my self-sequenced yoga practice before I ever became such a class follower did translate into strength, speed/reflexes and agility in my 5 Rhythms practice ... missing had been poise and grace ...

  Incidentally, I did renew the Yoga for the Young at Heart dvd at the library. That dvd is very nearly a keeper. Wish I could find it for less than $19.95 ...

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