Get Fit Where You Sit

Dear Yogis.

I’ve been asked to teach Desk Yoga for a corporate class. It’s a smart request. Not everybody has a yoga mat but everyone has a chair and some kind of desk that can be pressed into service! There’s a saying: as many living beings are there, that many asanas are there. When I finally do a teacher training course, Chair Yoga (which is what Desk Yoga boils down to) will definitely be part of it.

Not surprisingly, BKS Iyengar, with his emphasis on precision, alignment and props, is a major inspiration, dispelling any notion that Chair Yoga equates to Easy Yoga. His student and ‘chair expert’ Eyal Shifroni wrote A Chair For Yoga which Iyengar reviewed and edited. (Sample here). In the preface he makes it clear that the advanced options are for practitioners who have at least ten years of uninterrupted yoga practice (in a rigorous form of practice, such as Iyengar). Gone are the ideas that you can rest your laurels!

Any yoga is therapeutic. For example, Ashtanga’s first series is called Yoga Chikitsa, which means yoga therapy. The point of the twisting and folding with arms and legs here and there is the noble cause of purification of the body and the spirit by the neutralization and elimination of tensions and imbalances. Lakshmi Voelker-Binder, a yoga therapist, created Lakshmi Voelker Chair Yoga™ in 1982 to enable a student with arthritis to participate in yoga classes. After six months of chair yoga, the arthritis had receded so much that the student resumed her mat yoga. 

We may or may not have arthritis or various illnesses and conditions, we may be advanced yogis or yet-to-be advanced, we may have pre-conceived ideas about props and too much ego to use them but one thing’s for sure… many, many, many of us have backache from too much lockdown sitting. Time to use the chair for your good!

Zoom Classes 

Don’t forget the class today at 4.30. Take time out to breath and stretch and flow and move. Beginners welcome. Everyone is welcome. You can book/click here. See you later. 

Magical Kapsali Yoga Retreat

Thank you for the response to last week’s mention of our magical Kapsali yoga retreat. Have a look the pictures of our retreats since 2015 here. You could also let me know what kind of yoga retreat would suit you. Do you want Ashtanga, Yin, do you want to mix it up with a walking holiday or diving? We would travel to the island on the weekend of the 11th/12th September. Fancy coming? Let me know and save the date.

Yoga in the news 

The Telegraph has: I've always avoided it, but online yoga made me see the light. The opening of this article broke my heart: ‘I’ve resisted the cult of yoga for all of my adult life... On the few occasions I’ve relented I’ve loathed it. The class where the instructor told me, marvelling, ‘You’re so inflexible.’ The unfriendliness of the yogis, nasty despite their namastes. I always felt clumsy and out of place....’

The Metro has:  In 2020 yoga uptake rose by 25%, according to a report. According to a report by ClassPass, with data from over 30,000 sites in 30 countries, ‘Lunchtime workouts have seen a 67% increase in popularity’, the most popular time to take a class is now 12pm The survey shows people have been gravitating towards HIIT training – perhaps to combat the sedentary identity of 2020.

The Health Site has: Yoga poses for migraine: How to get relief from that pounding pain. I have to admit, the models posing in the suggested postures for migraine don’t look like that have pounding pain. Have a look and see what you think.