For Christine...

Here are some of the postures we do to warm up in prenatal yoga class.

They are also postures that women often find useful during labor.

Here are some pictures: so you can show your partners how to support you better or just so you can remember them.

Seated Pelvic Circles

Sit in a cross-leg position with the hands on the knees. Move the torso from the hips in as large and smooth a circle as possible. Repeat on both sides.

You can also do this posture from an all-fours position.

Cat stretches

Begin on your hands and knees in a tabletop position. Your back should be flat with your hands directly below your shoulders and your knees below your hips.

Exhale and round your back into a big C curve toward the ceiling like a cat (1). Hug your baby tight with your abdominal muscles by imagining that you’re pulling your belly button toward your spine. Put your chin toward your chest.

Inhale back to the neutral position (1) or for a bit of a deeper stretch, lift the heart and hips (without compressing through your low back.)

Another variation of this all fours stretch is Tigress. Curve through the SIDE of your torso: Take your gaze over your left shoulder as you take your hips to the left (creating a stretch in the RIGHT side of the body.) Sway from side to side.

Superwoman stretch

Kneel on the floor in tabletop posture, knees below the hips, hands below the shoulders and gaze between your hands.
Inhale and extend your right arm and left leg so that your outreached limbs and back form a parallel line to the floor (2). Flex your foot and don’t sway your lower back. Exhale and return to original position. Inhale and repeat with left arm and right leg.

Hope this helps a bit, dear mamas.

A yoga practice for breast health

Congratulations for taking such good care of your body and mind. Just being proactive about your health tells your body that you care for it, and this will support it in its quest for good health!

Start your practice with some warming up, especially for the shoulders. And/OR You might prefer to just do a few sun salutations with focus on the shoulders and chest.

Do something like these arm circles for several cycles of breaths. Try them in both directions: the one that comes naturally to you, and then the other way too.

Practice a few standing postures that you find powerful and warming. Something like these ones. Do one side first, holding each postures for, say, five breaths, and then return to the top of your mat, standing, and observing the effects of the postures. Repeat on the other side.

Once your body feels warm and ready, start to open up the shoulders and front of the chest, letting the blood move into the tissue in and around the breasts and armpits.

Here are 5 shoulder openers that would contribute to a healthy/open chest area. Choose just one or two, or do them all! If you do a posture on one side, as always, practice it with the other side for the same duration. You can hold these for 5 breaths each, or longer.

Now that your body is feeling open and the blood is going, practice an inversion (or several) to let all this fresh blood nourish the glands around the chest, neck that work to keep us radiantly healthy. Try to feel the body's fluids getting to places that they don't normally get to. Hold these postures longer than the others, if you like. Especially the legs-up-the-wall one. It's fun!

Enjoy the feeling of fluid circulation, unobstructed breath deep in your lungs, and the let yourself release into Savasana.

* If you are interested in looking at the energy associated with this part of the body, we are dealing with the fourth energy centre: The Heart. If you like to use visualizations in your practice, the colour associated with the heart is GREEN.
The breasts are the part of the body that deal most with nurturing, love, and compassion, so be sure to practice with these qualities in mind/heart:) Do your practice with love and compassion.

Warm greetings yogis and friends,

I am happily home, and nostalgic, and refreshed, and overwhelmed, and changed, and peaceful from the travels I've had the deep and affecting pleasure of enjoying these past few weeks. I've missed the sangha (spiritual community-you!) of home, but am returning filled up with the borrowed stuff of other sweet sanghas.

First. I love Thailand. We should all go together on a giant yoga pilgrimage. Can we?

Arriving in Bangkok was sweet. The trip was long, but I was excited to be there, so any traces of tired disappeared immediately. I had slightly prepared myself not to like Bangkok for its bigness, its busy-ness, its chaos, and its stinkiness, cause i'm not a huge fan of any of those, but none were present. Except for the bigness, and the busy-ness. Oh and a bit of the chaos. And it was a bit stinky, but its powerful and sacred shakti far outweighed any of this. I was struck quickly by the openness of people instead. I was struck by the sacred spaces, some sort of hidden, and some sort of towering, right in the middle of the thick of things. A temple ground, right off the main drag, close to where I was staying. Monks. Roosters. Best. Thai. Food. Ever. And then sky scrapers. And then nuns. And then traffic. And thai insence wafting through the streets, calling us to prayer. The paradoxes were unbelievable, but also essential. They were what made these people able to move through the chaos with such grace, I bet.

One morning, as all the rush hour traffic drove relentlessly past, a woman on her way to work stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, faced one of the nearby temples, put her hands gracefully together, and then knelt down, placing her forehead to the cement, bowing down humbly to her god. And then got back up, filled up, and carried on to work in her business woman suit.

Regardless of all of the strangeness and the paradoxes (or maybe because of them) I felt instantly at home in Bangkok. At home, safe, taken care of, at ease. As I think i've said, I've had more difficult trips to the grocery store than I did into Bangkok and thankfully, the ease would follow me through the rest of the trip.

My first day there, I went for a walk in the morning and stumbled upon some delicious, rich thai coffee. There was a quote on the wall of a coffee shop later in the trip that described the thai and laos coffee perfectly. I don't remember which guy said the quote, but I'm pretty sure he was drinking this stuff when he said it:

"Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love."

So the coffee became one of my passions (obsessions) while I was there, and the other one was the fruit shakes, which are simply fruit blended with ice. For the most part, we were finding them for about twenty baht (or less than a dollar) which was good, because on many days, I had about five of them. It was mango season, and the insides of the mangoes were the very same saffron as the monks' robes.

Very near to where I was staying was a pretty spectacular temple ground. It opened up onto Rambuttri (our street) and another big main drag. But inside, was a quiet market, a tiny restaurant called Mama's (my friend Darren's favourite Thai food) make-shift-fully set up, and a beautiful temple ground complete with some kind of gigantic, holy tree, where between the two of us, we made daily offerings. It was a bit of a ritual, if rituals can be made that quickly. I love that tree. (It was my first love, before the coffee or the mango shakes, and it was at first sight.)

Imagine how many prayers this tree has heard?

So, having met Bangkok, and found out about thai coffee, and visited an insane weekend market that was too big in which to even get orientation, we moved on to Laos via overnight train. The train was air conditioned and there were sleepers in our class (which was decidedly second and felt an awful lot like first. This is called flash-packing, i've learned. Back-packing is when you choose the wooden benches on the trains to sleep on. Flash-packing usually involves getting to similar destinations, but a lot more high maintenance and fancy. This would not be the end of my flash-packing. Many rooms with air conditioning were to be had.

So we crossed the Laos-Thai border, via the Friendship bridge. Getting Laos visas took about three seconds and then they were all, 'welcome to Laos.' The US could learn some lessons from these guys. I'm not going to go into the details of getting back into the states after this trip, but i will say that it was not so friendly, and certainly not so quick.

So I arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos via tuk tuk with Lao locals, where we learned the salutatatory words we would need on our way from an old Lao lady with a very kind and patient spirit. Lao is cute.

I was charmed by the Lao people instantly. They were quieter and kind of almost shy compared to the Thais, but still filled with a simliar quiet grace that was never missing from any of the people on this trip. Vientiane itself sits on the side of the Mekong River and on the other side of the river is Thailand, which you can still see. Vientiane (like the other places I visited in Laos) was colonised by the French in the 1900's and they left a European imprint on much of the architecture and food. Look at the photo of the door to the guesthouse below. Pretty, hey?

We stayed at a nice guesthouse which was very close to-just down the street from- where everything happens (which isn't so much. It's a humble city, Vientiane.) A night-market (tiny compared to what we would see later) gets set up along the Mekong, and restaurants serve Lao food and beer Lao along the Mekong at night. The twinkling lights are charming. First taste of mosquitoes, less so. (Especially with my Malaria fear still intact.)

We rented a motorbike one day and headed off to the Buddha park, which was one of my favourite things of this trip. Majestic, gigantic (the picture of the lounging buddha below has a tiny me in the picture to demonstrate the degree of gigantic-ness), ancient Buddhas as well as statues of many Hindu Gods (that's Hanuman, the monkey god below) are all gathered into one park and you can walk through and get a good look and then walk up into one of the monuments and get a sky view of all of it. It was pretty amazing. We met some monks and asked them if we could take their picture. And then they handed us their camera and asked if we would take pictures with them for them too. After that, we couldn't shake them (I wouldn't have wanted to; they were cute), and they were our permanent companions the rest of the afternoon in the park, graciously showing us all the sights, and hamming it up for many photos opportunities. The pictures of me and the monks were lost with Darren's camera (but a photographer took some too, for his magazine, and will send them to me by email at some point) but here's one of the boys:

The view from the top was humbling, and inspiring, and to honour all of this, a metta meditation (loving kindness) was done. Is there possibly a better venue for this Buddhist tradition? If yes, could you tell me where it is?

From Vientiane, we went by bus (not flash-packing) to Vang Vieng, a bit of a back-packers town with tvs blaring reruns of Friends epidsodes (for real) and giant, but still soft and lush mountains in the close background, with low-lying clouds nestled into their sides. Rented bikes one day and went for a 7km bike ride to some nearby caves where we had two little boys as our tour guides. They had a half-working flashlight to lead us just deep enough into the caves to see an alter to the Buddha, and then we came back out, headed in the thick heat to a pretty lagoon where we swung off a rope into the water, rich with minerals.

The lagoon was a saving grace that day, and there is no doubt in my mind that its waters were holy. Afterward, we returned to town where we were fed delicious Lao food (similar to Thai food, but not quite as wonderful) by the road side and shot glasses filled with Lao Lao (a whiskey with 'strange' 'herbs' marinating in it.) I don't recommend big amounts of this, but I had to try it. I'm polite. And it was a gift...

Next, was Luang Prabang, the old capital of Laos. This town is rich with temples and monuments and the town itself is built around a beautiful temple high in the sky. You can climb (a lot) of stairs to get to the top and see a pretty amazing view of the surrounding area.

This is the Buddhist shrine at the temple at the top of the stairs. (I put down the circle of marigolds.)

Luang Prabang is also known for its large numbers of monks. If you get up early enough, you can participate in (or watch) the giving of alms, where the monks come through the town and receive offerings from the people there. It's really a beautiful ritual, where the streets are lined with people waiting to offer rice and other food, and the monks move through slowly and quietly, gracefully receiving the offerings.

Spent a few more days there, visiting a waterfall, being sprayed, squirted and dumped on with water- constantly- as part of the Songkran (new year) festivities, and enjoying the occasional Beer Lao, before heading to Chiang Mai, where I took it easy: Enjoying their famous massages (daily), petting elephants (the usual), a yoga class, and back to Thai food.

And then back to Bangkok...

And then back to Winnipeg... refreshed, soothed, and hopeful for all the beauty and wonder and health that this new-new year certainly holds for us!

May we all be well, and peaceful, and at ease.

Hey yogis,

As you may know, Autumn equinox is nearly upon us. The season changes are such a nice quarterly marker to clean the slate. It is a time to let go of the old and make space for the new.
This equinox happens to fall precisely on the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. The translation of the name Yom Kippur is literally 'Day of Atonement.'
Which begins to describe what Yom Kippur is all about. Since I'm not Jewish, I won't claim to know all the hard-fast rules of this holiday, but I would love to borrow a few of them to incorporate into our practice of cleaning the slate.

The day (or days) of atonement are days meant for repenting for our sins. To make amends. To make things right, where this is possible. In the Jewish faith, it refers to repenting for sins against God, but for our purposes, let's just repent for our sins in general.

Ask yourself these questions:

• How have my actions caused suffering for me?
• How have my actions caused suffering for others?
• Can I make amends for any of these? If so, how will I do this?

As for the other suffering that you feel you've caused...

• Have you learned from it in any way? Think of these actions as an opportunity to learn about yourself. Why have you acted the way that you have? Are you ready to be done with some of this stuff? How has this affected the way you plan to treat yourself and others in the future?

The practice...

As for your practice for this Autumn Equinox, after you have thought about these ideas, perhaps you'd like to use your asana practice to clear the slate.
(In my little world, we are planning to do this with the 108 sun salutation practice.)
If you would like to join us in doing this, then please do, wherever your little world may be!
If 108 isn't going to happen, but you would like to clean the slate in some way, choose a number that's a multiple of 12. (12, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84, 96, 108)
These numbers are auspicious and sacred, and have been used for important stuff for many many many years. You can do all sun salutation a or you can do five a and then one b, five a and then one b. Sun salutation b helps to keep the heat high in the body... good for purification.

As you move through your practice, focus on forgiveness. Feel yourself being forgiven (especially by you, who is probably the hardest on you of all!) The heart-opening parts (especially upward dog) of the sun salutations are especially conducive to forgiveness. Feel that space opening up.

After your sun salutations, choose to practice a few postures that you feel are especially detoxifying. Backbends, twists, inversions (like shoulderstand). Seal your practice in with a nice long forward bend.
Then savasana (of course.)

If you would like to do a meditation to honour this change, here is a nice idea:

There is a ritual in the holiday of Yom Kippur where you walk near a lake or a river and empty the contents of your pockets into it, symbolising the release of whatever you have been holding onto.
For your practice, maybe you would like to do this. Write down on a piece of paper the ills you have caused this past season. Walk to a body of water. Release the paper into the water and let it be washed away.
Or you can use this in a mediation practice. As you lay in savasana or sit afterward, imagine all the sins that you have acted this season manifesting into little pieces or rocks and visualize placing them in your pockets. Visualized the most beautiful, cleansing body of water you can see. Watch yourself throw these little bits of regret into the water. Watch as the water swallows them up or the waves wash them away.
As you finish this practice, feel lighter and more free than you did when you began. Feel still imperfect, but much more able to act without causing suffering. Imagine what a beautiful next four months you will enjoy!

So your practice will be something like this:

• Take a few moments to focus on the suffering you have caused yourself and others. Set the intention to release it.
• Clean the slate with x number of sun salutes.

(Feel the forgiveness in the backbends and the humility of your imperfection in the forward bends.)

• Backbend(s) (whatever version feels challenging, but comfortable to your body today)
• Seated twist (to clear out the old)
• Shoulderstand (15 breaths)
• Seated forward bend (15 breaths)
• Savasana
• Meditation (if you feel so inspired)

Happy Autumn my sweet friends! May you all be happy and healthy and peaceful and free from suffering.

p.s. Oh yeah... and it's customary to wear white on the holiday, which symbolizes purity and calls to mind the promise that our sins shall be made as "white as snow."

p.p.s. and... the end of yom kippur marks the end of the year and thus the beginning of a new one! Happy new year! How will you celebrate this? Brie? Wine for breakfast?