Tag: yoga
Five Yoga Poses For Better Posture

Five Yoga Poses For Better Posture

By Emily Abbate, FITBIE.com (TNS)

There are loads of factors that contribute to bad posture. Maybe you work at a job where you’re doing constant repetitive motion without frequent breaks. Perhaps you’re used to carrying a bag around on one shoulder, resulting in a constant lean to the right or left side, or you’re doing the wrong workout. Or perhaps, you’re stuck at a desk job and not getting up and moving enough.

Regardless of the cause, poor posture can result in a slew of issues, including high risk of athletic injury and a restriction of lung capacity. Whatever the case may be, research shows that moving more can be the best medicine for your aching muscles and joints. Our movement of choice? Yoga.

“The regular practice of yoga asana helps create an upright posture by strengthening your core and back muscles, as well as stretching your shoulders and chest,” said Stephanie LaSpina, teacher at Y7 Studio. “Many yoga postures encourage the natural arch and elongation of your spine, directly countering the undesirable hunch in your upper back and shoulders.”

Check out LaSpina’s five yoga poses for better posture:

Wheel pose

Strengthens the back muscles while adding mobility to the spine and shoulders. By strengthening the back body, the spine is brought back into its upright natural alignment. This posture brings the spine into the opposite position of the hunched over spine, fully stretching the shoulders and chest while building strength in the back muscles.

Do it: Laying on your back, step your feet to the ground and make sure you can touch the back of your heels with your finger tips. Ensure your feet are no more than hips width apart. Place the palms of your hands down on the ground framing your ears, fingers point toward your heels. Press down into your feet and hands to rise up into your full wheel backbend.

Plank pose

Often poor posture originates from a weak core. By strengthening the core we are better able to support the lengthening of our spine and open our shoulders. Plank pose strengthens the core, glutes and shoulders.

Do it: From all fours, step your feet back so that your legs are long and straight. Your hands are placed directly under your shoulders as you press back strongly into the balls of your feet.

Cowface pose arms

Opens the chest and shoulders with an intense stretch. Relieves tightness and lengthens muscles after a long day hunched over a desk.

Do it: Sit in a comfortable seat, reach your right arm high above head. Bend your right elbow and place the palm of your hand in between your shoulder blades. Reach your left arm out to the left, bend your elbow and bring the back of your palm in between your shoulder blades. If your fingers meet, clasp your fingers together. If they do not meet, hold onto a strap with both your right and left hand to modify. Gently deepen the stretch by inching your fingers closer and closer to one another until they come to touch.

Upward facing dog

Strengthens the back muscles while stretching the shoulders, abdomen and chest. This posture helps to elongate the spine while building muscle in the back to help support good posture.

Do it: From plank pose, roll over your toes so that the tops of your feet and toes are pressing into the ground. Align hands directly under the shoulders. Press hands and tops of feet into the ground to lift legs and hips off of the ground. Lift the crown of the head up toward the sky as you relax your shoulders down your back and draw the shoulder blades toward on another.

Cat/cow

The combination of these two postures both helps to strengthen the abdomen and back while also finding mobility in the shoulders and spine.

Do it: On all fours, ensure your hands are directly under your shoulders and knees are directly under your hips. As you inhale, arch your spine, drop your belly and gaze up. As you exhale, round your spine, contract your abdomen as you gaze at your navel.

(This story originally appeared on Rodale Wellness.)

(c)2015 Fitbie.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: daveynin via Flickr

Meditate For Success

Meditate For Success

We ambitious strivers seeking guidance from fitness pros, decluttering experts, and TED talks often find the day divided in two unequal parts. Three-quarters goes to overworking. The remaining quarter is for countering the ill effects of overworking. We do the latter not necessarily to nurture our souls but to boost performance during the working hours.

You see, overworking and stress slow our productivity. Herein lies a paradox.

Relaxation, vacations, and a good night’s sleep could be seen as key to personal well-being. But gremlins have taken a wrench to our puritanical brains and put dollar values on our inner peace and repose. They are now a means to goose our output.

Consider the advice to get eight hours of sleep a night. Good sleep leaves one feeling refreshed, less depressed, less stressed. But it also has a utilitarian purpose. It boosts our performance at work. Thus, we use apps to ensure we’re maintaining eight-hour sleep periods incorporating five REM cycles.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the numbers: Sleep deprivation costs the U.S. economy $63 billion a year in lost productivity.

We seek techniques to do more per unit of time. For example, there are articles on how to “optimize” a three-day weekend. (To think, Americans used to have three-week vacations.)

Our employers are famously ungenerous with paid vacation. But many of us don’t even use the time we’re given. A study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association estimates that in 2013, Americans left 429 million paid vacation days on the table.

Why? Some said their workload is so heavy they can’t afford to get away. If they don’t complete their assignments, they may not have a job upon returning.

The travel association is now selling vacation time as a tool to raise the gross domestic product. If workers used all their available time off, the study says, U.S. business revenues would rise by $160 billion, and tax collections would rise by $21 billion.

Meditation, the great teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us, is “for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.”

But suppose it helps us better focus our attention. Wouldn’t that make us more useful worker bees? Sure.

A Google executive told Bloomberg TV that “wisdom traditions like yoga and meditation help us operate better.” He noted that the most important technology we have is the human body and brain. Yoga and meditation help us, he explained, “optimize this technology.”

Thanks to Google’s yoga program for its employees, he added, “there’s been a huge impact on both people’s productivity and culture.”

So yoga has become a get-ahead tool. Small wonder yoga teachers see participants aggressively jostling for mat space in their classes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There’s also a smartphone app that lets students follow the instructors of their choice. That way, if a star yoga teacher is not going to lead a particular class, they don’t have to waste their time on a B-lister.

What healthy habits don’t do for productivity, drugs will. Many American workers are apparently taking medications for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder solely to improve their output at work.

Taking these stimulants can cause addiction, anxiety and hallucinations, but for intense competitors, they are jet fuel. As a woman in her late 20s told The New York Times, they are “necessary for survival of the best and the smartest and highest-achieving people.”

We really can’t blame health advocates for toting up the economic benefits of more relaxed living. That’s often the only argument anyone notices anymore.

Meditation improves concentration. Heck, let’s meditate — and medicate — to better meditate. It’s the American way.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Balint Földesi via Flickr

Full Circle ‘Church’ Blessed By Millennials’ Appetite For Free-Form Spiritual Awakening

Full Circle ‘Church’ Blessed By Millennials’ Appetite For Free-Form Spiritual Awakening

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

VENICE, California — Across the street from the Rose Cafe in Venice, a bad-boy actor is shepherding a crew of millennial “nones” toward what might be called the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Part II.

The incense-and-healing-crystal-accessorized movement known as New Age flourished here in the 1960s and ’70s. No one ever wrote its obituary, but today it is diminished — many of its tenets co-opted into the broader culture, with fitness-focused yoga studios popping up on every corner and “wellness” a mainstream goal.

The Venice group is stepping in where earlier seekers left off, rejecting aspects of New Age while channeling young millennials’ approach to spirituality into a new movement — or, at least, a really good party.

On a recent Sunday, actor Andrew Keegan led a weekly ceremony called “Activ888.” Young, fresh-faced men and women in various modes of casual dress — some preppy, some with an edge — joined an aging hippie or two in a large circle on the floor.

They shared what they hoped to “activate” by being at the church known as Full Circle that day: Joy. Beauty. Not taking things personally.

“So it is,” participants said after each person spoke, an affirmation suspiciously similar to a post-prayer refrain from the TV series “Battlestar Galactica.” A young woman with a breathtaking voice played a guitar and sang a mantra.

Some have called Full Circle a religion, others a clubhouse. Founder Keegan — who’s perhaps best known for his performance opposite Heath Ledger in the 1999 movie “10 Things I Hate About You” — says it is meant to be a space for young adults to explore their spirituality and creativity, and to push back against gentrification in Venice.

But in the months since the project’s birth, steep Westside rents and insinuations that Keegan may be getting kind of culty have made it hard to make Full Circle Venice everything it would like to be.

Spiritual ground zero is familiar territory for Los Angeles. For reasons scholars have spent careers pondering, the region has spawned all sorts of religious and quasi-religious groups, often with celebrities as part of the package.

The Eastern-influenced Theosophists put down roots here in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, Aimee Semple McPherson’s evangelical Church of the Foursquare Gospel ensconced itself in Echo Park, elevating its leader to stardom (and some degree of infamy, in the wake of a possible kidnapping hoax and alleged affairs). In more recent decades, Scientology attracted John Travolta and Tom Cruise to its fold; to Kabbalah, Madonna and Demi Moore; to the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, a Beach Boy and Arianna Huffington.

Full Circle has been blessed by a demographic trend: millennials’ appetite for free-form spiritual awakening.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, in 2012 nearly a third of adults under 30 had no religious affiliation, compared with only nine percent of those 65 and older.

The “nones,” as the unaffiliated are called, don’t always reject spirituality outright.

Instead, many “seek to cultivate personal spirituality and meditation, and pick and choose among social programs that advance personal freedom and certain social causes,” said Wade Clark Roof, a professor emeritus of religion and society at UC Santa Barbara.

Full Circle, whose leaders say they reach out to “millennial and millennial-minded people,” fits the mold. It borrows from everything from alternative healing to Burning Man — with a dash of grass-roots rhetoric.

The church the group is renting is located on a prime Venice corner. Built in 1905, it housed Christian congregations for many years before a branch of the Hare Krishnas moved in. Brightly colored murals, painted by Full Circle members, adorn its facade. Its sanctuary has wood rafters and stained glass and is festooned with paper lanterns and New Age art.

Arrayed on a table by Full Circle’s front door on a recent Friday were cards advertising yoga classes, gatherings with “tonic bars,” and workshops like “Dream Awake,” an introduction to a technique called EFT Tapping, which promises to “Transform your fears in to love.”

Seated in a candle- and crystal-strewn conference room — beneath the gaze of a giant painting of Abbot Kinney — Keegan, 36, said that the idea for Full Circle came to him shortly after the Occupy movement staged a protest in Venice.

“It sent me on much more definitive idea of how to develop community (and) bring more abundance and cohesiveness,” he said, adding that when the Rose Avenue church property became available for rent, “everything lined up.”

“It’s nice to see people coming together not in a bar, not in a traditional setting, but for the great vision of something better than what exists,” he said.

The name “Full Circle” is borrowed from a communal organic farm in Ojai, California, where one co-founder grew up, but Keegan, who likes to hug guests, doesn’t see his church as an extension of hippie culture or New Age movements.

Rather, he insisted, the aim is to build a “spiritual community center” that is focused on the world outside as much as it is focused on the world within.

“There’s a lot of ‘woo woo’ in New Age. I refer to it as spiritual ego,” he said. “Even the whole guru thing that they keep associating with me. That’s the old paradigm, having someone to follow who’s more enlightened than you. That’s over.”

Activ888, the Sunday morning service, used to be called “Resonate” until the group decided it wanted to emphasize interests in sacred numerology and community improvement. “So it is” is not a borrowing from “Battlestar Galactica” but rather a nod to phrasing used in indigenous ceremonies to deliver acknowledgment and appreciation, Keegan said.

He was amused by the sci-fi connection, though.

“We’re not married to any of the language, it’s just the best of what’s come through,” he said. “Maybe we’ll shift it to ‘So say we all.’ That’s cool, too!”

Keegan himself is something of a shape-shifter. Besides working as an actor and holding recurring roles in TV shows with numbers in their titles — “Party of Five” and “7th Heaven” — he has operated a nightclub and invested in real estate. His run-ins with bouncers are chronicled by the likes of TMZ.

When Vice magazine profiled Full Circle in August, its reporters made note of celebrity-obsessed followers, a porkpie hat Keegan was wearing and the actor’s professed conversion moment — getting mugged in Venice at the same time as the Tohoku tsunami struck Japan.

A recent piece in New York magazine remarked upon how many beautiful young women frequent Full Circle, as well as Keegan’s “still very nice” physique, made famous 20 years ago in teen magazines like Tiger Beat.

Rick Swinger, who lives next door to Full Circle, complains about late-night noise and drinking.

“He’s an actor who likes to party. And he found a way to hide inside the church,” Swinger said of Keegan.

But raucousness wouldn’t necessarily disqualify Full Circle as a religious movement, said Varun Soni, dean of religious life at the University of Southern California.

“Celebration has always been a part of religion,” he said, pointing to harvest and fertility festivals of the ancient past. “In this day and age it’s a record party. A thousand years ago, it was a passion play.”

Soni, who lives in Venice, sees Full Circle as part of a spiritual trend also apparent among millennials on his campus, where one-third of the university’s interfaith council doesn’t affiliate with any organized religion.

“They’re still inspired by the big questions, but they pursue them in a personal way,” he said.

Keegan and his associates reject the cult label and insist that they’re doing serious work. They love the thought of being standard-bearers for an updated brand of ecstatic California spirituality.

“The generational aspect is very important,” said Daniel Paul, Full Circle’s operations manager. “We’re doing something that borrows from what our parents taught us but also innovates in a significant way.” Paul, 36, grew up visiting The Esalen Institute in Big Sur but said that his true spiritual awakening occurred more recently at Burning Man.

He sees Full Circle as a guardian of the bohemian Venice that’s under assault by an influx of companies such as Google, whose gleaming new offices are a stone’s throw away.

Working from such a prime location to “keep Venice weird” means trying to keep up with escalating rents. A new owner bought the church building at auction in August for $4,462,500. Shortly after, Full Circle’s rent ballooned by 50 percent.

“It almost took us out,” Keegan said. He has been spending his own money to help pay bills.

Paul, who joined Full Circle three months ago, said he was trying to professionalize the group’s business practices so that it could stay in operation.

Participants already pay for classes and events they attend at the church. Full Circle may soon add a membership program. A gallery will open in April. The group sells T-shirts, elixirs, and rents out its space. It is toying with the idea of offering wellness services — “sound and light healing, those kinds of things,” Keegan said.

During Activ888, Paul attempted some informal market research.

“What can this place do for you?” he asked the people in the circle. “Not from your intellect. From your feelings.”

One woman asked for a Goddess Group. Another wanted a circle for kids. A third made a long-winded request for what sounded like a bulletin board for job postings. Then everyone lay down under blankets and closed their eyes as visiting sound artist Torkom Ji played music based on 432 hertz, a frequency said to have healing powers because of a special resonance with the human body.

Paul quietly slipped out of the room. He had to start pulling things together for a record release party that afternoon for 22-year-old “acoustic rock R&B hip-hop” artist Drew Chadwick, once a contestant on “The X Factor,” with a band called Emblem3.

It was the kind of potentially money-making enterprise Full Circle hopes will be its lifeline. A line of teenage girls had already started queuing up around the corner.

Photo: Allen J. Schaben via Los Angeles Times/TNS

Federal Board OKs Release Of ‘Forever Prisoner’ Who Learned Yoga At Guantanamo

Federal Board OKs Release Of ‘Forever Prisoner’ Who Learned Yoga At Guantanamo

By Carol Rosenberg, The Miami Herald

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — A government parole board Wednesday cleared for eventual release a yoga-practicing prisoner who was brought to Guantanamo as a Taliban footsoldier and wants to leave this prison for a fresh start in a third country rather than his native Yemen.

“Forever prisoner” Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani, 35, told representatives of six U.S. government agencies on April 8 that he had read the biographies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama at Guantanamo and aspired to live “an ordinary life.”

Bihani has been held without charges since Dec. 30, 2001, when Afghan allies brought him to U.S. forces with wounds from a prisoner-of-war uprising.

His lawyer announced that he had been cleared for release and, although the Pentagon did not immediately announce the board decision, a spokesman agreed.

“I can confirm that Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani, currently held as a law of war detainee, was recently recommended for transfer as soon as practicable, by the interagency Periodic Review Board,” said Army Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a Defense Department spokesman.

The Yemeni’s new designation as eligible for release means that of Guantanamo prison’s 154 captives, 43 are now considered indefinite detainees and 78 could leave once the State Department negotiates transfer deals. The rest include three convicted war criminals and other captives either awaiting trial or considered possible tribunal candidates.

Bihani is the third so-called “forever prisoner” whose status was changed by the Periodic Review Board that President Barack Obama ordered set up and has so far heard from six captives. The board chose to continue holding another Yemeni indefinitely and has yet to rule in two other cases.

Bihani’s lawyer and a military officer assigned to his case described him to the board as a soldier who was the rank equivalent of a U.S. Army private. They said he had become fed up with life on the fringes of jihad, and described him as a sickly man with unchecked diabetes who finds escape on the cellblocks in yoga.

An intelligence assessment compiled for the board described Bihani as a sometime prison camp troublemaker, who was “almost certainly” a trained former member of al-Qaida whose brothers are former Afghan jihadists.

His attorney, Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, said “the security and other agencies on the board rightly determined that his continued detention of more than 12 years is unnecessary.”

She called him “an assistant cook 12 years ago for a Taliban-affiliated group that no longer exists” who is “seriously ill.”

Kebriaei said the Yemeni would prefer “resettlement in a third country, where he may begin a new life. He would also accept repatriation to Yemen.”

AFP Photo/Chantal Valery