One of the hardest things in this life is to be honest with yourself. The first reaction when I hear this phrase is to be in a state of complete denial. “I am realistic,” I’ll say to myself. “I know what I weigh, I am happy to list my development points if asked in a job interview and my insurance company knows I am a social smoker.“ And…
The below text is from yesterday morning, something I wrote straight after the yoga class I had taken. It was one of those moments when the right words to express what had until then been just a slightly uncomfortable feeling came to me and demanded to be written down straight away. So I sat down and typed everything on my phone, in the fear that I would lose…
Bad days happen to all of us. Sometimes you just know the day is not going to be the best one straight after waking up. Sometimes a bad day creeps up on you slowly, starting with an innocent coffee spill, followed by signal failure in the tube and the realisation the keys were left at home… When things start going wrong it can feel like you are watching…
Some of you might already have seen the video starring the international yoga teacher Briohny Smith did for the US fitness chain Equinox some six years ago. At the time the clip caused quite an uproar (mainly in the US, not sure if anybody in Europe cared…) as some considered it to be portraying yoga in an overtly sexual way, not representing the “true spirit” of the practise…
“Patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, difficulty, or annoyance without getting angry or upset.” Patience can mean different things to us, and its definition can also vary depending on the situation. Usually patience has an underlying realisation that we want, need – or lack – more self-control in situation we face. Here are few thoughts on how to map where we stand on this issue and…
Yoga can be very beneficial during pregnancy for several reasons. In addition to the “general” (in the absence of a better word…) benefits I talked about earlier here, here’s a few pregnancy specific points that are interesting: An asana practise can be very grounding both physically and emotionally: It can literally improve balance as the centre of gravity of the body shifts during pregnancy. It also offers hightened…
This post was first published in HappyGirlYoga. Lue suomalainen versio teksistä tästä. No matter how busy we are, there are several ways to practice self-care everyday., These are the moments we put ourselves first. It’s not necessarily about getting a mani-pedi ahead of a an event, or having time for a cup of coffee. In addition to taking care of our basic needs, we also need to decompress…
Breathing. Natural, pretty essential and still so many ways of doing it. Many of us tend to breath with our chest only, i.e. only using the top part of our lungs. Yet, the power of the belly breath is far greater than we realise and deep breath works on many levels: it can bring almost instantenous stress relief, improves oxygen intake (surprise, surprise) and helps to detoxify your…
Last week I wrote a piece about what yoga is (or can be.) I promised a follow up post on the benefits as well so here we go. You will not see flexibility on the list because it seems to be part of any other list of benefits/yoga discussion and I wanted to give space to all the other good stuff. Before anything we have to do a…