Tag Archives: video

Release of a net-​​entangled whale leads to joyful leaps

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I ran into a video about the lib­er­a­tion of a hump­back whale ensnared in fish net­ting off the Mex­i­can Pacific coast. A group of con­ser­va­tion­ist was film­ing whales and came across this ani­mal, appear­ing to be close to death. The video shows how the peo­ple cut free the net­ting over at least an hour of patiently work­ing with the whale. In the end, the last strands were cut and the whale was free. Within a few min­utes, the group viewed a 30-​​minute dis­play of the whale breach­ing the surf, slap­ping its tail and fins, and other aquatic acrobacy as a cel­e­bra­tion of its reac­quired free­dom and, per­haps, even a ges­ture of grat­i­tude to the humans who had inter­vened in her release from bondage and death.

This video has already been seen seven mil­lion so it’s already had its turn as a viral video on the Web, so it needs no push from me into the lime­light. I still thought those leaps of ani­mal joy out of the Pacific demon­strated the sheer emo­tion of freedom.

The Great Whale Con­ser­vancy  sup­ports work to pro­tect the great whales and their habi­tat so a plug goes to them.

 

The Heart Dance –

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Have you ever visu­al­ize how blood flows through your body and returns to the heart?

Gil Hed­ley, the anatomist who has done so much to make us rethink our under­stand­ing of our bod­ies by doing the detail work of pick­ing apart corpses, has a play­ful side to him and he has put it to use in explain­ing the syn­chro­nized flow of blood from the heart out to the cap­il­lar­ies of the extrem­i­ties and back.

Gil has sev­eral other videos on YouTube,  includ­ing the now famous Fuzz Speech about fas­cia and stretch­ing, syn­the­siz­ing why we do yoga to “melt the fuzz.”  You can get more infor­ma­tion on his web­site, includ­ing his teach­ing sched­ule, and his Face­book page. If you are not among the 344,000-plus who have seen the Fuzz Speech, you should watch it and let the mes­sage sink in.

For those with more time on their hands, they can watch his entire video series, Inte­gral Anatomy, all seven hours of it, which has been free on the web for since February.

Fake it until you become it

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Social psy­chol­o­gist Amy Cuddy explains “Your body lan­guage shapes who you are”. She teaches at Har­vard Busi­ness School, which is ironic, because I find she has a lot of insight into why I find yoga so empow­er­ing — it recruits the body into empow­er­ing the self.

Amy closes her talk with a per­sonal story about her own process of empow­er­ment. Power Pos­ing: Fake It Until You Make It

Reminder about the myo-​​fascial sytem in the human body

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I chanced across this ref­er­ence, Fas­cia and Struc­tural Inte­gra­tion with Robert Schleip, who is one of the leader in the expand­ing under­stand­ing of the myo-​​fascial sys­tem in the body, and the video:

Finally, an arti­cle in ref­er­ence to a DVD that gives some links to other resources. It all just reminds me that I have some much more to inves­ti­gate about the mind-​​body connection.

I also found two resources to deal with yoga injuries: Yoga Injuries and Pre­vent Yoga Injury, all via the it’s all about yoga, baby blog of Roseanne Har­vey. There is a book called The Con­traindi­ca­tion Index for Yoga Asanas (TCIYA), which would be help­ful to any­one try­ing to make the most of a yoga prac­tice, avoid­ing the pit­falls and shar­ing its gifts with others.

BuddhaFest – June 14-​​17

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Since I am mak­ing up for a pro­longed silence and not blog­ging, there is another DC event that should be mentioned:

Bud­dhaFest – Films Talks Med­i­ta­tion Music

Brought to you by the Insight Med­i­ta­tion Com­mu­nity of Wash­ing­ton (IMCW) and Tri­cy­cle magazine.

Oh, wait. I am too late to make much of a dif­fer­ence. Prac­ti­cally all the all day passes have sold out. You may be able to get indi­vid­ual tick­ets for films or dharma talks. On Sun­day night, Krishna Das will be chant­ing a trib­ute to Ram Das, but you’d want to tick­ets in advance.

Good news on the political front

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Mind­ful­ness turns into a pol­icy option in Wash­ing­ton, thanks to Rep. Tim Ryan (D) from Ohio (and oth­ers), and there’s now a book to spread the word.

The Wash­ing­ton Post In med­i­ta­tive mind­ful­ness, Rep. Tim Ryan sees a cure for many Amer­i­can ills:

For Ryan, the raisin was the begin­ning of a trans­for­ma­tion. The retreat, con­ducted by Jon Kabat-​​Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduc­tion Clinic at the Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts Med­ical School, led Ryan on a search into how the prac­tice of mind­ful­ness — sit­ting in silence, los­ing one­self in the present moment — could be a tonic for what ails the body politic.

The book is A Mind­ful Nation: How a Sim­ple Prac­tice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Per­for­mance, and Recap­ture the Amer­i­can Spirit. Catchy title. Also see the Hays House descrip­tion.

 

A new face and name for an online resource

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I tapped into a resource that helped me under­stand my body better.

I’ve been a fan of Yoga Spirit as it pio­neer the use of online audio and webi­nars with lead­ing yoga teach­ers and other experts, like Amy Wein­traub, Leslie Kaminoff and Judy Han­son Lasater. It dis­ap­peared from the web for a while only to come back to life as part of YogaTherapyWeb.com. In Jan­u­ary, the site turned itself into Yoga U. Most con­tent requires pay­ment for down­loads, but there are a lot of free resources that can wet an appetite for the for-​​pay material.

I signed up for Tom Myers‘s two-​​session webi­nar: Fas­cial Fit­ness – An Emerg­ing Rev­o­lu­tion in Move­ment Sci­ence (Jan­u­ary 25 and Feb­ru­ary 1). It also comes with other mate­r­ial, includ­ing some videos of fas­cial fit­ness rou­tines. He wrote Anatomy Trains: Myofas­cial Merid­i­ans for Man­ual and Move­ment Ther­a­pists, 2nd edi­tion and I plan on read­ing it as soon as I get through the dozen other books piled up on my desk. That’s why I signed up for the webi­nar — I can cap­ture the essence of what Myers is teach­ing in a cou­ple of hours. The first ses­sion clar­i­fied in my mind that I am on the right track in try­ing to deal with my periph­eral neu­ropa­thy. He has an ele­gant com­pelling con­cep­tual frame­work for pars­ing the body and its inter­nal matrix, backed up by the lat­est sci­en­tific research on the role of fas­cia. In this webi­nars, he is tai­lor­ing his mes­sage specif­i­cally to yoga instruc­tors and giv­ing sug­ges­tions for opti­miz­ing sequenc­ing to improve fas­cial fitness.

This webi­nar, along with other webi­nars and inter­views, will be recorded and avail­able for pur­chase at a later date at YogaU Online.

Second week of my 40-​​day yoga challenge

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More pre­cisely, the sec­ond week is draw­ing to a close.

I missed yoga classes on Tues­day and today because of other com­mit­ments. But I did fit in a restora­tive prac­tice on those evenings. The biggest rev­e­la­tion for me was see­ing the accu­mu­la­tive pay­off of reg­u­lar prac­tice. On Sat­ur­day, in Susan Bowen’s 2/​3 vinyasa flow class, she had us do wheel pose five times. I was able to get up for each one. Even more sur­pris­ing, I did not do a pre­lim­i­nary step of going from bridge pose (Setu Bandha Sar­van­gasana)  to wheel sup­port­ing some weight on my head and then in full wheel (Urd­hva Dha­nurasana). I did a bridge in which I made sure that my legs were doing all the work of sus­tain­ing the pose, my back was arched and then I placed my hands on the mat by my ears and pushed straight up. It was a smooth move­ment. In the past, the half-​​way head on the mat mod­i­fi­ca­tion seemed to jam my neck into my shoul­der gir­dle, mak­ing it much harder to push up into full wheel. I could feel the pres­sure on my spine.

I had seen this trick done by Sadie Nar­dini prob­a­bly in a YouTube video. I had been able to do it a cou­ple of times, but then my prac­tice got com­pletely dis­rupted and I lost the strength to push up. Doing it on Sat­ur­day just showed me that I had recov­ered enough to strength and improve my spinal flex­i­bil­ity to han­dle this power move into wheel.

From vulnerability to authenticity through wholehearted living

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I’ve run into a per­son who has changed my out­look on life, but I’ve never met her per­son­ally. Her book has deeply influ­enced how I view life.

Brené Brown is a psychologist/​researcher who wrote the book The Gifts of Imper­fec­tion (Hazelden: 2010) and also has an sprawl­ing web­site and her blog Ordi­nary Courage. She first came to my atten­tion when I saw her TEDx­Hous­ton talk, which was recently picked by Huff­in­g­ton Post as one of the top 18 TED videos of 2011:

Her 20 minute talk hit some deep per­sonal scars and led me to her site and then the book. While read­ing the book, I was under­go­ing all the prob­lems with my periph­eral neu­ropa­thy, and there was an amaz­ing inter­play between my myofas­cial release ther­apy and the cen­tral con­cepts of Brown’s book. On the masseuse’s table, I had to strip down to my box­ers and bare myself to the ther­a­pist, com­mu­ni­cate my pain and numb­ness, con­vey how one type of stroke was mak­ing me feel, and trust that he would be able address some of the con­stric­tions of my tis­sues. I had to expose my phys­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­ity to be able to start healing.

Shame and numbness

On another level, I dis­cov­ered from my read­ing of Brown’s book that I felt deep cur­rents of shame and, indeed, shame may actu­ally have been one of the strongest moti­vat­ing forces in my life. Shame is a “fear of dis­con­nec­tion” that peo­ple might find out what I am really like. Shame is such a blunt instru­ment that I couldn’t use it all the time, but once it’s out, it’s hard to lock it away. One way of deal­ing with this sense of shame is to block it out by numb­ing it. Brown says you can­not numb just one emo­tion (in my case, shame), you end up block­ing the whole emo­tional spectrum.

Although doc­tors might argue oth­er­wise, my numb­ness was both emo­tional and phys­i­cal, and the deaths of my par­ents and the dis­rup­tion that those events brought to my life this year had wors­ened my periph­eral neu­ropa­thy to the point that it was threat­en­ing my well-​​being. I was grasp­ing so hard to to my per­sonal facade that I was chok­ing off parts of my body and soul. Tak­ing pain med­ica­tion was just another way of block­ing out parts of my body, when I needed to get back in touch with them.

Brown’s book, which has the sub­ti­tle of “Let Go of Who You Think You’re Sup­posed to Be and Embrace Who You Are,” does a great job of break­ing down her approach to deal­ing with life and accept­ing the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of being imper­fect, and then lays out 10 guide­posts that can help any­one fol­low her map.

Brown has a man­i­festo that I keep posted near my desk and stashed in my shoul­der bag, and it’s avail­able as a col­or­ful post­card. I am going to cite it in full because it con­veys her mes­sage bet­ter than I can:

Authen­tic­ity is a daily practice.

Choos­ing authen­tic­ity means cul­ti­vat­ing the courage to be emo­tion­ally hon­est, to set bound­aries, and to allow our­selves to be vul­ner­a­ble; exer­cis­ing the com­pas­sion that comes from know­ing that we are all made of strength and strug­gle and con­nected to each other through a lov­ing and resilient human spirit; nurturing the con­nec­tion and sense of belong­ing that can only hap­pen when we let go of what we are sup­posed to be and embrace who we are.

Authen­tic­ity demands whole­hearted liv­ing and lov­ing — even when it’s hard, even when we’re wrestling with the shame and fear of not being good enough, and espe­cially when the job is so intense that we’re afraid to let our­selves feel it.

Mind­fully prac­tic­ing authen­tic­ity dur­ing our most soul-​​searchng strug­gles is how we invite grace, joy and grat­i­tude into our lives.

Seane Corn: yoga as prayer

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Seane Corn was the focus on a Speak­ing on Faith fea­ture on Yoga: Med­i­ta­tion in Action in Sep­tem­ber last year (How I missed this, I don’t know. I sus­pect it was because I was absorbed by my injured knee). I’ve men­tion her before in the blog because of her yoga out­reach pro­gram, Off the Mat, Into the World. There is a pod­cast or you can lis­ten online, but there’s a lot more to explore that goes beyond the radio pro­gram. As a teaser, The video that fol­lows is from Yoga Journal’s Yoga from the Heart and was recorded at a con­fer­ence. Seane men­tions that she prac­tices as a prayer for her father fight­ing can­cer, and that touched me because my brother is going through the same strug­gle. I was in awe of Seane’s con­trol and pace dur­ing the Sun Salutation.


Seane Corn Demon­strates “Body Prayer” from Speak­ing of Faith on Vimeo.