Take Care of You / Therapeutic Head-Stand

This is a 60-minute hatha class focusing on the shoulders, lower back and core. We move toward a therapeutic head-stand.

Thank you for being here.

Beloved you,

One of the hardest lessons for me to learn/ know in my bones: just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should do it. As with most of the more subtle work of yoga, this lesson sounds so simple, so obvious on the skin of its surface, but to really know it required so much diving into the belly of my practice. For so many years, I thought doing the most hard, most punishing things possible was the most admirable way to live. And I pushed and punished myself like a champion (of course). There were murmurs, however, deep within the pulsing blood in my veins, however, that even though I could definitely do hard things, maybe not doing them all the time was a fuller, richer, more wholesome way to live (those words don’t quite do the feeling justice, but such is the limit of language, you know?).

Fall is the time when I really and truly re-commit to the care of my-self. It’s a fast, dry, windy time, both atmospherically and energetically. Through the lens of Ayurveda, the Indian science of wellness, I tend toward the dosha Vata (windy, flighty, dry– in body and energy), and the combination of me plus Vata Autumn can lead to too much everything, resulting in a pile of exhaustion after major burnout. (Anyone else feel this way?) Every fall, then, this opportunity to instead choose to care for myself arises. And I take it. I choose to experience exactly what I am feeling, and to do the things I have found to nourish rather than deplete myself this time of year.

We talk about that a bit in this episode. And we make some tiny movements toward a therapeutic head-stand.