trees and knees

Sorry for the hiatus in posts! It has been a hectic couple of weeks as the bf was completing his studying and I was playing housewife :) I can’t say it will be better with summer coming up but I hope to be a bit more consistent with my updates. I have so many ideas for posts (really!) but I just HAD to write another one about yoga.

Tree or Vrksasana is a challenging balance pose with several variations. You stand on one leg while the other leg is with the foot on your standing leg’s inner thigh or calf or in half lotus. Your arms can be in prayer in front of the heart, above your head or outstretched, hands in yoga mudra. The variation that you take is dependent on several factors-your stage of development in that pose, how flexible your hips are, and also just how balanced you are feeling that day. Some days, no matter how hard I try, I cannot balance while my foot is on my upper thigh. However, the one thing I never do is place my foot on my standing knee.

For some reason, tree pose is used in ads to depict yoga, balance, peacefulness, or health of some sort. Unfortunately and frustratingly, I have seen countless pictures in advertisements AND on fitness(!) magazines and sites that display pictures of women in a tree pose with their foot on their knee. My most recent issue of Shape (which I love) had an advertisement with a pretty woman in a tube top swimsuit in a horribly incorrect tree pose. Looking up the words “tree” “pose” “yoga” in Google Images returns several pictures where tree pose is being shown in incorrect form on respectable sites including Fitsugar.com, chopra.com, and theholisticcare.com. There is also a disturbing one of these children at camp where many are doing the pose with their foot on their knees.

The benefits of yoga are wide and varied but a pose must be done correctly. Otherwise, your alignment is off and there is much pain and little gain. When the instructor tells you to get into tree pose, the gym mentality sometimes seeps in and you may think, “Oh well, I can’t get my foot all the way up my thigh, so I’ll put it as high as I can-on my knee-even though the instructor said not to.” When you place your foot on your knee, you are defeating the purpose of yoga in two ways. First and foremost, you are not recognizing, understanding, and respecting your limitations. You didn’t learn how to shoot a 3-pointer in one day, so don’t expect to learn a pose in one day. In basketball, we can only do so much to put the ball into the hoop, but unfortunately, in the case of yoga, we sometimes think we can coax the body into position-leading to a second kind of harm: physical harm. In tree pose, your standing leg already has your entire body weight on it and is trying to keep you upright; when your foot is on your knee, you are not only placing additional weight onto the standing knee but you are putting sideways pressure on it! This pushes your knees in an unnatural position which can cause you to become even more unbalanced. To compensate, you may even lock your knee to try to ensure that you stay standing. You may think that all of these factors are no big deal if you do it once in a while or until you work-up to placing your foot onto your thigh but in reality, you are stressing your knee, as if our knees don’t get abused enough. Please please respect your body, listen to your instructor, and protect your knees.

So until next time,
tree safely

a yogic state of mind

Well, I wasn’t lying when I said that there will be more yoga entries on this blog. Since writing the previous entry, the connection of the mind and yoga has been prevalent in conversations and in my practice and I thought it would be appropriate for me to touch upon the mind and yoga relationship.

Many Westerners, me included, are first exposed to yoga through their gym or a physical fitness class at school. After we get past the idea that yoga is simply stretching, we see it as a rigorous physical exercise-after all, we do practice it in a gym. However, perfecting the physical practice is not the ultimate purpose of yoga. Yoga is not practiced so that we can develop extraordinary flexibility and fold into a pretzel shape or gain massive core strength to balance into crow pose, then a tripod headstand and then lower ourselves in slow motion into chataranga. Although yogis can do amazing things with their bodies, those movements are only a means to the ultimate goal(for lack of a better word) - achieving a clearer mind or state of consciousness. A dumbed down explanation of it is that yoga is a moving meditation pairing physical movements with proper breathing to achieve clarity of the mind and thus strengthening the awareness between mind and body and universe.

Unfortunately, people's perception of yoga as strictly a physical exercise does perpetuate if individuals are never exposed to instructors who speak about yoga as a holistic practice or they choose to ignore their hippie instructor or perhaps they never even hear their instructor because they are too busy trying to stick every pose while checking themselves out in the mirror. The gym mentality is a strong and ugly beast that is bolstered by the American emphasis on competition. Admit it-there have been times in your practice where you want to be more flexible, more balanced, more focused and ironically, more yogic than the guy or girl next to you. The first step is identifying these instances and the next step is to shift your mentality.

I wanted to touch briefly on this topic tonight because I wanted to plant the seed that the practice of yoga is not actually fully yoga until you recognize the mind element of it. Maybe this will provide you with the revelation you have been looking for to elevate your practice or perhaps it is a stepping stone to your understanding of yoga. Either way, I think this awareness can at the very least, help you start respecting the practice as a whole. So next time, don’t roll your eyes when your instructor spends time breaking down ujjayi breath, instead, let it empower your practice and take your mind and body further.


Until next time,
breathe deeply & practice clearly

balance through yoga

Whew-what a busy month it’s been! Socially, it feels like people are coming out of the woodworks, especially this past week because my cousin was in town. At work, I’ve been putting in some extended hours for a huge project that had its final push for a deliverable this Wednesday. Physically, I have been getting up at 5:45 every weekday to either go to a boot camp or to get to work. Needless to say, I am spent and am looking forward to a long weekend that is starting right now as I take a bus into NYC and then in NJ where I will be celebrating my brother and friend’s graduations and many cousins’ birthdays!

When my life gets hectic, sleep, then exercise, and then mindful eating habits fall by the wayside-creating a horrible mind.body imbalance during a time when I could use it the most. Luckily, weeks like this are more of an exception than the rule. My previous job, as a consultant, required consistently longer hours week-in and week-out. It was in the “Bull Pen” that I gained my “Freshman 15”-snacking on nuts, devouring chocolate, eating late dinners from the Grand Central market and gulping 11PM iced double espressos with a shot of chocolate. It would have been a quick downward spiral into obesity, depression, and general overall poor health if it weren’t for one factor-yoga.

Now how can I attribute my current lifestyle and beliefs to one single thing? To my fellow yogis, you will agree with me when I say that yoga is more than what meets the eye and also its benefits are in the eyes of the yogi or yogini. When I was first introduced to yoga, I saw it as a reason to get out of the office, spend some time with co-workers, and get some “exercise.” I don’t remember my exact opinion of yoga before, but I’m pretty sure I saw it as a frou frou “workout” that was a bunch of stretching and then allowed you to sleep at the end it. HAHA, man was I ever wrong! I remember one of the first times I felt that yoga was an actual workout. I was in triangle, stretching my right hand up and feeling every tendon in my upper arm fidgeting. That was an awesome sensation and something I look back on often to remind myself the surprises that yoga holds.

For those who know me, I have become a huge advocate of yoga (and I believe rightfully so!) I believe that my growing awareness of the mind and body (the basis of this blog) can be attributed to my yoga practice and the people I have met that have influenced my practice. Each and every time I get on the mat to practice, I encounter unbelievable challenges-both physically and mentally. I spread the word because I want those that I care about to not only feel all their arm tendons but above that, I also want them to experience the awareness that comes with yoga. And now my blog is just another avenue for me to shout on the top of the virtual rooftops my love for it:)

I will not write any further about this topic since I could go on for hours about all the different aspects of it. Don’t worry though! This mind.body exercise will be featured often and proudly on Potluck Orchard. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on yoga -how it’s affected your life, your favorite pose, your most challenging pose, your introduction into it, etc. If you have not tried yoga yet, I encourage you to go out there and take a class at your gym or a local studio-actually take 10 since that is about how many it takes to start understanding it more deeply-then come back and tell me about it!

Until next time,
breathe deeply and pose