Mindful Yoga Classes Mondays 2:30 at Carrboro Yoga

Join me at Carrboro Yoga Company https://carolinayogacompany.com/carrboro/ starting March 4th 2018 in this mindful practice together that promotes great insights to your body and mind connection to turn reactivity to compassionate and balanced responses to the sensations in your body and mind. This class targets Myofascial Meridians in your body encouraging increased flexibility, strength, balance, and sense of well being.

What is Yoga Therapy?

https://yogatherapy.health/

The mission of yoga therapy is to adapt the practices of yoga to an individual’s health needs. Yoga therapy is designed to help empower the individual to progress toward greater health and well-being.

In yoga therapy, an individual meets with a yoga therapist with experience in designing a customized yoga practice for individuals with one or more health challenges that includes such things as yoga postures, meditation and breathing techniques to suit an individual’s desired needs. Each session is designed based on the individual’s abilities, goals and needs to help progress toward improved health and well-being. 

No previous yoga experience is required. The individual learns to explore the connections between the mind and body, and may realize benefits in breathing, flexibility, balance, strength, and the ability to decrease reactivity and better manage life circumstances.

Yoga therapy is done on a one to one basis or in a small group of individuals with like conditions and needs, e.g., a physical condition such as lung, heart or kidney disease, diabetes, chronic pain, depression, or anxiety. Yoga techniques are used to support the individual’s improved awareness to promote less reactivity and obtain tools to support relief of symptoms and/or to improve one’s function in the activities of daily living.

In yoga therapy, the individual client’s needs are the focus rather than teaching yoga methodology or a particular pose. The yoga therapist, through the use of their trained skills, develops a plan with the client and the yoga session or sessions unfold from there. Each yoga therapist understands why the client has come for the yoga therapy session and together with the client, a plan is developed to support the client’s needs.

Knowing what is safe and actually being able to teach it is not the same! Choose wisely.

Yoga can be very good for healthy aging. For example those living with Osteoporosis. Yoga can promote balance, decreased tension in the body, repatterning of risky social posture and movements that are risky to those living with the silent disease of osteoporosis. But there are some yoga poses and activities that are risky for students living with Osteoporosis, example loaded spinal flexion. Therefore, yoga teachers must be educated on what poses and movements to avoid or modify for these participants.

I have been working with and training yoga teachers for many years about how to teach to seniors. But educating is not enough. It is not easy to apply this knowledge! It takes a lot of practice and deeper critical reasoning because of all the poses and variations there are in asana (yoga poses). Many teacher training programs in the US teach to the pose and not to the purpose of the pose and how to modify it to anybody (I mean Any Body!).

Choose your yoga teacher carefully. The practice of yoga can cultivate this wonderful wisdom and freedom for students. One of these freedoms is the understanding of the patterns in my body and mind that do not support health and happiness. For those with Osteoporosis sitting on the floor with a flexed spine is risky, even more so when we add a twist.

There is a lot of inaccurate info on the internet. I just did a search for yoga and Osteoporosis images and there is a posted for the top 10 poses and MANY are contraindicated for osteoporosis mainly because the matority of people performing the poses do so with spinal flexion, example revolved triangle pose. The flexible model can do the pose, but not the majority of the students. Some of this is due to the students skeletal variation and some due to the students elasticity. It is better to offer a pose that does not load the spine and build the awareness of the spine.

Here is a link to a recent article from the Mayo Clinic about yoga and Osteoporosis. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)30940-6/abstract

Hope you can attend one of my private or group sessions and learn more.

Kindly,

SAM

sam@dogwoodstudioyoga.com

Tending Grief’s Garden: Finding Hope in Loss A Gentle Yoga and Journaling Retreat

April 6th, 2019. Dogwood Studio. For more information and to register:

http://mitziquint.com/events

Finding Your Balance, Catching Your Breath!

A Gentle YOGA and JOURNALING Retreat for Moving Through Loss

September 22nd, 9am to 4pm, 
Dogwood Studio, Chapel
To Register: 
Mitzi Quint, LCSW mquint@mitziquint.com
or SAM Sather, C-IAYT sam@dogwoodstudioyoga.com

Functional Alignment: Yoga for Your Body! 4 Class series, Sundays in August

Come to this series to learn where is the most common skeletal variation in each of the primary poses in yoga and then how to test this in your body to apply in your yoga practice or teaching of yoga.

Each 2-hour session includes: presentation, discussion, practicum and a gentle yoga class.

SESSIONS

• Session 1: Functional Alignment vs. Visual Alignment
• Session 2: Skeletal Variation and the 7 Archetypal Yoga Pose
• Session 3: Working with connective tissue tensile vs. habitual tension sensation in the body
• Session 4: Finding the target area and applying functional alignment

Location: UNC Wellness Center, Chapel Hill, NC 

$ 1 6 0  M E M B E R S ,  $ 2 0 0  N O N - M E M B E R S  /

I N D I V I D U A L C L A S S E S : $ 4 8 M E M B E R S , $ 5 8  N O N - M E M B E R S

#3 Fundamentals of YIN YOGA Series, August 6, 13, 20, 7:30pm CYCo

At Carolina Yoga Company, CYCo (Carrboro Location) join me for this three-part series exploring the fundamentals of Yin Yoga. Each session will include discussion about the principles of Yin, a practice to apply the information, and end with a Yin practice. While Yin yoga is not the same as restorative yoga, it does have some restorative characteristics, and can be more or less intense depending on the approach. Modifications will be offered to make the practice suitable to all yogis. Each class will:

• incorporate floor postures that are both strengthening (yang) and deep tissue stretches (yin), promoting a balanced body
• practice the mapping of sensation in the mind and body to our responses, and developing tools to replace reactivity with the tools of the mind and body
• explore meditation and breathing techniques to promote both inner and outer alignment to explore a healthy edge that targets the body’s energy centers.

Questions about signing up: info@carrboroyoga.com

Read more at http://carolinayogacompany.com/carrboro/series and scroll down to find the Yin Series.