in January this year, I participated in a course called Buff Bones, a training that includes exercises that are good for my bones. Having completed the basic training, I have now qualified as a Buff Bones instructor. This means I can lead students who want to improve or maintain their bone health through this methodical movement system of body conditioning.
Hip replacement surgery is a daunting prospect for anyone. Fortunately, the first suggestion of the surgical option usually comes well in advance of the need for the actual operation. You have time to get used to the idea. Nevertheless, a visit to the orthopaedic surgeon starts to shape your thinking towards the inevitable. This is especially true when levels of pain and physical limitations are increasing.
If, like me, you try to find more natural ways, of dealing with health issues, then surgical intervention can seem scary in the extreme. Now that I’m five years on the other side of double hip surgery, I can say that your hip replacement surgery may give you your life back. I’m thankful to modern technology performed by a highly skilled surgeon.
Bones represent getting down to basics. We might talk about the bones of a story. Diving deeper we say, I knew it in my bones. When Estes features bones in her stories, they represent the stripping away of the outer self – of the persona, or social mask – in order to contact one’s essence.
Where do people get their ideas? Often through social media. These days, Instagram and Facebook carry much responsibility for publishing impossibly beautiful and youthful images of people doing yoga. Discouraging to anyone who is trepidatious about taking up yoga in the first place.
One of the things we do well as a group of women is act as committed listeners to each other’s life stories. There’s nothing like ‘being gotten’ or ‘being seen’ by those who love you wholeheartedly.
It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon that holds all of our society’s negative ideas about the ageing process. It’s true that there’s loss of muscle strength, loss of balance and all those sense losses, too: hearing, vision, even taste and smell. But it’s not helpful to start looking for evidence of deterioration. And worse, to start lumping the losses together to create a depressed state of mind or resignation.
Tough times I have the old Bob Dylan rain song running in my head at the moment, A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. Patti Smith famously sang this song at the Nobel Awards ceremony, as she represented the absent poet/songwriter/performer. Dylan's hard rain is a metaphor for...
Why are people reluctant to see a medical or alternative health practitioner when they have a condition or injury that is getting in the way of everyday life?
I’ve run into two friends recently who are dragging their feet about getting treatment. They both have shoulder injuries. […]
This is the last post of the month where we’ve been exploring the topic of self-care. My intention has been to have us improve our relationship with taking good care of ourselves. This is obviously a continuous learning. But occasionally bringing a sharper focus to it will undoubtedly foster feeling ease in our lives. I believe that improving this sense of ease is as important as building up our muscles, cultivating flexibility or exercising our brains.
When I woke up on Wednesday morning this week with an extremely sore shoulder, I was annoyed. I knew I should put the brakes on.
Did I want to and did I? Of course not! First I tried to figure out what I might have done to create such a painful shoulder. I went over the previous day’s activities and the day before, too. It was very mysterious, as I couldn’t think of anything I’d done out of the ordinary.
Years ago I had osteoarthritis of both hips. I had hip replacement surgery in 2010 and have gone from strength to strength since then.
However the period when I was first diagnosed was hell for me. My ego felt crushed like a stepped-on grape. I was convinced that the orthopaedic surgeon’s diagnosis spelled career suicide for me as a yoga teacher. The idea of my sporting artificial hips filled me with dread and resistance.
I certainly didn’t want any yoga students to know I was less than perfect. I only wanted to present a healthy, ever-youthful image. […]
I want to address a question raised by one of my readers, Katrina Hinton, about a recent post, Take Care: Self-Reflection and Constructive Feedback. Katrina was a bright and enthusiastic yoga teacher trainee at Nature Care College back when I was part of the yoga training faculty. Now Katrina is an established yoga teacher in the ACT.
Katrina’s comments below were useful in helping me clarify the common idea that another person can hold up a mirror to help you understand yourself.
I love the honesty in your posts Eve. […]
The subject of ‘self-care’ is a complex one
Heather Hyde, my friend, colleague and sometimes student has generously offered her thoughts on the subject of self-care for Yoga Suits Her. I especially appreciate the way she has opened up the whole topic for us and questioning why we women are not better at self-care and how we might improve our skills. […]
It might be an expression that’s been around for years, but I’ve just woken up to what a great one expression it is: self-advocacy.
It’s similar in meaning to self-care. But ‘self-care activist and mentor’, Christy Tending says it’s just the beginning. In her blog post, she says:
The art of self-advocacy means boldly declaring what we need in order to feel whole and well and like ourselves.
I was reminded of how advocating for ourselves can be a life or death matter when I read the news yesterday. […]
Restorative yoga helps you recover from illness
As I started up my Take Care blog series last week, I was reminded by my friend Lesley of the healing properties of restorative yoga practice. Lesley speaks from experience when she writes:
Dearest Eve, thank you for your article. As you know, I have used restorative yoga and yoga nidra to support my recovery from illness. It has helped in so many ways – supporting my immune system, helping with pain management & reduction (fibromyalgia), reducing fear/anxiety, and keeping me smiling through some very difficult times. […]
There are many ways of dealing with back pain. We can seek western or eastern medical treatment. We can lie in bed until the pain mercifully passes. […]
Recently, I’ve had two episodes of feeling overcome with sadness. Not depression, but awash in sadness. You might have had times like this, too. They seemingly come out of nowhere and when I experience them, I feel compelled to figure out what’s going on. My hope is that I can defuse the melancholy as soon as possible, once I understand it. Thinking can take me out of the experience of being sad, as I build a narrative around the emotion. Sometimes the sadness is simply a black cloud that envelops and it’s not something to be understood. […]
I’m part of a yoga teachers practice group which meets monthly. We get together for a led-practice and then breakfast afterwards.
It’s a mutual gathering. No one person is the boss of it. The person leading and venue of the group rotates each month. This is semi-rural Australia, so we teachers come from all over. Some have to travel 1.5 hours to attend.
Besides enjoying the benefits of learning from each other, we get to float questions. For instance, last Saturday we were talking about how some teachers present their yoga classes off-the-cuff. […]
We yogis can do our bit to create more connection in the world every time we get on our yoga mats or cushions. We can breathe in kindness and breathe out rancour. We can be kind to our bodies in our asana practice. We can practice loving kindness in our meditations. When we join hands in prayer position, we can make that gesture mean it, that is, I see the divinity in me and you, too.
The French word for sunflower is tournesol, meaning turning toward the sun. ~ Rosina Mihajlovic, Rudolf Steiner School teacher
More than a year ago, I did a weeklong workshop that turned ‘my story’ upside down. My story had been running me for over four decades.
It doesn’t really matter what my particular story was. Each one of us has his or her personal narrative.
In the safe and nurturing environment of the workshop, I told my story. More importantly, I felt into all the shame and pain associated with it. […]