Looks like Tiny Devotions, the fabulous mala bead company, couldn’t help but take a little inspiration from Lululemon’s fabulous “Sh!t Yogis Say” parody. It’s all in good fun and should bring a smile to your face!

Want to win some free mala bead bling for your yoga wardrobe?

Here’s the giveaway rules from Tiny Devotions blog:

We meditated all of January and came out out of silence to make this video (Yes, we know we’re about a month late on the rest of the world).

We need your help in sharing it and spreading the meditating love all over the internet/universe.

So we’ve decided to share the love with a Shit Meditators Say Giveway.

How to enter – Either:

1. Leave a comment on the Shit Meditators Say video (feel free to share it with your friends and yogis)

2. Tweet a link of this video – make sure you include @tinydevotions so we can enter you in the giveaway

2 meditators will WIN a “one of a kind” buddha or Ganesha gemstone and silver wrist mala!

Winner announced when we get to 10,000 views! Spread the love (and the laughs)

Okay. Enjoy the video a few more times and get tweetin’ or commenting!

Related articles

• How to Clean a Yoga Mat (dailycupofyoga.com)
• How to Roll Your Yoga Mat to Avoid That Annoying Curl (fitsugar.com)
• 6 Things I Wish I Knew Before Buying My First Yoga Mat (fitsugar.com)
• Questions to Ask Yourself Before Buying a Yoga Mat (fitsugar.com)

{Isn’t this an amazing video of Joseph Encinia, 2011 World Champion of the Bishnu Ghosh Cup?
He subscribes to a slightly different yoga philosophy of 99% practice, 1% theory…}

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Mariska Breland, founder and instructor of Fuse Pilates, where she reminds us of some essential principles of muscle anatomy.]

A fundamental truth of anatomy is that an overly tight muscle (or connective tissue) will inhibit its opposing muscle’s strength.

What was once the result of MS-related weakness for me has become a structural issue from walking not-quite-right for years, to walking flat-out-wrong for a few years beyond. Structural issues are formed from habits. These habits can range from anything, for instance, from talking on the phone too much (creating that kink in the neck) to poor posture. Today, unless I’m standing, my ankle doesn’t come up to a 90 degree angle towards my leg and doing a calf stretch for 5 to 10 minutes twice a day at this point won’t cut it. I found that as much as I tried to strengthen the muscles to flex my foot, it wasn’t working because the tightness in the back of my leg wouldn’t allow it.

This can also happen in women (and some adventuresome gents…Prince comes to mind), that live in their high heels (another form of habit). Wearing high-heeled shoes will cause shortening of the calf muscles and Achilles tendons. In addition, heels shift the pelvis into an undesirable position, though simultaneously making your legs look awesome. Those trendy heels I used to love aren’t so good for balanced leg muscles which yoga and Pilates are ideal for maintaining.

Think about it like this: If your bicep is contracting, it shortens, so your tricep has to lengthen. If both contracted at the same time, your arm couldn’t bend.

Why do muscles get tight?

The simplest reason muscles become tight is that they aren’t stretched or taken through their range of motion sufficiently. The cause may also be neurological as a reaction to things like stress, or it could be a biomechanical problem where the body will tighten around a joint that it recognizes as unstable to protect from further injury.

Other causes of tightness include overuse, which can produce micro tears in the muscles. Those tears result in the muscles tightening to protect themselves. It is also possible to overstretch. When the body feels you are over-stretching, it activates the stretch reflex where the muscle contracts to stop you from injuring it during overly ambitious stretch exercises.

Of course, it could always be a combination of more than one thing.

How to fix a muscle that’s weak?

When you properly stretch a tight muscle (and the surrounding connective tissue), its antagonist muscle (the one that does the opposite job), theoretically can spontaneously increase in strength. In addition to regular Pilates and yoga, there are devices you can use to harness the stretch, such as the stretch brace that I now wear for hours and hours and hours on end, all with the goal of stretching out the tight leg muscles that are making my foot flexion difficult.

The ultimate goal: No pain and walking with a better gait, even when fashion wins over dorsiflexion and I break out the high heels.

A Tip: The next time you feel weak in one body part, look at the one that does the opposite motion and ask yourself, are you weak or tight? Or maybe both?

Stay hard core,

Mariska

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Fuse Pilates, developed in 2005 by fitness expert Mariska Breland, builds on traditional Pilates exercises and teaching styles with an original, fun, and highly effective twist on Pilates mat and apparatus classes. Prompted by the growing popularity of the Fuse Pilates method, Breland partnered with Roxanna Hakimi and Sormeh Youssefieh to open the Fuse Pilates Playground in Washington DC’s trendy Dupont Circle neighborhood in June 2011. Each Fuse class is different, uniquely customized to student requests and choreographed to upbeat music. Classes offer an intense yet approachable method of mat, tower, reformer and chair instruction, along with private coaching and wellness counseling for beginner to expert levels. Fuse Pilates’ highly trained and experienced instructors concentrate on 360 degrees of the body to shape and create beautifully-toned physiques while promoting overall health and wellness. To learn more about Fuse Pilates visit http://www.fusepilates.com/.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/fusepilates  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FusePilates

With the San Francisco Airport’s new Yoga Room splashing into the news this week, we take the opportunity to highlight random acts of yoga occurring in airports across the world. Clearly, airports and spontaneous yoga demonstrations were made for each other.

First off, here’s kirtan chantress extraordinaire, Ragani, and her band members making good use of their time in the Charlotte airport on the way home from a trip…

Next, a group of traveling yoginis, clearly inspired by Ragani’s amazing balancing act, attempt a world record for most yoginis striking a pose on an automatic walkway at the same time…I think they win…

A few tips on how to turn a delayed flight into the next great opportunity to impress your fellow travelers with a perfectly executed handstand…

Here we have handstand splits (2:30 into the clip)…glad no one got hurt…need I say more…

Have a “sore bum” from the long flight? Give these stretches a try…

I wonder if you have to get a permit for a synchronized yoga demonstration like this…

Finally, the last few clips are from folks who might be just as happy as the rest of the yoga world if the Yoga Room concept really takes off in airports…

If you’re under the weather today or just needing a little more relaxed yoga session, this gentle flow yoga practice on Yoga Journal’s Youtube channel should do the trick. Gets the body moving a little bit, without too many sustained inversions.

Video description:

This Gentle Yoga Flow practice is accessible to all levels. There is a primary focus on hip opening, gentle lunging and twisting. This sequence is ideal for the beginning yoga student or regular yogi who wants to tone it down for the day. For this practice you will need two blocks and your strap. Feel free to use this practice anytime you’re looking for a little revitalization. Visit http://www.yogajournal.com for more videos.

It’s a bit of a costly habit (well worth it though), but one of the first things I do when I read a book is check whether the author provides additional reading recommendations. I’m currently reading The Science of Yoga and was happy to find a list of science and yoga history related books for further reading. As the author states, “The list makes no claim of being comprehensive but simply offers entree to a growing literature that draws on demonstrable fact and reasonable inference to illuminate yoga.”

Click to view slideshow.

Some of these look well beyond my attention span in the science of yoga–glad Mr. Broad read them all and summed them up so nicely–but I definitely plan to add a few of these to my shelves.

• Science of Flexibility, 3rd ed. by Michael J. Alter (2004)
• Relief is in the Stretch: End Back Pain Through Yoga by Loren Fishman and Carol Ardman (2005)
• Yoga for Arthritis by Loren Fishman and Ellen Saltonstall (2008)
• Yogabody: Anatomy, Kinesiology, and Asana by Judith Hanson Lasater (2009)
• Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance, 7th ed. by William D. McArdle, Frank I. Katch, and Victor L. Katch (2009)
• Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing by Timothy McCall (2007)
• A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana by Mel Robin (2002)
• A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers: The Incorporation of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Anatomy into the Practice by Mel Robin (2009)
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, 3rd ed. by Robert M. Sapolsky (2004)
• Respiratory Physiology: A Clinical Approach by Richard M. Schwartzstein and Michael J. Parker (2005)
• Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Mark Singleton (2010)
• Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion by Hugh B. Urban (2003)
• Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through Yoga by Amy Weintraub (2004)
• Kiss the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts by David Gordon White (2006)

I know this clip’s a little old, but I love the heck out of this scene from King of the Hill. While Yogi Victor (Johnny Depp) is quite the crude yoga teacher, he clearly has Hank’s best interests at heart… Who knows, Hank might even learn how to “breath through his feet” once he gets a tank-top. Talk about some great lines…

Hank walks into class:

Hank: Uh, hello, I was wondering if yoga could help my back because it hurts like all…

Yogi Victor: Let me tell you a story. Once I was like you–skeptical, near-sighted, paunchy–then I met a special friend. This glorious friend took me to places I thought I’d never…

Hank: Eh, excuse me, is this one of those stories where this special friend of yours turns out to be yoga?

Yogi Victor: What time do you evacuate your bowels?

Hank: What?

Yogi Victor:  There’s only one right answer! Between 4 and 6 in the morning.

Hank: Well this was a great way to spend a lunch hour…

Yogi Victor: Lunch is one of the worst things you can do to yourself!

At Hank’s disability hearing (where Yogi Victor is apparently his key witness):

Board member: Mr. Hill, this guy is not helping your case.

Hank: Exactly, let me ask you, what healthy person would voluntarily spend five minutes with this joker? If I wasn’t in horrible pain wouldn’t I have kicked this guys ass?

Board: Hmmmm…, yeah…, we find for Hank Hill. Congratulations.

Yogi Victor: Why are you rewarding this man for abandoning the yoga way!?! Look at him. He’s clinched from his back muscles down to his inner eye…

Any other T.V. shows out there with great yoga scenes?

Video description:

This is an 18 minute Surya Namaskar or Sun Salutation follow-along practice. It’s a great way to wake up in the morning, or to end your day. While there are modifications for beginners, poses are not described in great detail so if you are brand new to yoga, you may fare better with a more tutorial-like video. This video is practice oriented, with 5 repetitions of Surya Namaskar A and 5 of Surya Namaskar B. While these sequences are taken from the Ashtanga tradition, Forrest Yoga modifications have been given for a few of the asanas, including lengthening the back of your neck at all times in order to reduce neck and upper back pain which I find sometimes accumulates from lots of sun salutes. 

My name is Shiva Reinhardt and I am a yoga teacher at the Blue Lotus Healing Arts Center in Ruidoso, NM. Our website is http://www.ruidosodayspa.com

Music from http://www.magnatune.com under the Creative Commons license: Artist: Hans Christian, Album: Rumi Symphony, Song: Divine Love

Perhaps this is not the perfect decision-making matrix, but I know I could have saved a few hundred dollars on more than one occasion with a little more rationality…

via the scordit blog

Devoted much of the evening to devouring William J. Broad’s soon-to-be-released book, The Science of Yoga. Not many candle-burning, page-turning yoga books out there, but this is definitely one of them.  Tough book to put down.

There’s something uniquely special about a science-focused yoga book that doesn’t induce immediate bouts of involuntary savasana. Needless to say, I’m entertained and enjoying the book.

Perhaps less exciting than some of the more hyped-up claims in the book, in the chronology section Broad introduces his readers to an Indian scientific text most yogis have probably never heard of: A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy by N.C. Paul.

1851: N.C. Paul authors A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy, considered the first scientific study of yoga. It seeks to explain how yogis maintain what the Indian doctor calls states of ‘human hibernation’ and looks to yoga breathing for clues to metabolic slowdowns (xxvi).

As you’ll see when reading The Science of Yoga, the treatise plays quite an inspirational role in Broad’s search for early scraps of scientific research on yoga. In his quest for early scientific yoga literature, Broad states:

The limitations of the current literature sent me casting a wide net, and I immediately made a big catch. It was a very old book–A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy–written by a young Indian doctor and published in 1851 in Benares (now known as Varanasi), the ancient city on the Ganges that marks the spiritual heart of Hinduism. It came to my attention because a few Western scholars had referred to it in passing.

I got lucky and found that Google Books had recently scanned Harvard’s copy into its electronic archive, so I was able to download the whole thing in a flash. Its language was archaic. But the author had addressed the science of yoga with great skill, illuminating an important aspect of respiratory physiology that many authorities still get wrong today.

Well, of course I couldn’t help but go and find the book for myself and share it here on Daily Cup of Yoga. Click here or on the image below to download and read the treatise for yourself. The only question I have now is why Broad didn’t name his book The Science of THE Yoga…