Vata Season - Grounding Breath

Vata (along with Pitta and Kapha) is one of the three humors, or doshas, which make up our personal constitutions. These principles are also present in the world around us, and dictate natural rhythms of our days, seasons and even our lives.

Autumn is Vata season. Vata is characterized by cold, dry, light, rough, clear and hard. Seems to make sense for this cold weather, right?

Staying warm, hydrated and eating nourishing foods such as soups, stews and warm grains are great ways to stay healthy and grounded. Another thing to try is a warming grounding Pranayama and yoga practice. (Ashtanga every night at 5:40 anyone?! :) )

Dirga, or Three-Part-Breath and Ujjayi Pranayama:

Start seated or even lying down. You may use a blanket to cover your body or wrap around your shoulders.

Start by taking deep, slow nostril breaths down into your belly. This way, we expand the lower lobes of our lungs, in turn massaging our internal organs, and signaling to our body that we are safe and happy.

Bring one hand to your side rib cage to start, then you may lower it down as you get used to the breath. The next step is to begin filling the rest of your rib cage with air. Start by filling you belly, then middle rib cage, then right up under your collar bones. You may even feel the air come into your throat.

As you exhale, do so naturally until you come to the bottom – you may use your abdominal muscles to squeeze the last bit of exhale out.

Begin again, starting with your belly first.

Once you become comfortable with this breath – you may layer a nice, warming Ujjayi breath over this.

Feel your seat grounded into the earth, and at the same time, lift the crown of your head to lengthen the spine. Picture your breath beyond your body – inhales coming up through your tailbone and out the crown of your head. The exhales coming down from the top, along your spine, and back out through the floor below you.

Ujjayi is a loud, ocean sounding breath, made by slightly contracting your throat. It is used in Ashtanga practices, but along with your Bandhas.

Read more about Ujjayi pranayama here.

Namaste.

Ma Bhaskarananda

A 20 Minute Gentle Practice

Made this for my family :)

Part 1

Part 2


Love you.

More on Vata Dosha Balancing

It's that time of year again, when the weather changes so swiftly it leaves you standing on the street corner shivering in shorts and wondering what happened to those warm, balmy afternoons (it was 80 degrees here last week in DC!). The anxiety kicks in and your mind blows around faster than the leaves on the street.  How do you get grounded again?

Anxiety comes from an imbalance of the doshas, an aggravation of vata in the nervous system.  To balance vata dosha, try the following:

1. An oil massage to reduce stress.  Use sesame oil if you have a vata dosha, coconut oil if you have pitta dosha, or corn oil if you have kapha dosha.

2.  Drink calming herb teas made from 1 part valerian, 1 part musta.  Steep a teaspoon of these herbs in 1 cup of hot water.  Drink twice a day.

3.  Almond milk is very good for anxiety.  Soak 10 raw almonds in water over night, peel off the skins and put them in the bledern.  Warm the milk and add a pinch of ginger, nutmeg and saffron.

4.  Orange juice is good if your anxiety is accompanied by a fast heart rate, ayurvedic practitioners recommend drinking a cup of orange juice with a teaspoon of honey and a pinch of nutmeg.  

5.  A warm bath of ginger and baking soda pacifies anxiety.  Add 1/3 cup ginger and 1/3 cup baking soda to a tubful of water, soak for 10-15 minutes. 

6.  And of course...yoga! 

*Here's a great list of foods that balance vata dosha:

http://www.holisticonline.com/ayurveda/ayv-vata-food-plan.htm

Managing Vata Dosha in Winter

Stop, Drop, and Roll: A Three Point Plan for Managing Vata Dosha

Tis the season to be vata – la-la-la-la-la, la, la, la…wait? What were we singing? Yes indeed friends, tis the season to feel our Vata Dosha begin to take the reigns. But fear not, out good friend and Ayurvedic practitioner Daniel Shankin (Sitaram Das) is here with a three part plan for managing our Vata Dosha this season – Stop, Drop, and Roll!

When the weather starts to change, and the harsh winds begin to blow cold, deranged expressions of Vata Dosha are sure to be close behind.  This vata energy can go out of balance at any time, and troubles many of us year round, but it’s particularly prevalent in the winter.  Vata is considered to be an accumlation of the elemental energies of air and space, and is associated with several qualites that we see manifested throughout the natural world.  These qualities include: cold, dry, light, mobile, rough, and subtle.  A large part of ayurvedic medicine is based on the premise that ‘like increases like’ and ‘opposites decrease’.  For example, drinking iced tea (cold) while driving very fast (mobile) on a windy day (rough, mobile) in February (cold)  is a good way to increase vata dosha, and the nervousness, insomnia, joint pain, energy loss, and depression that come with it.  Here is a simple, easy to remember, three point plan to make sure that your winter is as warm, juicy, sensual, and luxurious as any in recorded history.

Stop: For the Love of God, turn off the computer and go to bed already.  Close the 10,000 browser windows, quick checking your texts and keep your eyes on the road.  Put nineteen of the twenty books you are reading back on the shelf, and finish one.  And no, you aren’t going out tonight, to all five parties which all happen to be on opposite ends of town.  Just stop.  Renounce activity.  Eschew multitasking.  Don’t do something, just sit there.  Practice living calmly and simply.  Do bathtub yoga.  Let yourself off the hook when you feel like you ‘should‘ do something.  If you catch yourself feeling an anxious and obssesive need to fix, fiddle, improve, or adjust, drop your ass into meditation immediately.  Take some time to breathe deep, dropping into the body, and let your awareness explore the roots of your neurosis.  Once you’ve found your grounded center, rise up, and move from that place.  Ahhh, Exhale.

Drop: If we’re going to get this under control, we need to go straight to the bowels of Ayurveda.  Vata Dosha accumulates in the large intestine and colon.  When Vata runs wild it creates constipation, indigestion, and flatulence.  To keep this dosha at bay, we want to make sure that we move our bowels regularly.  Chances are, if you are reading this, you probably have a pretty healthy diet to begin with, and probably only need to make some minor changes to make sure that what goes in, comes out in a timely fashion.  Rather than fixate on lists of foods that are ‘do’s and don’ts’, just start paying attention to the way your meals affect your elimination.  Make sure that you are eating foods that are easily digestable as well as nutritious.  WInter is also a perfect experiement with spices.  Warm sweet spices like the kind you find in chai tea (cinnamon, cardamom, clove, etc) are perfect for winter, perfect for vata, and might just be perfect for you.

Roll: We all love our hot fast sweaty vinyasa flow classes.  Our favorite classes involve loud, funky music.  Nothing wrong with these classes, nothing at all.  Only thing is, they can aggravate Vata.  One of the characteristics of vata is that it is mobile, and is increased by excessive mobility.  Physical Mobility like fast flow yoga, and sensual mobility like loud fast music.  These two things increase vata in the nervous system and mind, and cause disturbances such as anxiety, insomnia, and lack of focus.    Vata is also dry, which means that if you are leaving a huge pile of sweat on the floor, you are dessicating yourself, and potentially making your life harder with symptoms such as dry skin and the aforementioned constipation.  I’m not saying to never do flow class, but it certainly wouldn’t kill you to mix it up and spend a little time with some of the more mature members of our yoga family, rolling around on the floor, rolling our joints open, lightly stretching and breathing into our chakras.  Rolling around on the floor is very pacifying for Vata Dosha.

Read more.....

http://yoganonymous.org/stop-drop-and-roll-a-three-point-plan-for-managing-vata-dosha/

Photos by Kathy, age 46

Photos by Sabian York, 8 years old

Recipes from Saturday October 23

Peanut Butter Cookies

(gluten and dairy-free)

Ingredients

1 ½ cups peanut butter

½ cup packed brown sugar

1 large egg white

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350º and line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Combine all three ingredients. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on sheets, spacing them about 1 inch apart. Using a fork, make a criss-cross pattern on each cookie.

Bake 12-15 minutes until pale golden and set around the edges. Cool completely on wire racks.

Yields about 2 dozen cookies.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

Cookies

2 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

1 ½ tsp. cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup granulated sugar

1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin

2 large eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

grated zest of 1 orange, optional

2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 cup chopped walnuts, optional

 

Glaze

1 ½ cups confectioner’s sugar

2 ½ Tbsp. Milk

½ tsp. vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375º F. Spray baking sheets with cooking spray or line with parchment paper, set aside.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and ginger in medium bowl. Set aside.

Cream together the butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar. Scrape the sides of the bowl.

Add the pumpkin, eggs, vanilla and orange zest, beating well to blend.

Slowly add the dry ingredients, blend well. Stir in the chocolate chips and walnuts.

Using a tablespoon scoop, drop the dough on the baking sheets. Bake on the middle oven rack for 13-18 minutes, until edges are lightly browned. Let cool on the baking sheets 5 minutes before transferring to racks to cool.

 For the glaze: Stir together the sugar, milk and vanilla until smooth. Dip the tops of the cookies in the glaze and put back on the racks to set, or drizzle in a pattern.

Mount Major

Radiant Child Yoga

From the presentation that Kristin and I gave a few weeks ago.

I am happy, I am good

I am happy, I am good

Satnam, satnam, satnam ji

Wahe guru, wahe guru, wahe guru ji.

Satnam, satnam, satnam ji

Wahe guru, wahe guru, wahe guru ji.

Satnam = true name, true self

Wahe guru = wonderful teacher, supreme being, god...

We also played 2 games:

- The Intuition Game - The group sits in a circle, and one person leaves the room. While that person is gone, someone in the group hides an object under their seat (a coin, a feather, whatever you have). When the person comes back, he/she stands in the center of the circle, and the people on the outside send them "you can do it" vibes. The person on the inside of the circle uses his/her intuition to guess who is sitting on the object.

- Yoga Counting - The group works together to count to 10. There is no set order to tell you who counts when - you just use your intuition! If two people talk at once, you start again at 1.

These games are fun with adults and kids...have fun playing!