Author Archives: Cecile Raynor

May1

Chair Pose Redefined For Integrated Efficiency!

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Do you lead with your butt back or do you feel totally balanced above your feet?

This weekend, I worked with a teacher who had been teaching for a few years. She still experienced muscle and joint discomfort so I had her go into her expression of Chair Pose to assess what was going on in her way of practicing yoga.

She was working so hard muscularly at controlling her body in ways she had been taught that her body was a war zone of conflicts which fed her aches and pain. For instance, she was leading with her butt going back (like most people these days) and got herself off balance which was revealed by her struggling with preventing her toes from lifting off the ground and by a lack of integrated team work in her body as a whole.

Unfortunately, she is not alone in this struggle.

Chair Pose is one of the poses often disliked by yoga teachers and practitioners I have worked with and there is a reason for it. The way it has been taught comes from body builders of the 19th century influenced by the Industrial Revolution. They approached fitness viewing the body as a machine made of parts to be exercised in a controlled way.

In the same live webinar, a yoga teacher in training described the quads strain she felt in her chair pose as “natural strain” because what we get used to comes to feel more “natural” than the natural way itself.

The truth is that when muscles stand out by their hard work, this is a sign that the yogi in this pose is not using her body as the coordinated self that it is. The strain is actually the body communicating to you that you are in stress mode. Holding against your whole-body intelligence warning comes with risks of injury and chronic tension.


Do you search for the seat with your butt and use your hands for help one way or the other when you sit down?
Or do you feel absolutely relaxed and balanced all the way through?
And do you notice a parallel between your Daily Body and your Yoga Body way of moving?

An integrated efficient practice of chair pose keeps you easily balanced on your feet because you are released and the energy can flow up and down as it is designed to do. As a result, you develop the flexible strength of the cat!

In doing so, you are not losing any opportunity to strengthen. All you lose is the excess tension that gives you the illusion that you are creating more strength.

If you want to receive feedback on your chair pose to experience the ease and efficiency of an integrated chair pose like these other webinar teachers did, attend my free webinar too by clicking on this link: https://offthematyoga.lpages.co/free-live-interactive-webi…/

For those interested in a more integrated yoga practice for increased efficiency, at the end of the webinar, I will introduce my online course and make a special offer for participants only.

I will soon be closing the door to this program designed for an intimate group of yoga teachers and committed practitioners who want to journey with me for 10 weeks and learn about this breakthrough approach to yoga called the Body Intelligence Activation Process or B.I.A. Process to transform and revitalize their practice!

Want to learn more about how to activate your whole-body intelligence guidance 24/7?

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body more efficiently on and off the mat. She is currently writing a book on her personal and professional experience to be published this year with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.

Apr24

To Engage or To Allow Engagement? A Crucial Difference On & Off the Mat!

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Every time I go to a yoga class or attend an online class, I am struck by the lack of distinction between “engaging” and “allowing engagement”. Do you use your mind to control your body muscles as if it knew better than your whole-body intelligence? Maybe you are so used to it that you don’t even know you have another option to stretch and strengthen that is more efficient? Then read on!

When you are spontaneously running, dancing or simply walking, you don’t need to tell your body what muscles to engage and when to release the joints. It has a postural mechanism, an ambassador for your whole-body intelligence, designed to handle it all for you. Its job is to manage your best balance, coordination and posture.

 

This mechanism works at its best when you don’t interfere with it. Children and animals are good examples of this perfectly functioning mechanism.

When you are on the mat, your mind can decide what pose you want to go into. After that it is best to let your postural mechanism handle your muscles and joints activity for you as you go into the skeletal expression of the pose. I know, it requires having trust in your whole-body wisdom to be there for you!

The thing is that when you “allow engagement” by your whole-body intelligence, it knows exactly what needs engaging and how much to engage so that the pose is good for all parts of your body. When you “engage” specific muscles and joints, you create unnecessary body tension that interferes with the best expression of your pose.

Releasing excess tension is neither going limp nor decreasing how much strength you are building. It is preventing building body stiffness while you are building strength!

Want to learn more about how to activate your whole-body intelligence guidance 24/7?

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day B.I.A. Process Program.

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body more efficiently on and off the mat. She is currently writing a book on her personal and professional experience to be published this year with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.

Apr17

When & Why You May Be Overdoing Unknowingly?

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Life Is Not Meant to Be So Hard When You know What Drives You!

Instead, it becomes efficiently productive on and off the mat. You can enjoy any kind of yoga you like even power yoga, yet you are safe from promoting injuries and you get the best out of your practice.


Overstretched back and compressed neck

Overdoing can be easy to change when it is not intertwined with cultural and emotional attachments to doing things the hard way. And when intertwined, this underlying motivation interferes with your best practice of yoga and your general well-being on and off the mat.

That is why overdoing is not as clear-cut as it sounds!

1) You may choose to overdo because you see it as pushing your limits in a good way. When practicing yoga, you may even consider pain something to ignore to build mental strength and to better your practice. This way of practicing and teaching comes from an old interpretation of the yoga teachings that have come to you from teachers who learned from teachers who jived with extreme asceticism. However, many new and experienced teachers are totally letting go of this approach to yoga, others are in the process of letting it go. Buddha himself had to overcome that way of thinking before he could get to enlightenment. Where are you at on that journey?

2) You may strain without wanting to but you do not know how to not strain in a given pose. That often comes from the way poses are still currently cued to you in your yoga classes or yoga books. Any encouragement to willfully “engage” specific muscles or body parts is overdoing because it is interfering with the natural movement design of your whole-body. Instead, learn to let your whole-body intelligence handle the muscle engagement of your whole-body for you within each pose or movement you chose to do. And till you learn, stay present to your whole-body whatever the pose you are in, it can help already. Nature works as a whole, not in parts.

3) You may strain your body without even being aware that you are doing so due to “unconscious habits” you have brought from your daily life onto the mat. The thing is that your mind may have pre-conceived ideas around what it means to “lengthen the spine” for instance. Mainly, your habitual way has come to feel more natural than the natural way. So as you are straining,  it “feels right” to your habit even though it may not be natural or beneficial for your body at all.

And these 3 ways of overdoing are often combined or overlapping in various ways.


Over-arched back and over-tensing of the quads.

Most likely, excess tension brought you to your first yoga class. And am with you, it does feel good in the moment to stretch the tension with various yoga poses. Or it feels good to strain some if you associate straining with positive effort to gain strength.


Overstretched back, locked hip joints sockets, over-tensed calves and compressed neck!

The truth is that if you are straining, you are not letting your postural mechanism do its job. And it is designed to handle your best balance, coordination and posture with no strain and with vitality.  Instead, you may compensate for it by creating unnecessary muscle tension or by overstretching your muscles to the point you meddle with your muscle tone just because it “feels good” in the moment.

When you learn to let your whole-body intelligence be in the driver seat, you can regain accurate perception of your “feelings” and your yoga practice can be most efficient without straining. How do you do that?

The Body Intelligence Activation Process activates your postural mechanism so you receive reliable guidance from your whole-body intelligence 24/7. Each time you consciously activate it, and progressively more so over time, your feelings become increasingly reliable again, your balance, coordination and posture improve organically in the process. Anyone can do this and you can too!

Want to explore this further and learn more about this amazing natural skill that can be regained? Read more of the posts on this blog-site, sign up to my free email seminar or join my free live interactive webinar series which will be offered a few more times before I start my 90 Day Live Interactive Program in May.

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day B.I.A. Process Program.

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body more efficiently on and off the mat. She is currently writing a book on her personal and professional experience to be published this year with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.

Apr10

When Is It Not Good To Perform Toe Standing Poses?

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You may have been told that Toe Stand Poses strengthen your abdominal muscles, hips, knees, ankles, and toes. Have you actually experience that without straining?

Going on your toes in Downward Dog or other poses using both feet equally can be fine, even helpful sometimes. However, poses on toes with a high level of imbalance is unlikely to be done by the average person without promoting injuries down the line.

When in a class using lots of these poses, I could not help but noticing in other yogis body distortions and compensations. Those, I knew, were causing muscles and joints straining which promotes body stiffness.

It is not because your yoga teacher can do a pose that the pose is good for your own body. Nor does it mean that staying in a straining pose is how you get better at it, it is how you get injured.

Staying in a pose using a tool to activate your whole-body guidance and get its 100% approval is how you prevent injuries and get the most out of your practice.

The first principle of yoga is “Ahimsa”, do not harm anyone. That includes yourself! And despite the widespread belief that strain is good for you, it is not so, this is only a “belief” that is getting outdated!

Strain may indicate that you are bringing unconscious habits of movements from your daily life to the mat. It is also the first step of injuries to come.

The Body Intelligence Activation Process or B.I.A. Process is an awesome solution to these challenges.

If you want to learn more about how to activate your whole-body intelligence on demand so you can prevent injuries on and off the mat and get the most out of your practice?

Join my latest FREE 6-part EMAIL SEMINAR:

“How to Unlearn Habits that Create Body Stiffness On and Off the Mat”
Based on the Alexander Technique & The Body Intelligence Activation Process
(B.I.A. Process)
To sign up to my local or online offerings click at the top of this homepage
Mar20

Stretching the Same Tension Over & Over?

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There is a reason for that and it may not be what you think!

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You may be stretching for flexibility and doing strengthening exercises for strength, yet does this keep you tension free on or of the mat? Or the same tension seems to come back endlessly?

Focusing on stretching and strengthening as two separate qualities is doing just that, focusing on “Separateness”! Learning to focus on these two qualities as the two sides of the same coin is the way to focus on “Unity” and its benefits which is to keep you tension free on or off the mat as you keep getting strong and flexible.

How can you do this when you think that mostly your muscles are your main pathway to strength and flexibility? How can you attend to both at the same time and know how to assess how much of which you need?

Maybe your true strength is not coming from your muscles as much as your skeletal structure and your mind working with your whole-body intelligence? Maybe your joints and muscles are more of a pathway to your flexibility as they keep everything together? And maybe, learning to release your joints is more key to your flexibility?

Releasing excess tension is neither going limp
nor decreasing how much strength you are building.
It is preventing building body stiffness while you are building strength!

In fact, if your bones were suddenly melting, no matter how strong your muscles, would you not turn into a puddle?

Flexible-strength as a skill where both strength and flexibility can be nurtured simultaneously is my personal and professional experience of what Patanjali recommends in his Sutras, namely that each yoga pose be practiced with “Steadiness & Ease”!

When you understand your body functioning in that way, you can build up muscle strength without building excess tension at the same time. When you learn to activate your postural mechanism, you can release excess tension while in a strengthening pose, as you build flexible-strength, prevent injury and reach your highest best without side effect like stiffness in your joints and muscles.

Interested in this way of thinking your movements and poses? Want to learn how to activate your whole-body intelligence via your postural mechanism, opt in my live offerings, local or online.

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day Virtual & Interactive

Mar13

The Danger of Hip Openers

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Because they can still feel good and yet damage your body, Hip Openers can be unknowingly dangerous when not practice with the approval of your Whole-Body Intelligence via your Postural Mechanism designed to handle your best posture, coordination and balance from an integrated perspective.

Anyone practicing yoga has done poses to open the hip joint sockets. However, do you really need your hip joints stretched out? Do you feel them tight in your daily movements or do you feel they are tight because you can’t do specific yoga poses to your liking?

Do you practice yoga with an idea that the more your joint or muscle are stretched the better? Not necessarily true! With that approach, you are likely to get in trouble sooner or later because you may be killing the natural balance needed in your muscle and joints between necessary tension and flexibility. Watch the video below from an experienced yoga teacher and her experience with this decades into her practice.


Diane Bruni’s Story

CHALLENGE: The thing is that your educated mind can’t assess where the limit is with utmost safety because it relies on what it has been told or on what “feels good”.

1) No teacher knows better than your inner teacher. And the inner teacher I am talking about is your whole-body intelligence, not just your stretch edge or your pain edge that represent only a small portion of your whole-body intelligence.

2) Yoga teachings warn you to not rely on your feelings alone because being subjective, they are not reliable!

3) Your body feelings are also corrupted by the unconscious habits of movements you have developed over time which need to be addressed so you can reclaim more accuracy in your sensory perception on and off the mat.

SOLUTION: Learning to activate your Whole-Body Intelligence by activating your Postural Mechanism is the best way I have found to date to always be guided to express any pose in the appropriate way and the appropriate amount because you approach your body as a coordinated self rather than the sum total of your body parts.

The B.I.A. Process teaches you to do just that. If you are interested in learning more about it, go to: https://offthematyogablog.com/ and sign up to my free email seminar, read my blog posts or sign up for a class or workshop locally or online.

Feb25

Is Resistance Training Always Necessary to Strengthen?

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Is Resisting Your Body a Smart Move as a Regular Form of Exercise?

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I just came back from my hot yoga class which I enjoyed because I like to sweat and challenge myself. My body type needs this especially considering my very sedentary style of living. However, when I go through the class, I choose not to fight against my body one body part at a time. I like to align with my innate “whole-body ” intelligence which guides me to my best expression for each pose as the coordinated self that I am. My outer muscles can release without me loosing my skeletal height. It feels awesome and prevents body stiffness and injuries. How does this work?

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Today, as we were in a challenging pose, my teacher made this comment: “Your body wants the path of least resistance, so you want the path of most resistance”. Is that necessary in order to strengthen? How much strength do we need for everyday living? And is there not a way between the path of least resistance (collapse) and the path of resistance (stiffening)?

Many people with back or knee issues are being told that their back and knees are weak and they need to strengthen them. Maybe there are some cases where that is true, but more often than not, it is misusing the body that creates the illusion of weakness.

Listen to Peter O’Sullivan in his U Tube video published on Apr 4, 2013 where he discusses cognitive functional therapy and the myth of “core stability” in relation to chronic low back pain.

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Peter O’Sullivan Video

Making demands on the big muscles of your back to support you when it is mostly the job of your postural muscles to do so is the real problem. Thinking that your six pack ab muscles contribute to your back stability as if they were your core muscles when they are only outer muscles, not inner core muscles is another misconception that leads to feeling that you are not strong enough for sustainable good posture.

It is my personal and professional experience that you can strengthen from the inside out working with your whole-body intelligence instead of working against it. If you actually step out of your own way when you strengthen, you develop flexible strength. When you resist against it, you develop strength alright but it is stiff strength which backfires on you one way or the other or sends you stretching like crazy unnecessarily.

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It is not a question of being right or wrong here, those are two different ways to approach strengthening. However, mind and body are the two sides of the same coin and if you choose to resist your whole-body intelligence as an ongoing way to exercise, you may be building up some level of stiffness of body and mind in the process!

Whichever way you move, you help your body on some level because movement is life and it is overall a good thing to do!:)

Interested in my approach to exercising? Read my blogposts or sign up for my events from private to groups, locally or online!

Do you want to learn more about this mind/body approach to strain-free yoga? 
Do you want to learn how to reclaim efficient moving for balanced living?
Join my FREE 6-part EMAIL SEMINAR:
"How to Unlearn Habits that Create Body Stiffness On and Off the Mat"

 

Nov27

What’s Body Synergy Awareness? The Key to Heal or Avoid Injury!

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BODY SYNERGY AWARENESS

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This is a common self-reinforcing synergy in our modern world.
If your yoga practice is not affecting such habit organically, then you are missing a dimension!

Do you know what your own body synergy is? Do you know it can affect you on all levels of functioning from physical to mental and emotional?  Do you ever investigate why you use your body the way you do? Or do you tend to focus on the end result, like poor posture, and you try to correct it muscularly whether on or off the mat? How is that working for you? Is it changing your synergy off the mat?

Do you know that your posture is the result of how you use the rest of your body all the way to your feet? That is why forcing the shoulders to open up and the body to align according to a pre-conceived idea of “good posture” does not really work for very long, sometimes seconds only. Mostly you go from straightening up to slouching right back throughout the day. Sounds familiar? The thing is that “good posture” is not something to remember to do nor something to hold on to. It is designed to happen organically like when you were children.

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Whether playing on the beach or running down a hill,
children display perfect postural alignment without thinking about it.
This is organic good posture display!

Muscular correcting of the body is fighting against the innate intelligence of your whole body. That is why it does not stick with you. The synergy of your whole body automatically brings back your habitual way to use yourself as a whole as it was doing for me in the story below. With a more organic functioning synergy, not only you now have a chance to fully heal chronic tension or left over injuries, you can also prevent  injuries whether on or off the mat and whether you are into hot power yoga or gentle yoga.

To assist people who need help, I designed a process so you can activate your Whole-Body Intelligence in a snap. It is based on over 25 years of practicing and teaching the Alexander Technique, the best kept secret of famous performers and Olympic athletes. And here below is a true story that happened to me and illustrates, in a concrete way, the amazing power of our Whole-Body Intelligence who succeeded where both traditional and holistic practitioners failed.

MY HEALING STORY USING THIS PROCESS

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 I used this process to deal with a pronounced head and hip imbalance doubled with a back nerve pain that could have easily left me crippled. I had started spending more time at the computer on account of blogging and book writing. As a result, I had been in my head instead of staying present to my whole body. One morning, I got up and saw my head was stuck to the left and my right hip stuck off to the right.  Besides, I could not do yoga or even stretch without triggering the nerve pain in my lower back. I was in shock especially considering I help others avoid this type of problems.

Usually I try to figure things out for myself but out of sheer panic, I searched outside of myself for help, going to several alternative practitioners in the hope they could fix what was wrong with me. Six months and two thousands dollars later, it had not yielded any visible results even though going to chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists felt nice at the time.

Since nothing was yielding sustainable results, I took things back into my own hands. So upon coming home from my last visit, I asked myself what I would recommend a student of mine to do in such a situation and I heard my own voice answering “Watch yourself like a Hawk and Activate your Body Intelligence!”. I was back where I ought to have started, trusting my whole-body wisdom and my process to heal myself.

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I followed my own advice, got encouraging results in 48 hours and within a month with no stretching and no outside help I was completely healed. I was not only totally realigned properly but my back nerve pain was gone and the problem never returned.

Of course, watching myself like a hawk I noticed quite a few things I was currently doing especially relating to screen time that promoted the problem and I also figured out how the habit had been created when I had young children. It had survived in a subtle form for a couple decades most likely helped by the nature of my work. Nonetheless, choosing not to do the habit and constantly activating my body intelligence took care of it all, old and new habit!

What if you could discover your own unconscious habits and learn how to unlearn them so they stop wrecking your body unknowingly on or off the mat?

Join my blog site, attend my online or local events and learn about the Body Intelligence Activation Process. You won’t regret it!

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day Virtual & Interactive Pilot Launch.

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body better on and off the mat. Her blog read by over 20 000 people and her webinars have an international audience. She is currently writing her book on “The Yoga of the Future and the B.I.A. Process: the Missing Link to Drop the Strain and Keep the Gain.” with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.

Nov13

From Muscular Control to Whole-Body Efficiency in Yoga: A Personal Journey!

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This personal story relating to my artwork illustrates the transformation that needs to happen in yoga practice and teaching so that yogis stop wrecking their body unknowingly whether on or off the mat.

It has to do with a change in mindset. Mine started with a very controlling mindset as I tried to get every drawing done to perfection (does this ring a bell?) and evolved into a trusting mindset that surrendered to what is, allowing my innate body wisdom to guide my hand effortlessly (does it not sound appealing?).

MY OWN MINDSET EVOLUTION

When I was a teenager, my friend loved the portraits I used to draw from a black and white picture they would bring to me. You can see that I was being very meticulous and used a lot of erasing pencils to get details of the hair, eyes and shirt just so. It was tedious work although still a way to express my creativity at the time.

These drawings were my attempt to reach an attractive yet illusive perfection by controlling every stroke. And my early interest was mainly focused on portraits maybe because then, the “head” was my familiar place of comfort.

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It was not until later when I studied the Alexander Technique and connected to my whole body that progressively a new style emerged as you may have noticed in prior blogs and in this one. By then, I was connected not only to the whole body but to a whole body in motion. From then on, I had the most amazing feeling of freedom and fun creating artwork, which I actually sold in Open Studios and at a Gallery. Drawings of dancers, musicians and yogis in action!:)

That transformation from fear to not get it right to implicit trust in your whole-body guidance is what I can offer you. It brought me from drawing portraits with tedious mental and muscular control of the lines to drawings where I allow myself to free flow and capture the movement without even looking at my paper initially. In the process, I have developed full trust that my Whole-Body Intelligence & Awareness of Movement are always present to guide me and you can too.

I have learned to practice yoga based on natural movements in line with my whole-body intelligence which is the ultimate safety net and injury prevention on and off the mat!

And the beauty of this work is that it translates in everything you do!

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MINDSET EVOLUTION & YOGA PRACTICE

Similar to my teenage drawings, modern yoga teachers tend to entertain some illusive idea that perfect form and anatomical knowledge are the answer to perfect yoga practice. Due to the Industrial Revolution and its focus on “Machines, Money & Appearances”, since the 19th century, the body is being handled as if it is a machine made of parts to workout. Teachers study anatomy in details and describe poses meticulously yet even those teachers get injured. Maybe we have been through the teenage years of modern yoga evolution. Yoga poses must be revisited so they can be done in line with our “Whole-Body Intelligence”, which knows better than our educated mind.

The difference between my teenage controlled drawings and my adult free flowing drawings is the difference I have been teaching yoga teachers so they can stop assessing yoga from a purely visual or analytical perspective. It helped their yoga practice and teaching because they no longer need to know everything with mechanical precision, they just need to know how to activate their whole body intelligence and guide students to activate their own. This way, they can guide or be guided effortlessly into the perfect and safest expression of each pose in every moment.

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This breakthrough process can be applied to any kind of yoga style you are attracted to practice, from Hot Power Yoga to gentle Kripalu Yoga. It has to do with discovering and un-learning common unconscious habits you have developed on and off the mat, and also with learning to activate your whole-body intelligence in every movement or pose.

Want to discover and unlearn these common unconscious habits that interfere with your best yoga practice?

Join my blog site, attend my online or local events and learn about the Body Intelligence Activation Process. You won’t regret it!

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day Virtual & Interactive Pilot Launch.

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body better on and off the mat. Her blog read by over 20 000 people and her webinars have an international audience. She is currently writing her book on “The Yoga of the Future and the B.I.A. Process: the Missing Link to Drop the Strain and Keep the Gain.” with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.

PS: For those curious about my artwork, you can go to http://studiocecile.com/

Nov6

Habits that Wreck Your Body Unknowingly On & Off The Mat!

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Forcing your back to stretch to reach your toes may feel good but it also destroys your back muscle tone.
Lengthening of your back muscles comes from freedom in the hip joints and armpits,
not from forcing the muscles to lengthen!

In this time and age, like most working individuals, you are probably busy and often overwhelmed with more work to do than you have time for. As it turns out, you have plenty of opportunities to tense up between home and work, back and forth, day after day.

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Multitasking mom listening to the phone, carrying her child and cooking all at the same time
bringing in the process body distortions that soon come to feel more natural than the natural way!

By the time you feel your tension big time, if you are a yoga lover, you can’t wait to get to your yoga mat as soon as you get a chance. When you actually reach your yoga class or you situate yourself on your mat, you are so ready to stretch that nagging accumulated tension in your neck, shoulders, back, arms or legs that you totally go for it. As long as it “feels” good and you can do it, you’ll even go to the maximum expression of your pose and naturally, you’ll feel good about that accomplishment.

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Butt pulled back with back excess straining. Front expansion with neck compression
or both happening at once in extreme version of warrior one

Yet, is it always a good thing to make a fire just because you have matches in your hands? Is going into the maximum expression of your pose the right thing to do for every part of your body? Is more always better? What do you think?

Of course, there is something to be said about a good spontaneous stretch. Especially if you are stretching like the cat, naturally indulging with delight into a good stretch from head to toes, upon awakening from a nap.

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This organic way of stretching, which human beings are also gifted with, is called “pandiculation”. It actually starts with enhancing the tension briefly to signal the brain that your muscles are ready to relax. Then your whole body can enter into sweet delightful surrender the length of a long yawn!

Are the stretches you do at the gym or in your yoga class different in any way from the cat stretch? Do they each spread all over your body in a delightful surrender or do you actually work at them, tugging at the tension in one specific area of your body in the hope to get more length out of your stretch?

If your stretches are  not a whole body experience, you may be handling your tension with the same mindset that created the tension in the first place. You usually feel good in the moment, but you are not free of the unconscious habits that created the tension which is why, before you know it, it is back again, nagging at you as you assume it an inevitable part of living this modern life.

That is how your yoga practice can feel good and still wreck your body!

What if you could discover these unconscious habits and learn how to unlearn them?

Join my blog site, attend my online or local events and learn about the B.I.A. Process. You won’t regret it!

1) Free Email Seminar 2) Free Webinar 3)  90 Day Virtual & Interactive Pilot Launch.

Cecile Raynor has been teaching the Alexander Technique for over 25 years out of which came her B.I.A. Process to assist yogis enhance their practice bypassing the intellect. She is also a Thai Yoga Massage Therapist and a Reiki Practitioner. Faculty at Akasha Yoga Teacher Training, she runs a 12 months Mastermind for Yoga Teachers with a Vision, and a 90 Day Virtual Program for trainees, new teachers and committed yoga practitioners interested in using their body better on and off the mat. Her blog read by over 19 000 people and her webinar have an international audience. She is currently writing her book on “The Yoga of the Future and the B.I.A. Process: the Missing Link to Drop the Strain and Keep the Gain.” with BlissLife Press, San Diego California.