The fountain of youth: Your pelvis & spine

´To stay young, keep your legs open ´-Yamuna Zake These were the words repeated by Yamuna Zake during one of the many training sessions in New York. Everyone laughed of course but despite the obvious double entourage insinuated in this phrase, from a mechanical and energetic standpoint behind this tongue and check comment resides an insightful and wise observation. You are only as old as your spine As one ages, thanks to gravity and bad posture habits, our pelvis begins to close in on itself which results in a curved spine. You see our pelvis is not just one big block of un-moving bone. It is actually composed of two different parts that come together in various points, namely at the pubic bone and the sacrum. The pubic bone is often an ignored piece of anatomy. When I get clients to figure out where it is and place a bit of pressure on it with a Yamuna ball, there is usually a shocked look of ´what the hell is that?!¨ and ´ooooooh that is weird!!´. These are of course normal reactions when dealing with an ignored body part. The body, like any good friend or lover, wants to be acknowledged and taken care of in all of her glory. Unfortunately, often only certain parts are paid attention to, and in relation to our bodies, these are usually the belly, in an effort to get abs of steel, the chest to get those bulging pecs (or breasts) and/or of course  the perfect beach bum. This pigeon holed focus on the appearance of body parts creates a great imbalance in the overall functioning of the body and our levels of mobility and vitality. Imbalances in the body create difficulties in movement and energy flow. This eventually manifests as chronic fatigue and chronic pain found in the neck, hip, back, knees…etc. This is why Yoga is so healing. It focuses on WHOLE body movement and not just pieces or parts and essentially the fulcrum of that movement and awareness that makes life so enjoyable rests on, in and around the pelvis. This is why the majority of Yoga poses focus on movement around the pelvis. The seat of kundalini energy (life force energy) resides here, resting at the base of the spine around the coccyx and sacrum at the back of the pelvis. Furthermore,the Liver, Gall Bladder, Kidney, Urinary Bladder, Spleen, and Stomach meridians run right along and through the pubic bone,  iliac crest and sit bone down to the down to the big toe. Then there is the famous ilias psoas which runs right through the cup of the pelvis and connects the femur and lumbar spine. This is often called the muscle of soul and when a threat is perceived and a flight reaction instigated, this is one of the first muscles to activate. This is also one reason why runners and other athletes can suffer from lower backpain as well as stressed out office workers (due to stress and long hours of sitting poorly). In addition to posterior and anterior parts of the pelvis there are also the internal (abductors/pubic to knee) and external connections (IT band/hip to knee) of the pelvis which if blocked up can create hip, feet and knee issues as well as energetically being connected with issues of digestion, gynecological problems,  anxiety and fear. The Pelvis and your Breath There is also a direct connection with hip mobility and shoulder mobility. I remember a few years back when I was working around the hip with a swimmer who was having  chronic neck and shoulder issues. We got in with a ball and started to work with a few Yoga poses to open up the space around the internal and external insertion points of the femur head. After we were done, he sat up and just looked at me shocked and couldn´t believe that the pain in his left shoulder had totally disappeared without me touching it. An open pelvis with moveable connecting parts is not only essential for freedom of movement, but also for freedom of breath. It is yet another reason that 60-70% of all Yoga poses center around opening and aligning the pelvis. Obviously hip flexibility is important to sit in any cross legged meditative pose, but there is so much more involved than just achieving a comfortable sitting position. When the pelvis is open and the sit bones correctly aligned and firmly sitting on the ground (not tucked forward or put off to one side or the other) than the spine automatically straightens and lengthens up through the top of the skull which then has the effect of lifting and opening the rib cage, which then of course, creates more space for the breath and allows for all the benefits that deep breathing provides such as – slower heart rate, balanced blood pressure, relaxed nervous system and consequently the ability to think and act with the pre-frontal cortex in charge rather than with instinctive fear reactions. Fountain of Youth: From the inside out The mechanics of Yoga is not about getting you the perfect body, it is about getting you INTO your body. This of course takes more than just standing on one´s head while watching the daily news. Without awareness, breath and time, Yoga becomes nothing more than a simple practice in gymnastics and can often lead to injury. This is why in Karmuka Yoga every pose is done with awareness, time and silence. Staying in a supported pose for an extended period of time, especially around the pelvic zone, not only allows one to get into the deep connective tissue and fascia surrounding various joints (eg. the hip joint) and muscle groups, but it also gives the practitioner the chance to observe whatever other things, be it physical, mental, emotional and/or spiritual blocks that might bubble up to the surface while in the pose. Taking time to get to know and breathe into all the many points connected to and through the

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Karmuka Yoga La vida y la muerte

End of the year: Embracing death to live life

With the end of the year coming, I find myself reflecting a lot over life, death and the turns that both take and I am more certain than ever that in order to live you must embrace death. About three years ago my father was diagnosed with cancer. Thanks to the great knowledge of the doctors in the hospital in Houston Texas, he survived. Today he is doing quite well, though he has to return for monthly check-ups. I am grateful that I had the resources and capacity to leave my students and practice here in Seville for a month to cross the ocean and visit him. However, the land of my birth is not the land of my soul. Throughout this trip I came into contact many positive things as well as very painful. I am absolutely certain that over 13 years ago I had to leave the country of my birth to find and know myself. During my time away, living as an immigrant in one country or another, always with a sense of instability and uncertainty about my future and identity, I am grateful that the only thing that kept me grounded and offered a bit of peace and desire to keep going and healing, was my Yoga practice.  It is the same evolving practice that gave me the strength and peace to continue and finish this visit to the land of my birth. I am not going to enter into the details about the turbulent waves of my family life, the dark, weird and totally bizarre things that I lived while growing up in a religiously fanatic and isolated home. It is enough to say that during my trip back to the states I realized on a very deep level that we are all going to die. You, your family, your friends, your pets, all of us are going to die and we need to recognize and accept this at a soul level in order to live to our fullest capacity.  Death is a gift that helps us to live as it allows us to untie ourselves from the heaviness of the past and accept the lightness of the present and the infinite possibilities of the future. If you think that you have all of eternity to do what you wish, it is very likely that you will never take the first step to do it. The concept, ´Work Expands to Fill the Time Available´ developed Betty Friedan proves this. It shows that when a person has limited time, for example 4 hours instead of 8, to start and finish something, they will do it in a much more effective and concentrated manner than when they have double the time. As an example of this, I include the observation and life of my own father. My father is a man who had great dreams and according to his religious perspective, he literally thought that he was never going to die. As a consequence he always thought that he had time to finish his many unfinished projects and develop a relationship with his wife and children. The result? An unfinished house that he had to sell and a distant, somewhat difficult relationship with his seven children and wife. It was only with the diagnostic of cancer that he realized that his time on this earth is limited. He then began to experience a huge sense of regret for not spending more time with his family and never finishing his great life project. Applying this concept of ´Work Expands to Fill the Time Available´ to life in general, one accepts that there is an end to this life, to this body of flesh and blood. With this acceptance of death the fear and the resistance to get out of ones comfort zone begins to disappear. The worries that we have about what others think, including people close to you, like your parents, partners or children begins to transform itself from something of fear into a sort of comedy. You begin to laugh at yourself and with life. Things that were once so serious, all of the sudden, areńt and instead of leaving your dreams in the emptiness of ´tomorrow´you begin concentrate and focus your energies, not in distractions, but rather towards the activities and people that truly make your happy. Joseph Campbell, the great writer and expert on world myth and religions, documented in his book, ´The hero of thousand faces ´ the points of similarity among various cultures, religious, regions and time periods and their hero stories. According to Campbell, the ´hero ´or protagonist of these myths always had to encounter a situation that pushed them forward and out of their comfort zone and into the reality of death. This is what he termed the ´hero ´s journey ´ In this journey the hero or heroine always has to confront death. Confronting and accepting the reality of his or her death, this hero or heroine lets go of being a victim to circunstance and finds within themselves the most valuable thing in the universe, their true self. A self that exists beyond external conditions. In this realization they then becomes the warrior and leader of their own life. This does not mean that things will always go the way that we want them to go, but the great lesson of this worldwide myth is that we always have the option to choose to either be the hero our life experience or the victim. We always have the option to stay in a frozen state of fear, complaining and blaming others, or we can look for solutions and use our own creativity to enjoy our limited time upon this Earth. During my time in the U.S.A. I observed a place where going out to eat was super expensive and never fully enjoyed because you had to quickly consume to allow the next consumer in and start the next activity. This stands in stark contrast to my experience

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