Monday, March 25, 2013
Earth Day Indiana- Saturday April 27th- Join us!
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Last year's Earth Day Indiana Festival featured 140 environmental and conservation exhibits, great music, good food and special activities for kids... in five action-packed hours.
The exhibits and children's activities were under large tents, and thousands of people came to learn and have a good time — even though the the day was cold and damp. This year's activities will be a lot like 2012, with a few surprises for your enjoyment. The weather will be better, too.
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A strong sponsor lineup helped secure 140 exhibits in 2012
The quality of exhibits at the Earth Day Indiana Festival improves every year, and this year's lineup is the largest and best ever. Here are sponsors that deserve special recognition.
United Water was our very first partner sponsor, and the company has been part of the festival since 1994. United Water is major supporter of environmental projects and personal development programs.
Indiana's Family of Farmers, also a partner sponsor,did triple duty with a large exhibit, an activity in the children's tent and serving as a food vendor.
Meijer joined Earth Day Indiana as a new partner sponsor. Meijer stores lead among national brands in promoting healthy food, eco-friendly products and alternative auto fuel.
All sponsors are listed below.
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| We can't do the Earth Day Indiana Festival without a strong team of volunteers. It's nice to reward some of you whenever we can. Kristel Tippen and her husband, Logan, were among our best team of volunteers ever. Krystel's name was drawn to receive an Epiphone guitar donated by the Guitar Center. Four of our volunteers received wonderful gift bags from Whole Foods Markets.
There will be more gifts for volunteers in 2013, so sign up heretoday.
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Downward Facing Dog
(AH-doh MOO-kah shvah-NAHS-anna)
adho = downward
mukha = face
svana = dog
adho = downward
mukha = face
svana = dog
Step by Step
Come onto the floor on your hands and knees. Set your knees directly below your hips and your hands slightly forward of your shoulders. Spread your palms, index fingers parallel or slightly turned out, and turn your toes under.
Exhale and lift your knees away from the floor. At first keep the knees slightly bent and the heels lifted away from the floor. Lengthen your tailbone away from the back of your pelvis and press it lightly toward the pubis. Against this resistance, lift the sitting bones toward the ceiling, and from your inner ankles draw the inner legs up into the groins.
Then with an exhalation, push your top thighs back and stretch your heels onto or down toward the floor. Straighten your knees but be sure not to lock them. Firm the outer thighs and roll the upper thighs inward slightly. Narrow the front of the pelvis.
Firm the outer arms and press the bases of the index fingers actively into the floor. From these two points lift along your inner arms from the wrists to the tops of the shoulders. Firm your shoulder blades against your back, then widen them and draw them toward the tailbone. Keep the head between the upper arms; don't let it hang.
Adho Mukha Svanasana is one of the poses in the traditional Sun Salutation sequence. It's also an excellent yoga asana all on its own. Stay in this pose anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes. Then bend your knees to the floor with an exhalation and rest in Child's Pose.Cat Pose
Marjari = cat
Step by Step
Start on your hands and knees in a "tabletop" position. Make sure your knees are set directly below your hips and your wrists, elbows and shoulders are in line and perpendicular to the floor. Center your head in a neutral position, eyes looking at the floor.Inhale, coming back to neutral "tabletop" position on your hands and knees.This pose is often paired with Cow Pose on the inhale for a gentle, flowing vinyasa.Yoga for Back Pain, Part 3
Yoga for Back Pain, Part 3
On a recent flight home from a weekend workshop in Wyoming, as I sat in the oh- so-comfortable seating of one of our major airlines, I decided to peruse the SkyMall magazine that can be found in every seat back pouch of every plane in the country. I am always wondering if there will actually be something in there that I cannot live without. Of course, the last time that happened was about 15 years ago, and I still use the nifty wallet I got to this day. But what jumped out at me, as I squirmed to stay comfortable on hour two of my flight, was the number of devices for all sorts of health issues—most notably, for low-back pain. There were at least a half dozen different gizmos to help you cure your back pain, and you could easily drop $500-600 if you got them all. A recurrent theme for many of the devices was a way to create traction on your spine as a way to reduce low-back pain.
The pages of SkyMall are not the only place where you can find traction prescribed for improving LBP. In fact many medical offices dealing with low-back pain, like your neighborhood chiropractor, may have a very fancy table and set up to do just that. Despite the lack of scientific evidence that traction as a single form of treatment for low-back pain is effective, many students find the yoga suggestions below helpful in a multi-pronged approach to the problem. I had a friend with such pain, who after trying a lot of other things, swears that the weekly table traction he got at his chiropractor’s office finally did the trick. His only complaint was the cost: a lot!
As I’ve discussed in my past few posts about studies on back pain and easing it with yoga, your practice can provide you with safe, gradual traction to relieve tight muscles and connective tissue in the low back and possibly improve the space between the lumbar vertebrae. And at much less the out-of-pocket cost! Some of the poses you already do, if done mindfully with an eye to not triggering any low-back pain while in them, could be helping to create some traction already. Poses like Downward-Facing Dog and Standing Forward Fold, with a slight bend to the knees for both to allow the pelvis to create most of the forward folding action over the leg bones, can allow for some traction on the lumbar spine. If you have a history of a bulging or herniated disc, you should check in with your doctor before doing these poses regularly.
What works really nicely and gives more traction for the entire spine, is to do a version of Down Dog that involves a partner standing behind you, holding a strap that is placed across the top of your thighs. As you go up into Down Dog on your own, the partner will pull the strap firmly against your thighs while leaning back. This allows your arms to become almost unnecessary in keeping you in the pose. Your main job becomes cultivating the feeling that you are lengthening your spine away from your legs in the direction of your hands. Your partner anchors you up and back at the thighs and gravity pulling your forward and down does the rest to create traction for the spine. Stay for up to two minutes. Always take a minute or so when you come out to see how the back responds to this. If you feel good afterwards, it is usually safe to proceed further.
If you don’t have a friend that can do this with you (although I highly recommend you train one to do so) you can use a sturdy doorknob and a long yoga strap to accomplish the same thing. Make the strap into a non-slip large loop, thread it around the inside and outside doorknob of an indoor door, with the door open into a room you can practice Dog into. Step your body inside the loop, holding it up against the top of your front thigh as you face away from the door. Bend your knees, lean your weight forward into the strap, and drop your hands to the floor. At this point you will likely walk your feet back a bit, so they will be on either side of the door, while walking your hands forward until you are in Down Dog, with the strap creating a good pull back on your thighs. In the partner and door versions of Down Dog, you can stay for up to two minutes if things are pain free. With the door method, bend the knees and walk forward away from door, and the body will swing up from the back pressure of the strap. If you have a “yoga wall,” you have likely played with this similar pose with your sling on the higher set of bolts.
With a yoga wall, you can also do a hanging version of Cobbler Pose, which really maximizes gravity’s effect on the spine. The only problem is that you need a very strong core to get in and out of that pose safely, so I will not describe it here, but next post I will address core strengthening and low back pain specifically.
One last idea: Position yourself close to a wall and lay down on your back about one shins-length from the wall. With your knees bent to 90 degrees, put your feet up on the wall so that your shins are parallel with the floor. You will have a nice 90-degree bend also at the hips and thigh bones. Here you can place your hands on the thighs down by the root of the legs. Push your hands into the thighs directly toward the wall. This will create a kind of secondary traction on the spine as your hands move your thighbones away from the pelvis and the pelvis gets pulled along for the ride. Again, maintain the push for up to two minutes, or as tolerated. and assess how it feels after you come out of pose.
As with all practices, as long as your back is not feeling worse after your yoga traction experiments, you will want to do these variations regularly over the course of a few weeks or longer to establish ongoing benefits.
Yoga for Back Pain, Part 2
Yoga for Back Pain, Part 2
A colleague of mine recently made the observation that you never hear your friends and family telling you how great their back feels. In fact, it is usually the opposite sentiment if they mention the back part of the body at all. And yet, as my last post pointed out, yoga is proven to provide relief for chronic back pain of many kinds. The sensation of well-being for a formerly in-pain student is likely a main reason people return to yoga class week after week.
It’s common to see among new yoga students chest-fallen spines, tucked pelvises, and forward-jutting heads. Called kyphosis, lumbar lordosis, and Head Forward Syndrome respectively, these postures are often either the source of back pain or the result of pain due to postural compensations you make to avoid pain. Meanwhile, we know that improving your posture helps to counteract the consequences of aging and gravity on the spine, such as diminished stature, decreased lung capacity, and even decreased abdominal cavity size, which can contribute to sluggish bowels and constipation, urinary frequency, and stress incontinence. Yowser! If you didn’t have a reason to stand more erect, you do now! And for students of all ages, good posture improves balance, lung function, general circulation to all of the body parts, and encourages normal spine architecture.
One way to assess posture is to look at the plumb line, the imaginary line that reveals your center of gravity and that passes through key anatomical landmarks. Looking at someone from the side (or yourself in a photo), start the line at the center opening of the ear, and draw directly down to the side of foot and see what other areas of the body this line bisects. Ideally the line goes through the center point of your upper arm bone (the head of the humerus), the boney point or your upper leg bone near the hip joint (the greater trochanter), the center of the side knee joint (front to back center point) and the boney point of your outer ankle (the lateral malleolus). Many people new to yoga, however, have points that fall in front of or behind the plumb line. Don’t get discouraged if that’s you; you can change this gradually with regular yoga practice.
One way to start working on getting back to center is to stand with your back, including your shoulder blades and butt, resting gently against a wall, but with your heels 4-6 inches away from it. If you have already determined that you have a forward head position, don’t attempt to rest it on the wall at this time. Your yoga practice will begin to correct this situation gradually. If you notice that your upper thoracic (in the region of your ribs) spine is on the wall, but not your shoulder blades, you may have kyphosis. You can work on this by consciously widening your collarbones on the front upper chest away from the breastbone, noticing if the shoulder blades respond by starting to make contact with the wall behind you. If you notice that the low back and spine are flat on the wall, you may have lost the natural lumbar curve that typically leaves a small space between just your low back and the wall. Try bending the knees slightly and tipping the pelvis forward and down a little bit. Does the space in the lower back suddenly appear? If it does, can you maintain the space while simultaneously strongly straightening the legs by pushing down into the floor with the entire foot and gently lengthening up the spine toward the crown of your head?
Even if you’re not able to get to the center line, you’re moving in that direction while learning some valuable feedback about your body: Does this exercise cause actual pain in the back or just intense sensation that resolves quickly when you release the posture? After trying this for a few minutes against the wall, try it away from the wall. Experienced yogis will recognize this as one of the foundational standing yoga poses, Tadasana. When doing it away from the wall, use the memory of the wall contact to help you find a more upright posture on your own.
Another way to play with posture is to lay on your back with your feet pressing into a wall. This will help you create the same effort used in the legs when standing. While maintaining the pressure through the feet, notice the shape of the spine and where you make contact with the floor. If the shoulder blades don’t rest on the floor but the upper spine does, try inhaling the arms up toward the ceiling and then overhead down to the floor (don’t insist they make it all the way to the ground). Exhale them back down to the sides of the body. Repeat this about 6 times. Then reassess the upper back and shoulder blade position.
If the low back is flat on the floor when you begin, with no evidence of the natural lumbar arch, keep one foot pressed into the wall while exhaling and bringing the other knee into the chest and using the hands to squeeze it carefully toward the body. Inhale the leg back to its starting position and do the same on with the other leg. Repeat side to side 6 times. See if this liberates the lumbar spine a bit.
Armed with the information about your own body, you may begin to recognize potential posture-related cases of some of your own back pain. And hopefully, these exercises have already eased some of that sensation. It’s sometimes said that all other yoga poses grow out of Mountain Pose, so in my next post, I’ll highlight some other poses that have unique value for low-back pain. Until then, stand tall, y’all!
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