Turkey Flow & The Real Bird of Paradise

A week ago today, I taught a half flow, half restorative class to prepare folks for the Thanksgiving Day holiday.  We had a pretty good time, and a rockin', if not slightly nutters, playlist to practice to...  This is one of my more diverse ones, and I had some requests to post it publicly, so here it is:

1. Devotion, Stephen DeRuby
2. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits
3. Just Dance, Lady Gaga
4. We R Who We R, Ke$ha
5. Bizarre Love Triangle '94, New Order
6. Raise Your Glass, Pink
7. Letting Go, Sean Kingston & Nicki Minaj
8. One Tribe, Black Eyed Peas
9. Like This, Kelly Rowland
10. Heart of the Matter, India.Arie
11. Thank You, Dido
12. Govindah, Rasa
13. Love, ANAHATA
14. Gift of Tears, Vin Mitchell
15. Silent Moment, ANAHATA

The Real Bird of Paradise? 
I split my Thanksgiving between the kitchen and the yoga studio.  And as such, my fella inevitably made a crack about the bird of paradise, a reference both to the bird I prepared (above) and the yoga pose (featured to the right).  The pose is quite challenging -- it's a balancing pose, with a bind, with some serious hip opening; it took me about a year to get the balancing and the bind, without the full extension of the leg.  Comparatively, the other bird took four and half hours to cook, and over a week later, we're still munching on the leftovers.

Which is the real bird of paradise?  You tell me.

Gratitude: A Meditation for Now (and Later)

Gratitude is one of those words that comes up in yoga. Depending on how you're feeling towards the spiritual / emotional side of things, gratitude could be what the teacher is talking about while you're holding an awkward pose or it could be a meditation you seek to live by.

Sometimes when I'm feeling a little cynical, I think to myself, "gratitude pose--I'm grateful I can even get into it today." (See photo on right from yogajournal.com.)

When I'm teaching parsvottanasana (gratitude pose), I like to remind the class to be grateful for something external but also something inward-facing. For some reason, self gratitude is often perceived as a lack of humility, as a negative. It can be challenging to retrain ourselves to think, "well gosh, thank you for looking out for me today." Despite all of our external responsibilities, our first priority should always be providing for ourselves (or we can't be as useful to the external world)!

It's a beautiful idea, all this gratitude. But it's easy to forget to be grateful for yourself and others that really are always there should you need them. Right now, I'm incredibly thankful for all my friends.

This post is an incredibly round about way of saying thank you.