PictureFancy some chocolate anyone?
Chocolate does not need to be a guilty pleasure.  Why feel guilty when you can be doing something good for yourself, like sharing in the delights of some home made chocolate.

 

Here we share with you our thoughts on chocolate.  We are looking even more forward to sharing the real thing in Bali soon!

Who doesn’t love chocolate?

 

And when it is raw, natural guilt free chocolate,  even better.

 

I know a lot of yogis and health conscious people out there that can eat it by the bucket load.  It triggers something in everyone you just want to go back for more.

 

I love making my own raw-chocolates.

 

Again, quality over quantity for me.  I can eat 2-3 but that is it. For some reason my digestion can only tolerate small amounts.

 

My favorite types of chocolate are truffles, or the plain with activated nuts.

 

I went through a stage putting adaptogens like astragulas, shilajit-ginseng-reishi into my mix and that gets into a whole new level of mind opening craziness!

 

Anyway, I will be giving a chocolate making workshop at the coming art of life retreat so watch out.

 

Oksana
The cacao bean used to be the Mayan currency. That’s how highly it was valued!

 

Put cacao beans under a heavy press and by extraction you get 2 ingredients:  cacao butter and cacao powder. Put cacao butter and powder back together again, and the alchemical process makes chocolate!!

 

Raw, untreated, unheated cacao has high levels of triptophans!!

 

Triptophans effect our serotonin levels – that’s why we feel good when we eat chocolate.

 

Chocolate also contains dozens of mineral and vitamins, the highest of these being magnesium. Magnesium is excellent for us especially after any form of exercise, like after our yoga practice!

 

I always have chocolate in the house.  I make it myself.  It is really easy to have a week’s supply. I eat it all the time.

 

Commercialised chocolate is far from the real thing. The majority of it contains gums, emulsifiers and stabilizers, and most brands have been using palm oil too.

 

The level of sugar (and it’s the bad fructose sugar they use) is stupendously high, as well as flavor enhancers, these days they even replace the whole ‘chocolate factor’ with a substitute additive called PGPR made in the lab (see this link for more http://www.progressive-charlestown.com/2012/02/things-you-probably-dont-want-to-know.html)

 

Vote with your dollar, vote for nutrition, and eat as much good chocolate as you want!!!


I eat things as I feel like them.  For some reason I tend to feel like a piece of chocolate at the end of the day.

 

I have always preferred dark chocolate to milk chocolate.  I like trying different types of chocolate with bits of things in them.

 

I don’t eat much chocolate and I never feel like eating very much anyway. For me it is about having a small taste of something.

 

I have never been a person to sit down and eat a whole block of chocolate although I know lots of people who tell me they can do so with ease.   I cannot even imagine feeling like I would want to.

 

Maybe I have a different chemical make up? Enough serotonin naturally?  I used to be a runner and could run for hours and never have a so-called ‘runner’s high’.  I just felt a basic calm and happy.

 

www.artofliferetreats.com


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Picture Many people ask us before we run retreats whether there will be coffee.

It’s like they think they might be doing something naughty or wrong by wanting a cup of coffee in the morning.

 

A part of our retreat process is to help you question these types of assumptions that can lead to feelings of guilt or shame.  We are about happiness after all!

 

It does not mean we are hedonists promoting everything that feels good.  We just try to help you towards a healthier line of thinking so you can make more informed decisions for yourself, that’s all.

 

And managing people’s coffee expectations at our yoga and raw food retreat is not hard! We drink coffee!  And, we also want to be flexible enough to try different things too.

 

Below are our quick thoughts on coffee.  You will see that some of us have much more knowledge than others and, perhaps most importantly, that we try not to just drink coffee simply out of habit and have had a little think about what we are doing to get to the places we are now—different places as they are!

 

 

I had a big break from coffee a couple years back when I started being 100 percent raw. My body just couldn’t tolerate it so I stopped.

 

When on raw food I was getting naturally  stimulated therefore coffee’s stimulating properties were almost too much to handle.

 

Now, since being on an 80 percent raw food intake, I have discovered the coffee bean again.  But I always question where  it comes from and how has it been processed etc.

 

I prefer quality to quantity.

 

I love it black but sometimes crave the odd nut milk latte.

 

Oksana
I love the smell of the coffee. And I certainly have a taste for good coffee. I like trying different brews and filtration systems, at the moment I am into Flores and Toraja coffee (different regions in Indonesia). It’s a darker bean, almost black and had a more rounded earthy chocolate taste to it.

 

I drink my coffee black. And I generally don’t drink it first thing in the morning.

 

I am very aware of what its effects are on my body.

 

Coffee has a bad name for it because it’s addictive, can make you jittery, acidic and ‘over stimulated’. Many people ‘use’ coffee to move their bowels in the morning.

 

There are 2 types of coffee bean – the Robusta and Arabica bean.

 

The Robusta coffee is a lower grade bean produced heavily by 3rd world countries for big corporation to produce a cheap high caffeinated bean to flood the market. Starbucks, Gloria Jeans, Nestle etc. If it is Big it is using the robusta bean.

 

The Arabica bean is the higher grade bean, grows usually at higher altitude, and needs more refined conditions.

 

The caffeine content is what most people get addicted to. Caffeine effects your nervous system and your adrenals. But the most unfavouable quality of coffee is actually its acidity levels. It takes 12 cups of water to reduce the effect of one cup of coffee in your system! That’s 12 cups of water!!!

 

The smell and the colour of acidic urine is strong! So watch your pee and make sure you drink lots of water to dilute the effects from your body.

 
I forced myself to start drinking coffee when I started work to be social! I didn’t like it at first but I soon began to. I only had one cup a day.

 

Then one day I was not able to have my coffee at the regular time due to some routine change.

 

I got this massive headache that lasted all day and I did not know what it was.

 

I later figured out that it was this one cup of coffee that my body became addicted to. I didn’t like the idea of being addicted to something.  This was all before my days as a practicing yogi.

 

So I stopped for a while.  However, the ritual of a hot drink at certain times was very calming so I was just having something else like a tea or herbal tea or something.

 

Over time I somehow felt it was time to have some coffee again and I gradually started drinking it.  It actually gave me some sort of physiological lift.  I think it is the caffeine and it has an effect on my blood pressure.  I have naturally quite low blood pressure, which, if it gets too low can make you feel very weak and unable to do anything.  I have not had this scientifically verified or anything!  But, what I found was that without changing anything else—exercise, diet (vegetarian, a lot of it raw), that cup of coffee seemed to make a difference.

 

So now I drink coffee again.  I will have to look at the type of coffee now Im more informed.  You will see I am the most unrefined of the foodies here but that is where I am at.  I use an aeropress.

 

I remember reading Iyengar’s book, Light on Yoga, and in the beginning section it talks about having a cup of tea or coffee in the morning before your practice.  I thought, well, if Iyengar says then there you go!

 

However, I am always acutely aware that coffee is large source of income for millions of people in developing countries.  I know that labour conditions are not always the best for them and I hope that can be improved.

 

Apparently:
65 years after their last meeting  BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois met again, and their topic of conversation was their mutual love for coffee!


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PictureIn general jams have been made from the need to preserve fruit so you can enjoy them and their flavours in periods in which it’s hard to source them.

 

At the time of ancient Rome there were very similar products to jam, made from whole fruit dipped in sweet wine, mulled wine, juice and even honey.

 

The Italian Geography of fruit and their flavours are:

 

South Italy, thanks to high temperatures is famous for citrus marmalade.
Lemon marmalade in Sicily, oranges in Calabria and quince and figs in Puglia. In these lands citrus are vast and can enjoy a hot and tireless sun.

 

Central Italy offers a wide range of grape jam.

 

In Northern Italy, thanks to the humid climate, the forest fruits are used for jams. Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries.

 

Jam can be made from: cherries, plums, oranges, strawberries, peaches, apricots.  One of the greatest benefits of not boiling the fruit unlike  the traditional way of making jam is that all the enzymes are intact and so much less sugar is needed. They can enjoyed with raw crackers and breads.

 

It’s ideal for the whole family.

 

An abundance of colors and flavours to be tasted at any time of the day: breakfast, snack time and can also be used for the preparation of so many other raw sweets.

 

I used lemon and dates as the preservative. Dates with its natural sugar enables ‘marmelada’ a 4-5 day life in the fridge.

 

Ingredients:

  • 500g of ripe apricots, or any fruit of your choice
  • 7-8 large fresh dates
  • Juice-half a lemon
  • 1 teaspoon of lemon peel
  • ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

 

Put all the ingredients in food processor and process until a thick mass – the marmelada is formed. It will need 2-3 min, depends of the power of food processor.

 

Put the jam into a jar, eat and store the rest in the fridge.

 

 

Hugs from Italy! :))
Neli Todorov writes an active blog http://nelisraw.blogspot.it/ and shares news of workshops and events on her facebook page


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PictureAs a teacher I am always trying to demonstrate active movement and show where movement may be coming from. Sometimes this is tricky because what you see may not be where the movement arises.

 

Also, sometimes a more passive posture may end up looking much the same as the active posture.  But the feeling is completely different.

 

In the first picture I used active spinal movements to come into the pose.

 

In the second I came in by ‘falling’ with gravity and mainly by flexing my hips.

 

While they look much the same, the feeling in the torso especially is completely different.

 

Active movement (spinal forward flexion first) – Non-active movement (hip flexion first)


 

In the first pose I feel lifted, light and lengthened.  In the second I feel more sinking—especially into the hips–and general heaviness.

 

I don’t want to suggest one is right or wrong.  I choose to do the first version in my practice and teaching to help develop strength and mobility in the torso.

 

Aside from helping my spine feel good, moving actively and having activated muscles around my tummy in particular, helps me come into the arm balance variation that follows this posture in our current sequence.

 

Here I have to say, I got a six-pack without ever doing a crunch or by adding a ‘core yoga’ section into my classes or self-practice.

 

I simply do active movements throughout my entire class and am pretty much doing a ‘sit-up’, aka active spinal forward flexion, in every forward bend I do.

 

Back to the postures at hand!  There are two.  A standing posture, then an arm balance.
Watch the video first to get a sense of the flow and process.

Spinally speaking, the standing posture is basically a twisting, side bending, forward bending backbend.  That is, once I am in the lunge and lengthen lower back (sitting bones down, top of pelvis back), I do a twist, a side bend, a forward bend, then a little back bend in my upper back.  A little hip flexion creeps in but after the spinal forward flexion.

Step 1: Get into a lunge
In this lunge I have my back heel up.  That is because I am going to make this posture dynamic and move into the arm balance.  Traditionally heel is down.

 

Many people find having heel up difficult to balance.  You need to be using your feet and legs actively to assist with the balance.  I grip with my toes lightly.

 

Also, if you allow your hips to be sinking it is often a sign you are not using your legs actively enough and will make it harder to balance.  I keep my hips a little higher and legs active here.  Nothing wrong with going lower but just in an active and not sinking way.

 

Step 2: Lengthen lower back
Here I have taken sitting bones down, top of pelvis back in order to lengthen my lower back.

 

To me, this is different and more subtle than ‘tucking under’.  Remember, rather than fret about action, go for feeling.  The feeling here is to have space in your lower back and not squashing.

 

In this picture I have also lengthened my entire spine. I have taken my lower ribs back and up lightly.  You cannot see my neck but I have head down, neck back slightly to lengthen back of neck.

 

I have begun to push my armpits forward and lightly down, elbows lightly up.

 

Step 3: Active spinal twist
I try to move from base of spine upwards.  That means, turning from navel, area then lower ribs, then chest, then shoulders.

 

Look at the front foot.  See how much it is still working.

 

Spine still long, not arching.

 

Step 4: Active spinal side bending
Here I initiate side bending by bringing back hip forward and up towards the rib.  At the same time I am reaching opposite arm up and forward from my waist/pelvis and trying to move that side hip back slightly so the whole side body lengthens.

 

The side of my body that closest in this picture is firming.  This side bending firmness will help me in the arm balance.

 

You can see I start to have more weight on my front foot—the back heel is raising as well in preparation for the arm balance to soon come.

 

At this stage I am in a back lengthening, twisting, side bending posture.

 

Step 5: Spinal forward flexion
Now I have begun a spinal forward flexion process.

 

See the space you can see between the top of my thigh and torso and how the angle is still relatively open.

 

I am now in a spine lengthening, twisting, side bending, forward bend.

Step 6: A bit of hip flexion
There is no need to go deeper.  Unless you are coming to the arm balance, that is!

To get to the ground I need some hip flexion.  I initiate hip flexion here, after I have done my active twisting, side bending, forward bend.  Importantly, I maintain these actions as I lower.In my own practice I often choose to stay at this point here.  It feels really good.

I can do the arm balance easily but for me it seems unnecessary compared to how nice it feels to stay actively in this posture for some time.

 

At this point a t lot of yoga teachers in classes I have attended will come up and try and get me to put my back heel on the ground, to try and put my hand on the ground, to try and take my legs further apart.

 

There is nothing wrong with that.  But this feels so much better.  Perhaps it is not pretty but once you start to appreciate active movements and see what is going on in the posture you see this as something lovely and delicious feeling.

 

I am not leaning or using the bottom arm on my knee at all.  If you were to use it then do so in an intelligent and active way.  That would mean using the arm to press lightly into the thigh and pressing the thigh back into the arm.  I am definitely not using my arm to ‘wrench’ or twist my spine here.  I am also not sinking into it.

 

Step 7: More hip flexion and knee bending to get hands to ground
The only way to get to the ground is to get some more hip flexion in there, front knee bends more as well.

 

A lot more in fact.  You can see it has started to come in front of my toes.  I need to be firm behind my knee to maintain the integrity of my knee here.  My ankles are moderately flexible in a squat so my heel can stay down.  If you need it is perfectly fine to lift that heel.  In fact, it might help you to keep firm behind the knee.

 

You can see hands are coming in front of the foot and off to the side.

 

I am maintaining all of the actions from previous steps.  That means my front knee is actually only lightly touching my arm.

 

Notice how at no stage did I start pushing my arm into the knee to get me into this twist.  They are touching lightly here.  I do not want that front knee to get heavy.  It will become heavy if you are not using your torso actively and you will feel like you are sinking in this posture instead of lifting.

 

This picture sort of shows you how my whole back body is lengthened, not flattened.   You can see I am moving my chest into my upper back and moving my shoulder blades around the sides of my chest.

 

Notice I am transferring weight forward.  You can see this as I am coming more onto the tops of my toes on the back foot.

 

Step 8: Enhance side bending
Leaning forward with more weight on my hands and pushing the floor away.  I don’t want weight on my feet in an arm balance.  I need to support it by pushing into the floor with arms to get lift.

 

I am gripping with finger tips as thought grabbing at the ground (not flattening fingers).

 

I am maintaining all the core actions.

 

This allows me to enhace side bending by bringing the back knee into my shoulder.  I can only do this without feeling heavy or sinking if I have kept all of the actions in the torso.

 

You can see weight is more and more over the hands and my front heel has started to lift.  I need lightness in this foot to come up.

 

I squeeze my wrists together and keep feeling as though my elbows are trying to come together.

 

Step 9: Lean forward, smile, stay firm but calm, and lift
Compare this picture with the previous one and you see my shoulders have come further forward over the finger tips.  I have to lean forward without dropping into my shoulders to come into this position.

 

Actually, let me correct myself.  I don’t have to.  You can drop and do this but it will probably feel awful on your wrists and shoulders!

 

If you can sneak a look at my tummy here you can see is it active!

 



Picture


Step 10

Step 10: Legs out!
I continue leaning forward.  See how far my shoulders have come in front of wrists.  I suppose if you were stronger you would not need to lean as far forward but I am not that strong.  I am trying not to lower my chest but to stay lifted.

 

Maintaining all previous actions, I just straighten my legs.

 

The top thigh is rolling in and bottom thigh is rolling out.

 

I am happy and calm and firm and strong and feeling good.  If you walked past me I could say hello and tell you how good I was feeling and have a little chat without getting breathless.

 

In Sum
Remember that this arm balance is just a bit of show ponying really.  It looks impressive but it won’t make you happier or healthier!

 

Staying in the standing version might help you more than the arm balance.


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Picture

Hanumanasana (henceforth to be called the splits) is a pose to work towards with caution.
.
As I tell my students, when I first started yoga I injured myself with over-zealous practice of the posture.
This was a case of pure ego.  I actually practiced mindfully and diligently.  The day I made it into the pose after many months of practice I was so pleased with myself that later on (several hours after my practice and we could almost call it the next day) I met a friend and said ‘Look, I can do the splits!’

I proceeded to do the splits right there and then, with no preparation.

Well, let’s say I managed the position but did something to my butt that had me limping for a month!

 

These days I can do the pose almost first thing in the morning as I have been practicing for many years.  However, most people will need quite a bit of preparation.

 

The splits should not feel like too much stretching. It is not about splitting apart.

 

Working actively means the pose is actually about coming together again.

 

You remain at whatever stage you feel comfortable in (feel like lengthening and relaxing, not stretching and tugging).  But first, some keys to practice. Below I have shown step-wise progression into the posture.
Hover the curser over the photos to see the steps

Keys to practice
There are two key things I am doing in each stage. The first also has a little subplot.
First, my front thigh is rolling out and my back thigh is rolling in.
This means the thigh bone of the front leg feels as though the side butt (near the crease) is firming slightly.  What you see is that the knee might roll away from the centre line of your body.

 

The back thigh is rolling in, which means you might feel the inner thigh firming a little.  If you could turn around and see your knee is trying to move so it is more towards the centre line of your body.

 

The subplot here is that I am also trying to move the side of front hip back and draw side of back hip forward.

 

If you are not mindful the opposite tends to happen.  That is, when you roll the front thigh out it can often bring the side of front hip forward and when rolling the back thigh in it can often send the side of back hip backward. So you need to watch out for this.

 

The second key thing I am doing is to try to suck my legs or feet together.

 

Yes. I am not actually trying to split them apart.

 

Sucking them together could be likened to someone at foot trying to push your legs back together (what I am doing).

 

Whereas most beginners just try to let their legs come apart. Actually, they do not even do that so much as let the weight of their entire pelvis and torso just hang and sag in the middle.  Its not a pleasant feeling. Sucking it up is key.

 

In our yoga practice of this pose we need to be thinking of trying to draw our feet back together again (while they move apart).

 

This makes the posture active rather than passive.

 

It will help make you stronger and more mobile.

 

The video shows these movements in action.  I have also provided a 2nd video to show advanced variations of the posture (intended for demonstrational purposes).


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