I just read this story about flat feet in the New York Times. I’m not anti-surgery at all. Having benefited from surgical repair of torn cartilage in my hip socket, I fully appreciate how sometimes modern medicine is the way to go. Surgery helped me when yoga, massage, physical therapy, and other modalities just weren’t working.

But I notice the author of the article says his doctor tried everything—orthotics, taping, a brace—but mentions nothing of strength training for the feet. He does say he had hoped for a “simple solution like exercises.” I wonder if he ever worked with a physical therapist on the kind of footwork we do in yoga classes? Of course, it’s not that simple—you have to do them every day—and it takes time. But I suspect the recuperation from a surgery like this isn’t so fast either.

Feet First

Anyone who has taken class with me this week knows that I’ve been a little foot focused. Since the focus of the month at the studio has been vrksasana (tree pose), I’ve been making sure to incorporate some foot stretching and strengthening work into my classes. But I’ve been a bit more hoof centric this week because I’m currently enrolled in the amazing Jenny Otto’s therapeutic Body Balance program at Willow Street Yoga, and we just spent a weekend focused on, you guessed it, feet.

Jenny, along with one of my other yoga inspirations, Doug Keller, has a knack clearly spelling out the connections between the strength and suppleness of the foot and the rest of the body, via the fascia, muscles, and bones.

You’ve heard it before, but it’s worth repeating–your feet are your foundation! If you’ve got issues with your knees, your hips, or your back (or just about anything, really), chances are there’s something going on with your feet. Pronated? There’s a good chance your lower back isn’t feeling so great. Supinated? Maybe you’re feeling things in your sacroiliac. Is the transverse arch of your foot week? Chances are your pelvic floor is not very toned. Didn’t know you had a transverse arch? (Oh… your poor pelvic floor!)

Doug Keller provides an overview of the energetic and physical connections between our feet and the rest of the body in his article Sole Support — The Feet, which you can read at his web page or at Yoga + Joyful Living. For more in depth reading, check out his Yoga as Therapy books.

In the mean time, you can do your feet and the rest of your body a favor with a few simple exercises to unstick tight fascia and strengthen weak muscles. These are exercises that I’ve learned from Doug, Jenny and fellow Flow teacher Megan Davis, except where otherwise noted.

Foot care basics:

Yogi hand/toe shake – sit with legs extended in front of you or in a chair. Cross one ankle over the opposite thigh. Interlace the fingers of your opposite hand between your toes. Wiggle them around to stretch out the space between your toes. With fingers between toes, take a few gentle ankle circles in each direction.

Massage – slide your fingers out. Gently press your toes back toward your foot (flex the foot) and then draw them toward the sole of the foot (point the foot). Thoroughly massage the bottom of your foot, from heel to toes, along inside and outside edges and the midline of the foot.

Toe calisthenics – uncross your leg and place the sole of the foot on the floor.
• Lift all toes off the floor (keep the ball of the foot down), and spread them apart as much as possible (yes, even the pinky toe!). Set them all down.
• Lift all the toes again. Try to lengthen through the big toe and set just that one down. Now do the same with the little toe. Now try to press the big and little toes to the floor and keep the middle three lifted (this one will really work the transverse arch of the foot). Go ahead—use your fingers to tell the toes what to do!
• Set all the toes down. Try to lift just the big toe. Lift only the little toe. Now try lifting the big toe and the little toe, while keeping the other three down. Breaking a sweat yet?

Other ways to help your feet:

Yamuna Foot Wakers have helped me when I’ve had plantar fasciitis flare ups. The knobby bits feel really good on tight, sore tissue. Try starting at the ball of the foot and putting pressure there as you alternately lift your toes away from and then curl them down around the Foot Waker. Work your way down the foot this way. You can also rock the foot forward and back at each spot along the way to get deeper into the tissue.

Dr. Andrew Weil describes a particularly effective stretch for plantar fasciitis: Sit down and cross the affected leg over the other. With legs crossed, extend your top leg and reach for the toes (use a belt if you have to). Stretch the foot by gently flexing the toes back. Hold for 10 seconds. Stop. Repeat 10 times. Do this stretch first thing in the morning and repeat at mid day and evening.

Attention, please.

My thoughts are still brewing on my overdue follow up post on the rasas and limiting our diet of anger and other emotions. I know it’s overdue, because I just went upstairs to yell at my neighbor for being noisy. There’s some rasa for you.

But in the mean time, while I avoid dealing with that, here’s something for you to think about:

“Your asana should make you pay attention. You want to feel a little uncomfortable.”

I heard this recently while on vacation, taking class at an unfamiliar studio. I was at first put off by this suggestion, party because I felt like the teacher had just given me a rather uncomfortable hands-on adjustment. And I was on vacation – the whole point was to be comfortable. I was in class that day to feel good, to relax, and stretch my travel-weary muscles.

But he was right. Asana is often uncomfortable not only because our muscles are tight, but because holding poses can bring up emotions and memories that we might want to push aside, or we might not like realizing that maybe we could work a little harder, or differently. If our yoga is so comfortable that our mind is wandering and we aren’t paying attention, what is it doing for us? (The exception of course being restorative poses, that are designed to help us let go and not be uncomfortable).

What do you think? Have some of your best or most interesting yoga experiences been when you’ve been a little uncomfortable? How do you know that you’re crossing the line from paying attention and instead injuring yourself, or focusing too much on achievement?

“As we practice yoga and begin to meditate, we develop equanimity. We let go of this ego. We realize that most of life is not personal.”

I read this passage in B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Life a few years ago and have always found it both helpful and troublesome. Iyengar uses the example of typical driving conditions in India—streets jammed with drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and animals trying to get where they’re going—to point out how life is full of moments that don’t have be taken personally. “…our culture reminds us that sometimes life is impersonal. We all are subject to impersonal forces—like traffic.”

When I first read this I thought, OK, so there’s a tool for those days when someone or something irks you. Just remember that life is full of impersonal moments that we don’t have to take personally. It’s not about me; it’s just something that happened.

So much easier said than done, when for example, a driver is being courteous enough to hurriedly wave you through a cross walk, or the person in front of you in the express check out lane has interpreted the 15-item limit to include multiple incidence of 15 broad categories of items—fruits, things you store under the sink in the bathroom, processed snack foods containing high fructose corn syrup…

I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t something else about the little things in life that makes us so susceptible to frustration, anger, anxiety, or hurt. Why can’t I just develop equanimity, damn it?

And then I read this blog’s namesake book, and learned about something that Daniel Gilbert calls the “psychological immune system” and the intensity trigger.

According to Gilbert, our psychological defenses are like a military defense system that is triggered by large threats rather than small ones. A system that is prepared for every small hazard, say with travel bans, electrified borders, and constant surveillance, would be costly and impractical. So there has to be some minimum threshold that triggers a defensive reaction. The big threats get the big guns, but little ones might slip by, unnoticed (until, of course, they hit their target).

Our psychological immune system is like this. “Failed marriages and lost jobs are the kinds of large-scale assaults on our happiness that trigger our psychological defenses, but these defenses are not triggered by broken pencils, stubbed toes, or slow elevators…Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures.”

Our brains are designed to help us recover and develop resilience after major losses, catastrophic events, and hardships. But we’re on our own when it comes to not strangling the loud know-it-all who catches the typo in our report.

So where does that leave us? Maybe in addition to telling ourselves “it’s not personal,” we can add “small threat—no missiles necessary” to our daily mantras. We can also try asking ourselves what is the rasa, or essential flavor of what we’re feeling at a particular moment (anger? disgust? fear?), and how that is affecting our response. Maybe we can even try to limit the amount of anger or disgust in our daily diet. More about that later…

Get up, stand up

Rumor has it that some trees in the DC metro area are showing signs of buds. Someone saw a crocus. Spring is in the air (despite the forecast for snow tonight). I find myself thinking about riding my bike to the yoga studio—as soon as all those bike lanes are cleared of lingering snow—and perusing garden catalogues to see which variety of heirloom lettuce I can kill this year.

If you’re like me, you spent the last few weeks hunkered down, staying at home to keep out of the snow (and then the melting snow and puddles), cooking, eating, and maybe watching a bit too much TV. And there’s a certain amount of inertia that has built up (inertia being the polite way of saying tummy fat).

And so I find myself looking forward to ballet tonight and yoga tomorrow night—it will be good to get things moving. I want to move, sweat, and wring out the toxins.

But apparently those things can’t happen soon enough. Because between now and then, I’ll be sitting all day. Just this morning I read an article by Olivia Judson in the New York Times about how sitting for extended periods of time wrecks havoc on the body. And not just because when you sit you’re not exercising, or you tend to eat more, or you hip flexors tighten and your back muscles weaken. It’s actually just bad for you all on its own. Apparently, some of the molecules that help our body process sugars and fats are only produced when muscles are actively contracted, as when we are walking around. Too much sitting causes our bodies to shift into a “physiology of inactivity,” and our metabolisms to slow down.

It’s enough to make me want to jump up and run to an Ashtanga or Jivamukti yoga class. Right now.

Unfortunately, we can’t always take off to go to yoga in the middle of the day. And one can only get up for water (and then for the bathroom) so many time per day. If you find yourself chained to a non-standing desk for most of the day, here are some ways to give yourself a break from the tyranny of metabolic slow down. All of these are poses that can be done comfortably in the space of your office or cubicle.

Tadasana (also known as standing up).

From tadasana, extend your arms overhead (urdhva hastasana). Hold your right wrist in your left hand and gently bend to the left. Lengthen both sides of the body as you go up and over, rather than collapsing and cruching on the left side. Repeat on the other side.

Supported forward folds – place your hands on your desk or wall and slowly walk your feet back so that you’re in a supported uttanasana. Keep the low belly lifted. Gently resist your shins away from each other and press into all four corners of each foot into the floor to keep the legs active and the back supported.

Twists
• Sure the seated variety won’t get that lipoprotein lipase firing, but will help with digestion and unkink a stiff spine.
• You can take a standing version from tadasana by drawing one knee toward your chest with the opposite hand. Draw your low belly in and up as you gently twist toward the leg. Your other hand can rest on your hip or low back, or you can extend the arm to the side.
• For a nice twist from your forward fold, with your hands on your desk or the wall, move one hand so that it is lined up with the midline of your body. Extend the other arm directly side and lift your belly as you rotate the torso to the side.

Vrksasana (tree pose) – take off your shoes and practice a standing balance!

Garudasana (eagle pose) – this will be a sure conversation starter, if one of your coworkers happens by your cubicle.

Malasana (squat) – technically, not standing, but a nice hip opener. Tuck some books under your heels if they don’t touch the floor.

Finally, this gentle backbend is one of my favorites – it’s kind of like a standing cat and cow. Start in tadasana. Clasp your hands behind your back, fingers interlaced. Don’t lock your elbows, but instead keep your palms together and elbows soft, or bent. As you inhale gently squeeze the tips of the shoulder blades together behind you and you lift your heart for a small gentle back bend. Hug the fronts of the hips together to keep the belly engaged and the low back safe. As you exhale, allow your knees to bend. Draw your belly in more and curve your spine as though you’re trying to make a “C” shape. Let your head and neck relax forward. Repeat these two movements—gently bending up and back on the inhale and gently curving forward on the exhale—a few times to release a stiff spine and stretch the fronts of the shoulders.

Yoga for difficult days

If you live near the Washington, DC metro area, you’ve been cooped up for quite a few days now, thanks to Snowpocalypse II: The Wrath of Tai Shan and Snowpocalypse III: Son of Tai Shan. Even as you emerge from the coziness of your home and start to venture outside, you may still be sore from all that shoveling, or maybe inertia has set in and you just don’t feel like getting off the couch after all this time. Whatever the reason, you might not feel up to your usual yoga practice. You might not feel up to anything beyond some chips and salsa (that is, if you were fortunate enough to get to the grocery store before all the chips and salsa were snatched up by your fellow panicked citizens).

So you’re feeling stiff, hurty, tired, bored, possibly cranky because you really wanted those chips, and you find that even if you could get to a yoga class, you don’t think you could bend down to take off your snow boots, let alone fold forward in uttanasana.

If you’re like me, whenever you’re immobile for a long time—or even just for a little while, say from sitting in a car for too long—you probably stiffen up in the hips, hamstrings and lower back. This tightness cuts us off from our core, as though we had some sort of invisible crunchy outer shell around our marshmallowy interior. We lose our ability to feel like we’re initiating movement from our core, and instead of moving steadily and gracefully we hobble around, hunched over like little snow elves, wondering if anyone manufactures a full-body heating pad.

If you don’t have a full-body heating pad, you may want to try the following at-home practice. I’ve been playing around with this series for a while now, as a way to break through that feeling of stuckness after time spent traveling in a car or plane, or after spending a day in bed sick or taking some time off because of an injury.

The idea is to repeat this series of gentle movements and slowly add more intense poses with each iteration so that we can slowly release tension in the hips, hamstrings, back and other areas.  That way we can to break through that barrier of stiffness and gain access to core muscles so that we begin to move more fluidly and naturally and with less pain.

You can do as little or as much of this practice as you like. If you’re feeling really stuck, try doing the first sequence of movements and see how you feel. If that’s enough, you can stop there. If, as I often do, you find that doing just this small amount of movement is enough to begin to loosen tight muscles and joints so that you feel like you have enough energy, then proceed to the next sequence, and so on. The sun salutations are optional—but again, I usually find that after the first or second sequence, I really want to do them. Move slowly, move gently. Remember—forcing things just causes more tension!

Yoga for Difficult Days