As Seattle has been turned into a winter wonderland filled with snow, I’ve been thinking about the need to change your practice with the seasons, specifically warming up well. One of my teachers, Melina, has talked a lot about ways to change your practice throughout the season (for example, lots of inversions and backbends during cold winters, forward bends and seated poses during hot summers) and I think these are very important subtleties to be aware of.

The biggest change for me during winter is to make sure that you are taking the time to warm up thoroughly before you start going deep into your stretches. I can’t tell you how many classes I’ve been to over the years where despite the weather (and time of day too – mornings require more warming up) the teacher has jumped right into long static stretches. Not only is this dangerous injury wise, but what ends up happening is that instead of stretching muscles only, you end up stretching your ligaments more than you should. Ligaments, as opposed to muscles, don’t spring back well after you have overstretched them, and since ligaments are what stabilize your joints, you really don’t want them overstretched.

In the personal training world, almost everybody I know has taken to stretching after workouts as opposed to before. And if you are going to stretch before working out or exercising (for activities that require lots of range of motion, this may be necessary) the rule of thumb is that you should warm up to at least a light sweat before you stretch. Dynamic stretching is also gaining in popularity.

For a yoga practice, this can mean adding a few more sun salutations (again, not pushing yourself in the stretches until you are warm) to build up heat before you move to more static poses. Whatever you do, please take the time to warm up. Your body will thank you.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about non-attachment, specifically as it relates to our identity, or I-am-ness. We can tend to build up these tags that we attach to our lives in an effort to create a story about who we are. As a friend of mine put it recently, it’s sort of like we are trying to have the correct identity bullet points to share with people at parties.

We attach to these outside ideas and hang our hat on them to declare that “I am a writer”, or “I am vegan”, etc. But these outside things will never really be who we are. They are just the stories we tell ourselves and others. And at some point we realize that the stories and our true self are not the same thing.

As the Yoga Sutras put it, the cause of suffering is the association or identification of the seer with the seen. I’ve been trying to think a lot about the identities that I’ve assumed for myself over the years and to bring some conscious awareness to them.

It’s not that you stop doing the things you have always loved doing or that which you want to pursue in life, it’s just that you realize that those things are not who you are. That you are more than a collection of bullet points. And when we can do that, when we can disassociate the seer with the seen, then we get closer to our true self. It’s amazing how difficult that can be.

As I begin my transition into this new career, I wanted to set up a blog where I can share my thoughts, provide links to helpful resources, and share a little insight into my new path.

My main passions are yoga, circus, and personal training, so that’s pretty much the bulk of what I’ll be sharing here. I’m intending to add some video tutorials down the road and to build up the site to be as useful for readers as possible, so if there are any resources you think would be helpful on your own path, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to add them.

I’ve been learning so much lately about both fitness and yoga philosophy lately, and am excited to share that. I really believe in the mind body connection and love how bringing conscious attention to one can positively affect the other.

So some of what I’ll be exploring is how the yoga sutras (the ancient yogic texts that are the source of much of what we would consider traditional yogic practices) relate to our modern practice, both for yoga and life in general.

I also believe in the value of pure child-like play, so I’ll also be sharing things that get me excited, whether amazing circus acts that I find inspirational or just fun ways of moving that can help bring joy to your day. I welcome feedback, comments, and e-mails, so please don’t hesitate to connect.