Thai Yoga Massage is a kind of bodywork that applies light pressure and facilitated stretching to your muscles. From a rehabilitation perspective, this is exactly what your tight and rigid tissue needs. The other component to this practice that must be mentioned is that it allows you to dip into a passive moving meditation, which opens up many channels that promote healing. This is similar to what happens in yoga, but Thai Yoga Massage goes a bit deeper because the yoga is being done to you.
In my work, I target three components of health: proper amount of rest, good flexibility throughout the whole body, and cardiovascular strength. Most people need more of all three of these. Thai Yoga Massage targets two of these components very well, and makes cardiovascular strength training not nearly as daunting.
Rest, Flexibility, and Cardio become very important because every day we are bombarded with things that do not serve us. For example, most people live with unreasonable work expectations, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, and poor nutrition.
These situations cause stress on bodies, and as a response, we create tension in an associated area to protect ourselves. It can become a vicious cumulative cycle that can only be repaired through chemical shifts. Let’s face it: most people are medicated in some way to induce the molecular changes needed when they could have prevented the downward spiral of their health through enough rest, flexibility, and cardiovascular strength.
When we drive ourselves too hard mentally, physically, or emotionally, we absorb tension all over our body. Eventually, it afects our movement patterns, sleep cycles, and mood. Thai Massage is the perfect modality to ward of this tension, as you relax and let a good practitioner move, compress, and stretch you. It is an ancient healing art, originally created to support a god to many cultures: Buddha. If it helped him so long ago, it most certainly can help Americans today.
We have a lot to be thankful for as we live in a world where we can access necessities rather easily. However, we often don’t take enough time for our basic health needs. We should have enough rest to recharge the immune system, enough flexibility for tissue to maneuver around possible injuries, and enough cardiovascular strength to maintain good circulation. If you attain these three things, the cumulative cycle does not have the chance to begin. Thai Yoga Massage is a fantastic way to ensure that you are taking the time to recharge and protect your body. Try scheduling this practice into your life so that you can maintain a happy active lifestyle.
Guest Post By Joy Carey – MS Rehab Science & Certified in Thai Massage
Thai Yoga Massage for Beginners
Hawthorne Community Health is offering a 4-hour workshop for on how to integrate facilitated stretching into sessions. (It does meet requirements for 4 CEU’s for massage therapists.) The emphasis will be a stretching a person effectively, yet safely. After the workshop, you will be able to give a 20 min. Thai Yoga Massage that you can trust your receiver will love.The event will be held at 1241 Carpenter Street near the Italian Market in Philadelphia on Friday, October 25th from 11am to 3pm. Cost is $110 for one person, and $176 for two. If you are interested, please contact Joy Carey at 717-519-7289 for more information or visit our website:www.HawthorneCommunityHealth.com.
When’s the last time you both got together for a date night?
Let’s see how much time it takes for you to remember?
2 seconds
5 seconds
10 seconds
15 seconds
Whoa,
If you had to think about it for more than that…its been WAY TOO LONG.
Don’t worry about it too much, we have a fun suprise for you that will keep coming to your inbox every few weeks.
What’s that?
We call them Love Coupons, sometimes Love Vouchers. We started handing these out after our Couples Yoga classes last year and everyone loved them. Our Couples Yoga classes will start up again after Summer, but we didn’t want to wait that long to share this fun gift. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine, that many people forget to about the most important person in their lives.
We’ve included a small gallery of what they look like below and a link to sign-up for our Love Coupons newsletter series. You’ll get a new one every three weeks or so, which is a good clue that, its time for another fun, romantic date-night!
I can’t think of a better time of year to go outdoors with your significant other and enjoy Mother Natures incredible tapestry of colours and texture. From your backyard to your Longwood Gardens, plan an afternoon walk today and get out there and away from your computer, enjoying each others company!
We became members at Winterthur Gardens this year and have been there 2-3 times already. It’s not nearly as crowded as Longwood Gardens and in certain places, it feels as if you are Mr DuPont himself enjoying a quiet time together.
So stop procrastinating and get out there this weekend.
Now that the temperatures are heating up just wanted to let you get a virtual taste of my favorite drink to make in the summer. I don’t know why but mint grows like a weed at our house during the summer, the more mint I pull out, the more mint seems to sprout up.
Healthy Summer Drink of mint, cucumber and lime - refreshingly zesty!
Just take 2 cucumbers, peel and seed.
Grab some mint leaves.
Squeeze lime juice in and puree all together now.
Zoom, zoom, zoom!
Voila. You have a refreshing and alkalizing drink when the thermometer reaches into the 80s.
You can throw a few big ice cubes in if you want.
Give this to your carnivore friends and even they will be yum-yum-ing!
Garnish with a few mint leaves on top.
You can also throw in a few kale or spinach leaves if you are so included, although it you are making this for a friend it will be more attractive without the dark green.
If you don’t want to waste the cucumber seeds then you can take them and lay on the floor with a towel underneath your head. Put the seeds on your eyes and hang out for 10 minutes. The big dark circle under your eyes will have evaporated. Great to do before a big event where you have to look good. If you want a bonus to this eye bag tightening treatment then have your legs up on a chair or up on a wall and you’ll feel tensions start to melt away. It’s like a mini restorative spa yoga treatment for a recession wallet.
It’s fun to do this with a friend or family member. I’ve done treatment with my dad (we had to hide from my step-mom since we didn’t want her to see us getting cucumber juice on the floor and freak out) and also with a guy friend. Both of them felt and looked so refreshed afterwards.
Another Healthy Summer Drink.
Do you have a ton of mint that grows around your property? Then take some leaves and just boil with water. Let it steep a few hours. Now you have your own mint tea. Throw in your ice cubes and you have another refreshing summer drink. Squeeze some lemon in if you are so inclined.
What are your favorite healthy non-alcoholic drinks? Post your answer on our Facebook page or in the comments section below….
For yoga and weight loss, what are the best simple poses( asanas) and exercises to do?
Are you sick of seeing that muffin top peering out of your tank top? Do you feel powerless to change your eating habits? I had never seen a yoga system specifically targeted towards weight loss so I was curious to see how Charry Morris’ Yoga Weight Loss System would work. The e-book is 58 pages long and peppered with pics and illustrations showing you how to do the yoga poses for weight loss and even an illustrated sequence guide is in the back.
One of my favorite things about this guide is the omission of sanskrit terms. I always thought it was intimidating to use the Sanskrit and not the English terms to describe poses. I have gone to more yoga classes than Lindsay Lohan has gone to rehab and I probably can only understand about 10 sanskrit terms, besides having heard them hundreds (some maybe thousands) of times.
Watch this video testimonial
I think the free report that Charry offers is incredibly pointed. Her suggestions are in simple but powerful language aided with illustrations and photos to help you understand yoga poses and how yoga works on different systems of the body to help you with weight loss (such as the musko-skeletal, endocrine, digestive, nervous etc). Even if you don’t buy her training manual, if you are committed to changing your health and body and want to learn more about how to take control over your level of vitality and wellness, then get the free manual. Have a buddy to practice with and check in on your new habits and practice to help make you more likely to stick to it. Give yourself a reward for every goal you get to (make the reward a facial and not fried chicken).
Yoga poses for weight loss
I think the questions at the end of each module are great for dealing with people’s emotional attachment to food. I think these questions would be even more powerful if you had a group or buddy who you could check in with and be accountable to.
One of Charry’s movement sequences
I like the simple diet modification suggestions. Her style of eating is very much in line with my philosophy. Eat foods in their natural state. Substitute water for soda and juice (which will end up saving you a lot of money as well) If you read the ingredients and don’t understand what Sodium Diloryll Dichromate is then it probably is a fancy word for pure toxic crap – so avoid ingredients that sound like your 9th grade lab project.
Yoga is ultimately a state of attuned inner awareness. By heightening our awareness of how we feel when we eat or avoid certain foods, we have more mastery over our diet. You can’t control what you have no awareness over. She doesn’t try to make you eat a raw, vegan or vegetarian diet, she just emphasizes cleaner ways of eating our meat, dairy and eggs.
She give suggestions for lots of viable substitutes for dairy. One thing that I wish was stressed more here was to avoid more refined
yoga poses for weight loss
sugar, although she does mention the evil HFCS (High fructose corn syrup). If you are going to eat soy milk and yogurt if it is loaded with sugar then you aren’t doing your body many favors. Eating something with Stevia or some other kind of natural sweetener (evaporated cane juice and corn sugar are just marketing terms for highly processed toxic white sugar or HFCS) so stay away from them. Also equally toxic are thing like Equal and NutraSweet…these things have been proven to cause cancer in mice. You’re not doing your bod any favors with these either.
If you are confused about all this you might want to read the book “Sugar Blues”. If you don’t think that refined sugar has any strong negative effects on you then go three days without any refined sugar. You’ll have to read ALOT of labels at the grocery store…sugar likes to make it’s way into all kind of non-dessert food like ketchup and potato chips . You’ll probably feel a huge shift in your level of calm and awareness. Or you can do the opposite if you are not good at impulse control. For two days, eat nothing but Fruit Loops, Dunkin Doughnuts, Ben N Jerry’s Wavy Gravy, Starbucks Double Frappacinos with extra whipped cream, Diet Coke for every meal and snack and notice how crappy you feel (and probably look).
I think the exercise about examining your food habits is quite illuminating. Every day around 3 pm I have to have something sweet….these days I usually just microwave a small bowl of dark chocolate chips. It’s not a health tonic though.
The simple step by step instructions with pictures are so helpful. I like how she shows what your hands and feet should look like in certain poses…makes a huge difference in how the pose feels and the benefits you get from it.
What I really appreciate about this yoga training manual that is not often found in others is the modifications and suggestions for people that have certain injuries. When you are in table pose you should not hinge your neck back if you have neck issues.
Charry doesn’t assume everyone can physically do all the postures so the variations are very welcoming for beginners or for the stiff and inflexible. For the balancing poses, I think it is very helpful to have the close up of the feet and toes. It’s great to see a more challenging balancing pose and also an easier modification. You’re not auditioning for Cirque Du Soleil, you just want to get in balance health-wise.
If you do buy this manual, I would recommend going to a few traditional hatha yoga or vinyasa class so you can really learn the poses with expert supervision and the teacher can help you get into proper alignment so you get the maximum benefits from the pose.
After you feel comfortable with the basic poses, then you can use this guide to help you develop and refine your own personal practice. I was too poor to pay for classes a few years back (and the time it takes to get to classes was a drag) so for many years I just did my own practice at home, sometimes with a tape or a book or sometimes with no written or visual aids.
Before you start saying you don’t have time, money, space or privacy to practice just reflect on your excuses. Are you committed to your excuses or are you committed to changing your life? What will your life, body and health be like if you continue on the health path you are now on? Take on this program for one week and see what a difference you feel. If you regularly practice yoga already, what changes in your life did you notice when you started to make this a part of your life?
