turbodog spirit center

Forrest Yoga Shoulder Shrugs

Benefits:

• Releases tension in upper back and neck
• Strengthens and warms up shoulders for inversions, backbends, arm-balances etc.
• Helps with posture by stretching chest open thereby eliminating hunching
• Therapeutic for rotator cuff injuries
• Can be done anywhere, like sitting at your desk while reading this
• Appropriate for all levels

Alignment:

• Keep back of skull-bones over sacrum rather than pushing head forward when squeezing shoulder-blades, like most people do.
• Keep chin parallel to the floor rather than making the common error of tilting head forward when drawing shoulder-blades   down.

Pushing head forward &/or tilting head strains back of neck  muscles.

• Arms are relaxed forcing upper back & shoulder muscles to work
• Upper back muscles release on inhales, in-between each squeeze, without rounding shoulders forward.

How to work in the pose:

• Isolate each set of squeezes to turn-on sleepy muscles rather than defaulting to the same muscles you habitually use, thereby insuring you work all of the upper back muscles.
• squeeze evenly with left and right side.
• keep squeezing shoulder-blades together as you drag them down.
• draw shoulder-blades as far down as you can – your range of movement will increase over time.

Pose Cues:

Arms dangle.
Inhale into upper back & shoulders
Hold the breath, bring shoulders up and draw them straight back
Exhale squeeze tops of shoulder blades together, keep squeezing & drag them down your back
Release the squeeze, inhale broaden upper back & shoulders
Exhale squeeze middle of shoulder blades together, keep squeezing & drag them down your back
Release the squeeze, inhale broaden upper back & shoulders
Exhale squeeze bottom tips of shoulder blades together, keep squeezing and pull them down your back

Pose Variations:

• Sitting up against the wall with a roll behind the back along thespine, top of roll lined up with crown of head. This variation is most appropriate for beginners and anyone having trouble isolating the different regions of upper back.
• In any seated position at the beginning of a class.
• In Horse or Warrior.
• Bend elbows when squeezing bottom tips of shoulder blades towards each other if cannot engage those muscles while arms are straight.

By Kelly Johnson, Scholarship recipient

Over Memorial Day weekend, I joined a dozen other people for a beautiful, fun, and healing retreat up in Wisconsin. The three days were a retreat in the most accurate sense — drawing away from the city and our busy schedules into a time of introspection, community, and yoga.

Practice:
Each day began with an intense and sweaty asana to wake up the body and to give our minds a space to put our process work into practice. I missed the first practice on Friday but arrived just in time to peek in on the last few minutes before savasana. A dozen people were easing into pigeon, with Talya and Steve padding around the room and quietly tending to individuals. I realized that I had never watched a class as an outsider — now, seeing the focus and devotion from both students and teachers reminded me why so many students who find their way to Turbodog Spirit Center quickly become adherents.

The morning intensives began with a short talk about the focus of the day and a few emotional and mental directives, followed by a period of meditation. The classes themselves were like all others taught by Steve and Talya — both familiar but unexpected, restorative and challenging. Having so many intense asanas in a row does wonders. Stiffness, fatigue, and aches quickly peel away to reveal underlying tightness and holding. The body starts to melt open and the problem areas emerge — that’s when practice starts to get interesting and meaningful, when we can focus in on breathing into injuries, identifying habits, and playing with the edge.

Process Work:
The yoga asanas were only half of the weekend — the other half was process work centered on our own journey of our intents for our lives  and the manifestation of those intents. I can be somewhat guarded, especially when discussing nebulous or emotional topics, so I was most nervous about this aspect. The first evening, we started easy: a journey into the place of visioning, in order to clarify what it is we desires for ourselves. I was relieved when we discussed these desires, as I found out that everyone was looking for similar things: belonging, purpose, freedom, or growth. It turned out that my intent for myself wasn’t as silly as I had first imagined — and thus, the first lesson of the weekend…

The process work on Saturday focused on challenges and obstacles which prevent us from manifesting this intent. We took time to reflect on the beliefs we have and the messages that we tell ourselves that hold us back from actually living those dreams that we have for ourselves. Instead of seeing these beliefs as bad or something that must be conquered, we meditated on why we hold those beliefs and what the obstacles have taught us.

On the last day of the retreat, we sat down together for a traditional pipe ceremony and a sharing of our gratitude. I was touched at how many people, including myself, were most grateful for the weekend itself and the community that came together for the retreat.

The sweat:
The highlight of the weekend, for me, was the sweatlodge ceremony on Sunday afternoon. Chuck Walks in Spirit, a Blackfoot medicine elder, came up from Evanston to pour our lodge. The land that we had the ceremony on was an ancient Indian meeting place and burial ground — artifacts dating back to the paleolithic era have been found on the site! The land was covered with burial mounds a sight so amazing and (literally) electrifying that I could help but cry out “oh, wow!” when I took in the scope of it. Truly, the beauty of the place can only be experienced first hand.

The sweatlodge ceremony takes several hours, as there are many steps for setting up the lodge, preparing the site, and building the sacred fire. This was happy work with our group, as we were all enjoying each other’s company and the beautiful day. A few auspicious signs at the beginning of the ceremony helped us feel like we were all doing something good for ourselves and our relations. As for the sweatlodge itself, it was an intense, clarifying, and deeply personal experience. I feel lucky to have taken part in this ceremony, along with the entire weekend, with such an amazing group of people.

Setting Intent:
One of the recurring messages of the weekend was the importance of setting an intent, then sending that intent out into the world. We don’t know how or when that intent will become reality, but the most important first step is letting this desire be known. A year ago, I told Talya that I was interested in taking part in the sweatlodge retreat and that I was making it a goal for myself to go. This April and May, I was unexpectedly hit with several major expenses which made it impossible to find the extra money for the retreat. It came up in conversation with Talya, and she invited me to apply for a scholarship. One of the things that makes Turbo Dog so amazing is the fact that they are able to offer scholarships for events like this based on financial need. In the end, I was able to attend because of this assistance — but also because of the fact that I had declared this intent a year earlier. I am not a person that easily asks for help, but I have experienced the power of sending out hopes, desires, and needs to the community and having them respond. Aho!

Learn more about the retreat and/or register here

by Amy Wilcoxon, member

I cannot write about the Spring ceremony in and of itself, without including my experiences in the Fall and Winter Equinox ceremonies as well. You see, as I shared with other participants honoring the dawn of Spring, a new seasonal year, consciously honoring the changing of seasons with ceremony, in community, provides a way for me to get through them. Each season seems to bring its own set of unique life challenges and triumphs, presents a theme for me to ponder and live out, whether I like it or not. We have become so disembodied in our culture, or at least I have in mine, that we forget our mental and spiritual connection to our bodies, and our whole body connection to the seasons, the life cycle.

Yearning for connection, and listening to my body, is what brought me to practice yoga in the first place. I have always had a sensitive body, a kind of atmospheric barometer, quite literally! While my family, friends, and professional peers seemed to always be able to keep going about what life demanded of them—in graduate school, caring for children, caring for parents, working overtime to make ends meet—my body would always protest when I didn’t include it in my busy schedule. Allergies, asthma, arthritis, even early stages of heart disease, have always alerted me that I need to stop, breathe, pay attention, and reassess my priorities. More specifically, my body has always invited me to enter into a deeper relationship with itself, its place in the natural world, and how I am an embodied being, connected to and an integral part of something greater than myself. For me, this something greater is both spiritual and physical, both an individual journey and a whole, collective story, which includes the natural world around us, and the seasons.

I love the Spring. I used to think I was winter woman, my favorite recreational pastimes being ice-skating and snow-skiing. I also tend to be introspective, and love the cave-like setting that winter invites us to live into. Dark, cold, we pull in and huddle around the hearth of the fire. We tend to feel more fatigued, less exposure to sunlight and energizing vitamin D, more sleep, we seek warmth in comfort food, hot coffee, wooly blankets. I always found this season very comforting, comfortable. I would get to keep to myself and mull over my own thoughts under cover, underground. I always thought Spring was nice, I liked celebrating Easter and watching the colors open and blossom.  I liked that everyone seemed to have an extra spring in their step (no pun intended), happy to greet each other as we finally emerged from our caves and begin exploring together for fresh food, fun, and sunshine. There’s plenty to go around, we enjoy sharing the bounty.

There has always been one central theme that Spring seems to invite me to live into that scares me to the point that I want to go back to the safe cave of winter. Spring is a time of opening, expanding, and living out our creativity actively, a potential showcase for others to see and perhaps be affected by. To really embrace the season of Spring, and to really enter into it, means opening our creative impulses and desires that have been quietly developing within our hearts to be expressed, made a concrete manifestation, a contribution to the life-making of the season itself! The fall and winter seasons allow us to go inward a bit, listen to Spirit in our hearts and in the fire, and to discern changes to be made and priorities to be reassessed when we go out in the world again come Spring. But for me, to actually live out these changes, in the new and creative ways the season invites…well, I make my living on how scary and difficult this can be for many of us, and I’m no exception!

Spring teaches us that there is a time and place to slow down, rest, ponder about important life changes, and even feel depressed and stuck, frozen. That time was winter. Spring is the time to embrace the energy that comes with sunlight and heat and procreation and to open, literally show our colors. This Spring is inviting me to step out of my own private drama in which I have felt stuck (but strangely comfortable), and to step into a new way of being. This Spring invites me to practice this new way of being actively, in the sunlight, for others to see, admire, pass by, judge. Doesn’t matter really, the point is to live into something new—still me, but a new season, a new year, and the ability to make new choices. Perhaps open to new, unfamiliar emotions and sensations that are strange and uncomfortable and scary. The temptation to retreat into the wintry cave…still there, but I realize through ceremony that I have the strength, support, and clarified intention to open into Spring.

Ceremony, ritual, meditation, prayer, breathwork, song, yoga, sharing in a talking circle—these allow the changes to move across the threshold from pondering to being, new beliefs and possibilities to take form in the body, new synaptic connections to be fortified in the brain. My fifteen years working in the field of psychology have taught me that talking and making insights are important to change, but not nearly enough. To truly “spring” into a new way of being, we must practice the changes in our bodies, in community. We must engage the body, as well as our creative minds, in movement and song and ritual to seal these new synaptic connections, to enter into the new way of being that calls us, and perhaps has been calling us for several years over. Scholars used to believe that our minds were pretty much developed by our thirties, and that making any real, lasting changes past thirty-five was near impossible, or at least improbable. The seasons tell us a different story. Spring invites something new, a real, embodied change from the old habits and patterns. The conditions are here to emerge, open, shine.

This is what I got from Spring Equinox Ceremony at Turbodog Spirit Center, 2009.

By Andrea Brands, board member & member

Several days before my birthday friends asked me if I was doing anything special to celebrate.  I was sure of only one thing:  Wednesday yoga class with Steve.

It might seem odd to some people that yoga would be my priority on my birthday. To me it’s a celebration of body, mind and spirit that has been essential to finding balance in my life and helping me gain a healthy perspective.  If I can choose how I celebrate, I’m on the mat.

Birthdays can be funny things.  There’s often a lot of pressure to do something crazy and over the top, to spin out of control because, well, it’s your birthday for gosh sake.   I used to think that if I didn’t have the day planned and someone at work didn’t surprise me with a cake, my own personal holiday was a bust.

But there’s something to be said about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and to savor the good things that surround us in our daily life.  I am grateful for what I have in my life and the peace that I have found.

Don’t get me wrong, even at 47 I love to get notes and well wishes from friends, and I blow out a candle in my honor no matter what.  But if I don’t jump out of a plane or dance on the table at a party, that’s ok, too.

For this birthday this year I will connect to joy through my practice and with my community at TSC.  There is much to celebrate in that.

And maybe tomorrow I will choose to jump out of that plane.

By Angela Dancey, member

When I first heard about the all-night Spring Equinox Ceremony at Turbodog Spirit Center, I knew I was going to do it. I hadn’t stayed up through the night since I played drums in a rock band (a very different kind of spiritual experience), but the idea of a sustained and meaningful ceremony to mark the season’s change was irresistible. I was curious and a little nervous as the event approached, but open to whatever presented itself as we passed from night to sunrise, darkness to light, and Winter to Spring.

I should note that this ceremony held a special attraction for me because I had my own spring-related vision about 2 months ago. During a particularly deep meditation, I saw myself standing in a parking lot, looking up at the springtime sun. I could feel warmth on my face, and I felt so grateful for the sun’s return. A tree appeared before me, with tight green buds all over its branches. I looked down at myself, and I saw tight green buds under my skin, ready to burst! Needless to say, it was a powerful and profound vision, one that I was constantly reminded of both before and during the Spring Equinox Ceremony.

We gathered at 10pm on Friday night for a potluck dinner before our journey together. First, we sang a song honoring the four elements: air, earth, water, and fire. We then shared some sweet strawberries, edamame and other nourishing food as we introduced ourselves to the group and discussed what had brought us to Turbodog Spirit Center that night. Most of us had similar hopes: to feel a deeper connection with Spirit, with the Earth, and with each other.

We finished our meal and formed a circle in order to begin the ceremony. Accompanied by Steve’s harmonium and drum, we chanted to the Hindu deity Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who removes obstacles—not by destroying them, Steve explained, but by finding a way around them, just as water flows around an obstruction in its path. The powers of the four cardinal directions were called, accompanied by the burning of sweetgrass, and I could sense very powerful energies assembling for the ceremony to come.

Talya told us that during the course of the night, we would be collaborating on a special project: a despacho. This is a Peruvian tradition that represents an offering of love and gratitude to Mother Earth and other spirits of nature. A square of white cloth was placed in the middle of the circle, and around it were arranged bowls of red and yellow rose petals, fragrant tobacco, cornmeal, salt, sparkly stars, cotton balls and other materials; these would represent different qualities and intents that we hoped to manifest in the coming year.

Individually, we took time to reflect on the previous year’s events, then record in our journals the knowledge we had gained about ourselves, and the wisdom that had come from that information. We used the talking stick to take turns sharing with the group any shifts that had occurred for us over the past year, whether in our personal, professional or spiritual lives. As I listened, I was able to appreciate each person’s unique spirit even as I was reminded of our deeper connection.

I was among the first group, led by Steve, that would be sleeping while the other group, led by Talya, would be meditating, writing and visioning. We moved off into a darker and quieter corner of the studio, bringing yoga mats, pillows and blankets. I remember thinking at the time that it should have felt awkward to just lie down and go to sleep with this group of people, but it felt perfectly natural. I soon entered a state of consciousness that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I wasn’t awake, but I was hyper-aware, and could even hear Talya speaking in the other room. I could also feel the presence of each person around me—even those in the other room—as a kind of spark or light. I wasn’t meditating, or really dreaming, but my mind was consistently showing me natural scenes from my hometown in Northwest Washington, such as the pebbly shores of the Nooksack River and the mossy woods around my childhood home.

The time came for us to switch places with the other group, and we quickly refreshed ourselves with some blueberries and hot tea in order to begin our process work. First was an activity called Recapitulation, where you recall a specific moment where you gave your power away, pause the scene and call the power to come back into your body. I worked with several different moments from the previous year, some of which were still raw with feeling.

During the second sleeping shift, I once again went into a state of semi-conscious awareness, this time with no imagery at all. When I was woken by a member of the other group, I felt very heavy, as if I had actively dreamed, but I couldn’t remember what I had seen.

The process work for this second round included sharing with a partner our hopes for the coming seasons. We then condensed these hopes into single words or phrases that represented who we hoped to become; mine included “fearless,” “strong,” and “kind.” We also spent some time in walking meditation and shamanic journeying, opening ourselves to the possibility of what Talya called a spiritual “download.”

We woke the sleeping group, then put the finishing touches on our despacho, adding different elements according to the truths and wishes we had uncovered. At some point during the night, it had begun to snow, at first lightly, then coming down hard, with a bitter wind that blew the flakes almost horizontally across the landscape. It was now time to wrap the despacho, full of all of our offerings, hopes and dreams for the new year, and complete the final stage: setting fire to the bundle so that it could reach all corners of the Earth. We put on our heavy winter coats once again (the previous day in Chicago had reached 60 degrees!) and went outside. Any lingering sleepiness was quickly blown away by the freezing temperature and blowing snow. It took some effort to light the despacho and get it burning, but once it started, we turned our backs to it, in order to convey our faith that the offerings it contained would reach the spirits for whom they were meant.

After a short break, we arranged our yoga mats in a circle so that we all faced each other, and Steve and Talya led us through two hours of asana, practicing along with us, creating a playful communal energy. I was tired but also alive and aware, and felt a strong and easy connection to everyone around me. The practice held many surprises for me—moments where I was sure I wouldn’t be able to get into or hold a pose, yet I did. Forearm balance splits was just one example—typically this pose generates a lot of struggle for me, and yet I kicked up into it with ease during this practice. It was as if the ceremony had allowed me to get past the inner Judge, the voice that just loves to tell me to give up before I’ve even started. It was a beautiful reminder that I am stronger than I give myself credit for, and I know I will call on this insight in the future.

After a delicious savasana, we had a breakfast of orange juice and congee, a creamy rice dish that Steve had been slow cooking throughout the night. The ceremony itself seemed to have flown by, the moments of dreaming, visioning and practicing blending together into a beautiful and mysterious whole. Even though newly fallen snow lay on the ground, spring had arrived. May our hopes and dreams for the coming months flourish, as well as the space that made this experience possible—Turbodog Spirit Center.