The Branches

Yogi Gift Giving Guide

The season of gift-giving is approaching. At Queen Street Yoga we are stocking up on all the yoga props you could ever need for enhancing home practice and self care. We’ve got plenty of items for yogis and non-yogis in your life. Check out our gift-giving guide below.

AND…ANNOUNCING OUR HOLIDAY SALE!

Get 15% off all retail items at QSY between Nov 27-Dec 24. We can also special order any Half Moon props for you – our last order will go out Dec 4th, in order to have all items arrive before Christmas. Please check out shophalfmoon.com and email us by Dec 4th with any requests you have.

QSY gift giving guide Continue reading “Yogi Gift Giving Guide”

Introducing the Loop Strap & A Wonderful Variation of Downward Dog

Typically I try to be fairly minimalistic, but when it comes to yoga props I cannot help myself. All the props! The more the merrier! I love trying out new props, and finding out ways that props can support my body in different poses so I can release or rest a bit more. So basically, I’m a lazy yoga prop hoarder.

Halfmoon Yoga, which is an awesome made-in-Canada prop company just came out with a brilliant twist on the yoga strap. They’ve made a sturdy strap that has a loop at one end, and with the buckle on the second end you can configure it to have two loops.

It opens up all kinds of possibilities. If you had some sewing skills, you could probably easily convert a yoga strap to also have a loop in, and save a few bucks. Continue reading “Introducing the Loop Strap & A Wonderful Variation of Downward Dog”

Leena’s Learning Break

This post is from QSY Director, Leena Miller Cressman about her plans to take a 6-week break from teaching. Leena will be back to teaching January 12. In the meantime, all her classes will still be on the schedule, and will be taught by our other excellent teachers. You can check out the live schedule here.

I love teaching. I love guiding folks through these embodiment explorations we call yoga. I love watching a student take a deeper breath, or release tension from their jaw. I love seeing the exhilaration on someone’s face when they kick up to their first handstand. I love the peaceful, resonant sound of a whole group singing the sound of Aum at the end of class.

Getting to teach yoga as a profession, and lead our community at QSY is an enormous privilege.

When you love something deeply, it can be easy to forget that you still need breaks and healthy boundaries. You still need time to refresh and explore things from a new perspective.

I recently had a great conversation with a university professor friend of mine. I shared with her that it felt challenging to juggle the administrative work of running the studio, teaching public classes, workshops and yoga teacher training, and also make space for research and development and learning. Without much time for my own learning, it was feeling difficult to be as refreshed and innovative as I’d like to be when I teach. She pointed out that this is the precise reason for sabbaticals in the academic world. Every three years or so, tenured academics get a period where they are free from their teaching load, they lessen their administrative duties, and they get to pour themselves wholeheartedly into their research and learning. Since I don’t have a PhD I’ll just call what I need a “learning break.”Continue reading “Leena’s Learning Break”

Honing our Internal Senses: NEW Slow Flow Classes & A Free Home Sequence

By Leena Miller Cressman, QSY Director. You can find Leena teaching Slow Flow on Monday nights at 5:30pm. Her classes include exploration of balance and joint proprioception, aspects of the Tensegrity Repair Series, and space for deep breathing and relaxation.

LEARNING NEW WORDS

As a kid, I always loved learning new words. I loved the sounding out the unfamiliar configuration of letters, and discovering a new way to describe or convey the meaning of something. I still love new words, and this is one of the many reasons I love studying and exploring anatomy and physiology, it gives me the chance to learn all sorts of new (and sometimes strange) words and ways of describing the human body. Like gastrocnemius! Listen to it pronounced it here. It is just so much more fun to say than “calves”.

Two words that I think should be on every yogi’s vocabulary list are interoception and proprioception. Interoception and proprioception are two distinct types of perception. Here’s how I’d define them:

Interoception: Our perception and sensing of internal sensations, feelings, movements, and responses of the body. If you sense a pang of hunger in your belly, or notice pounding of your heart when you’re nervous that is introception. It is the opposite of exteroception, which is an external sensation on the body, like feeling wind in your hair, or the warmth of your hand in your pocket.
Proprioception: Comes from the latin “one’s own”. It’s our sense of where our body is in space. It’s our ability to sense the relative positioning of our joints, joint angles, and muscle length, and to feel our movement and what will bring greater equilibrium. Proprioception is what allows you to feel how deeply bent your knee is in Warrior 2 without looking at your leg, or allows you to navigate a dark, unfamiliar room at night.

Continue reading “Honing our Internal Senses: NEW Slow Flow Classes & A Free Home Sequence”

Regaining Core Strength After Twins – A Post by Kris

This post was written by longtime QSY teacher Kris Lekin. In this post, Kris offers some insight into re-gaining core strength and support after pregnancy.

Just before I got pregnant in 2013, I was more physically fit than I had ever been. I was deepening my yoga practice, running and cycling daily, and even going to the gym (ok, that was only occasionally – I’ve never loved the gym). Then came the pregnancy (dun, dun, duuun)…with twins! My belly grew large and fast, and so did the rest of me. I accepted it as all being part of the process, but I was troubled by the size I would inevitably be and what that would do to my core muscles. I was aware of the condition diastasis recti (separation of the rectus abdominus muscle into left and right halves) and knew that this was inevitable with a twin pregnancy that went to term. It is a condition that occurs from 30-40% of all pregnancies. While pregnant, I studied with Jill Miller (of the Yoga Tune Up method) to help keep my inner baby carriage (a.k.a. the deep core) strong to support pregnancy and birth. However, the more my belly swelled, the less optimistic I was that I would ever be able to plank again, let alone do a handstand.

I carried my babies for 40 full weeks, and they grew and grew. I couldn’t have been more proud that I had “made it” that long, despite the fact my body had completely changed. A couple of months after delivery, I eased back into my yoga practice and tried to run once again. My body felt foreign. It also felt like my insides were falling out and that my middle wasn’t being supportive in my movements. Continue reading “Regaining Core Strength After Twins – A Post by Kris”

Hamstring Strength and Flexibility Sequence

By Leena Miller Cressman, QSY director and resident body-nerd.

One of my favorite well-informed yoga/anatomy-nerd bloggers, Jenni Rawlings, recently had a great blog post and video exercise reminding yogis to strengthen their hamstrings. A lot of yoga sequences and postures encourage flexibility and lengthening of the posterior chain of muscles, specifically the hamstrings.

Due to the amount of sitting we do in North America, the posterior chain becomes shortened for many people, and we lose range of motion in the hips and hamstrings in movements such as forward bends. Think of the difference in the geometry of the knee and hip, and the different loads and length of the muscles and connective tissue lining the back of the leg (from the ankle, up the calves, up hamstrings, up to the butt) in a standing position vs. a chair sitting position. In a seated position, the chair (or couch or car seat) acts like a sort of cast, holding the body in one static position and the
posterior chain can become shortened in that resting position. When it comes to mobility, when you don’t use it you lose it.

But, stretching isn’t the only way to improve range of motion and mobility. Strengthening is a great way to help increase range of motion too. This is commonly misunderstood. Much research has found that contrary to popular belief, strength training does not make you more “tight”, in fact it can help increase range of motion and functional mobility just as much, or possibly more than stretching. Continue reading “Hamstring Strength and Flexibility Sequence”

#tbt Throwback Thursday – How I fell in love with the Tensegrity Repair Series

It’s Throwback Thursday here at Queen Street Yoga, and today we are throwing back to August of 2014 when Leena wrote about falling in love with the Tensegrity Repair Series. Later this month we are looking forward to a day-long workshop all about the Tensegrity Repair Series with Vancouver-based teacher Trudy Austin. If you’ve ever been curious to learn more about the flowing movements that Emma and Leena sometimes incorporate into their classes, consider joining us for Trudy’s workshop on October 24.

Grease for your Rusty Parts

Photo by mtneer_man on Flickr

Ever get up from your desk, and feel your joints creak like a rusty old car? Perhaps due to the amount of time we spend sitting in chairs, seats, and couches in North America, the average person I see has core weakness. This instability in the core is often coupled with tightness and lack of mobility in the hip joints and shoulder joints (and by core, I’m not solely referring to the abdominal muscles, but also muscles of the pelvis, deep core and back muscles.)

The Tensegrity Repair Series is a set of 20 simple exercises designed to restore healthy range of motion to the hips, shoulders, and spine. It helps to build supple strength in the core muscles, and balance and stabilize the pelvis. Overall, I’ve found it to be an amazing antidote to the most common structural and postural imbalance issues that I have personally, and that I see in the general population. It brings that little bit of grease back to our creaky parts.Continue reading “#tbt Throwback Thursday – How I fell in love with the Tensegrity Repair Series”

100 Faces- 10 Years of QSY

This post was written by QSY Director, Leena Miller Cressman.

This fall, Queen Street Yoga turns 10! It’s a significant milestone as a small business and as a community. According to this article by Forbes, only about one-third of small business survive 10 or more years. Yippee, beating the odds! In addition to throwing an awesome party to celebrate (more on that later on), I wanted to share some of the story of how Queen Street Yoga came to be what it is today.

Just over ten years ago Meaghan Johnson, a Kitchener native, founded the studio. From the story I remember Meaghan telling me, at the time she wasn’t planning to open a large yoga studio. However, someone tipped her off about this beautiful space with glowing hardwood floors, big windows and high ceilings that used to be a dance studio, but now was sitting vacant. (Before it was a dance studio our space was a club called Pop the Gator- if anyone has photos or stories about that send them our way!) Meaghan arranged to visit the vacant space, and upon walking into the space she exclaimed, “Well shit, now I have to open a yoga studio. This space is too perfect.”

The studio opened with a staff of several other teachers in addition to Meaghan, and always had an emphasis on mindful, alignment-based yoga, with a grassroots community feel. Meaghan once told me that she opened the studio with about $1,000 and slowly invested and grew the business from there. This gradual model of growth, alongside a lot of community support, thoughtful offerings, and caring, dedicated students, teachers and administrators is why we’re still open and still growing today, ten years later.Continue reading “100 Faces- 10 Years of QSY”

Yoga to Rest & Rejuvenate

Fall has arrived, on a bright and airy Monday in September. While typically we celebrate the turning of the year on January 1st, September can feel like the true start of the year for anyone who is in school. Our Yoga Teacher Training begins this friday, so we are certainly in the back-to-school spirit!

Preparing for the Teacher Training and our Open House has Leena and I quite busy. We anticipate that the fall’s events and gatherings will keep up their regular pace from now until Christmas, so we are taking extra care to encourage ourselves and students to practice #selfcare this fall and find little pockets of time to slow down, breathe and renew ourselves. Leena put together this restorative sequence as a resource for anyone who might want to try slowing down at home. Continue reading “Yoga to Rest & Rejuvenate”

In These Bodies We Will Live [Emma’s Savasana Songs + Free Download]

Emma is currently away on a 3 week vacation to Burning Man. You may be missing her singing to you in savasana at the end of classes, so here is a recording of her singing the Mumford and Sons song, “Awake My Soul”. You can listen to it online, and/or download it!
Continue reading “In These Bodies We Will Live [Emma’s Savasana Songs + Free Download]”