Brush your hair?? (sometimes)
Brush your dog??? (love to brush a doggy!)
Brush your naughty bits (errrr.....wax much?)
Brush your Body??? YES ALL THE TIME!!
In Bodywork school right now we are learning about lympth and how we can get it moving to improve our health, strengthen our immunity and get rid of toxins out of the body.
A great way to be in touch with your body aswell as helping to eliminate toxins, is dry body brushing. Spend just a couple minutes each day, dry brushing your skin from the bottom upwards with a dry body brush (pick one up at London drugs or Finlandia), in a circular motion until the skin gets rosy, always have the brush strokes leading to the heart direction. You can do this right before you have a shower, not only does it get rid of dead dry skin and makes skin healthier and more radiant looking, it also encourages our lymph glands to clear out their toxins, and in effect it nourishes your organs as it all eliminates the crap from your body caused from pollution, junk food, sitting here in front of this computer! :) Plus what a great excuse to spend time with yourself, bring that connection back to you and your mind, body and spirit. if that doesn't convince you, I also believe it helps to reduce cellulite! Staying on pampering, using organic or chemical free bathing products are so much better for you, check your bottles and definitely stay away from anything that contains aluminum, or those really long words you don't have a clue what they are. They are all putting dangerous and harmful chemicals onto your skin, which gets absorbed into your body, do I need to say anymore?? They don't cost more than regular shampoo and you can buy them in health stores. Wouldn't you rather smell of natural sweet oranges or aloe oil, rather than chemically enhanced toxins?? Yes please :)
Beautiful inside and out!
Deep Tissue class got me thinking about what yoga stretches might reach those hip flexes and lengthen the quad's and hamstrings. A really great hip opener that I learned from Yoga school in Costa Rica from Sasha our instructor was 'rocking the baby'. If you really visualise your hip joint inside your body and rotate the hip outwards as you rock your baby, in this case its your arm which should be planted with flexed foot inside the elbow joining your hands around the front. Keep both feet flexed and sit up straight, and be as quick or slow as you like. The important thing is to remember that is focus on the hip, so rotate the hip outwards, not the knee, really isolate the joint, close your eyes and visualise a good oiling of the end of the femur bone meeting the hip!
Working with the hip flexors, the first stretch is from the Kit Laughlin book I mentioned in previous blogs, and is the 1st picture below, you really need to isolate the hamstring here and pull back with the foot, and forwards with the knee on the back leg, sinking your hips forward and lower to the ground. The 2nd picture, is a common yoga pose, lifting the back knee off the floor, straightening the leg onto the toes pushing the back heel back, and dropping the forearms to the inside of the bent leg, maybe taking the forehead to the floor. All great hip openers! (also helps with flexibilty for when you become the next bad bond girl and need experience in wrapping legs around Daniel Craigs neck)
Hope you enjoy the stretch and brushing (of all body parts!)
Namaste
The Raw Yogini
NB: This post is edited from a previous post I wrote last year.
