We’ve all been there at the weekend, too tired to do anything. Feeling tired and wired happens more often than many of us would like, and it can be hard to know what kind of practice is best to do when you feel this way.

The beauty of a yoga practice is that it’s specifically designed to bring the body and mind into balance. The first step is to rest the body. Even if your job is not physical work your body is tired at the end of the day because the mind uses a lot of glucose, which leaves you feeling depleted.

A short restorative session of different postures that combines forward folds to calm the nervous system and simple twists to revitalize the body and move stagnant blood, rebalancing your energy. Once your body starts to relax, Boccio says, you can bring your mind into balance with it by doing a simple breath-awareness practice. Start by exhaling completely, with long and steady breaths, as if the receding waves are drawing with them the accumulated detritus of the day; then take deep inhalations that feel like waves coming in with great force. Finally, be aware of how much you reactivate the mind with television or computer before going to bed.

To unwind just before going to sleep, try a foot massage: Coat the sole of your foot with raw sesame oil (you can add a few drops of a calming essential 
oil like lavender), and massage for a few minutes. This brings the energy down in the body.

Savasana (Corpse Pose)

Begin by feeling the support of the earth 
beneath you. Mentally scan your body and 
notice your level of fatigue or overstimulation. As you move through the following sequence, hold each pose as long as feels right to you.

Apanasana (Knees-to-Chest Pose)

Bring one knee into your chest, keeping the other leg straight on 
the ground. Switch knees, and then bring both knees into your chest. This pose helps release the kidney area, where fatigue is often felt.

Jathara Parivartanasana (Revolved Abdomen Pose)

Extend your arms. Bring your knees over to your right side and hold; switch sides. 
Twists like these lift your 
energy and bring new 
blood to your 
internal organs 
and kidney area.

Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose)

This calming inversion takes pressure off the lower part of your body.

Janu Sirasana (Head-of-the-Knee Pose)

Come into the pose and hold; 
then switch sides. This forward bend helps calm the nervous system.

Try making restorative poses the core of your practice if you are feeling run down or in need of a lift before Spring. Why not try the first two poses for 10 minutes or longer, and the third for 5 minutes or longer. If you want to wind down before bedtime or just feel like lifting your spirits then try this sequence and feel the benefits when you wake up with a beaming smile on your face the next morning.

Supta Baddha Konasana
(Reclining Bound Angle Pose) Supported

Sit on your mat in front of a bolster placed lengthwise behind you, Loop a strap behind your back at your sacrum. Bring it forward around your hips and over your shins, and secure it under your feet so that it encircles the lower part of your body, Place the soles of your feet together and put a folded blanket or block beneath each of your outer thighs. Lie back with your spine centered on the bolster and with your arms out to the sides, palms up.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) Supported

Place a bolster or two folded blankets on your mat, and lie back over them so that they support your back rib cage but allow your upper back and shoulders to reach toward the floor. Place the soles of your feet together, cross your shins, or bend the knees and keep feet flat on the floor. More-experienced yogis can practice with the legs straight and the feet on a block. Let your arms rest out to the sides or stretch them overhead with elbows bent and palms facing up.

Viparita Karani (Legs-upthe-wall Pose) Supported

Inches away from the wall (the exact distance depends on your leg flexibility and comfort). Sit sideways on the bolster, with the side of your hip touching the wall. With the bolster under your bottom, lower yourself back and swivel around so that your torso is perpendicular to the wall and your legs are extended up it. Let your arms rest out to the sides, palms up. In the beginning, stayabout 5 minutes, and gradually increase the time to 10 minutes or longer

Just about everyone I come into contact with in London, it seems, share a similar sense of time deprivation. Of course, most of us, most of the time, have goals; having a job, going to school, raising children, all require us to get things to be done. There’s nothing wrong with drive but we live in a culture that prizes productivity and speed. Before we know it, we’re embroiled in a perpetual battle with time, missing out on our connections.

Is there a way to live that frees us from the cycle of longing for more time, misusing the time we do have, and then blaming a lack of time for our discontent? The answer is yes. I’ve worked with people on improving their relationship with time. Happily, doing so doesn’t require withdrawing from the world. Nor do you need to focus on timesaving tips for scheduling yourself with ever-greater efficiency. Instead, you bring greater awareness to the way you experience time by building small steps into your daily routine that help you savor your life.

To experience time differently, you need to cultivate and practice a new relationship with it, just as you’d nurture a yoga or meditation practice. At first, you may feel as though you’re swimming against the current of cultural cues that push you to do more and move faster. It may not be easy to change, but the rewards are great. This approach can bring you into a deeper harmony with time, allowing you to engage more fully with every moment.

Your first step is  self-study, one of the ethical principles of yoga. This asks you to look inward and get to know yourself better. It teaches you to feel the difference between your own natural rhythms and the world around you. It can teach you what’s practical and healthy to focus on, and what you may need to delegate or drop.

In much the same way that those who struggle with food issues may be unaware of what and how they’re eating, you may not have examined the behaviors and assumptions that shape your relationship with time. Taking a time inventory gives you a window into the values that underlie your time-spending habits. Begin your self-study by asking yourself questions like these: Besides eating and sleeping, how do I allocate my time in 24-hours? Do the activities on which I spend most of my time nourish me, or do they feel obligatory? When I long for more time, what do I imagine doing with it?

Do you feel time starved? Has your yoga or meditation practice helped you deal with any time issues?

When you try and meditate does it often feel like there is never enough space in London? We often think of going inside closing our eyes and focusing our attention on some internal process occuring spontaneously, like our breathing. The logical assumption is that the object of our meditation is to find inner peace. The outside world, the hustle and bustle of the city is an obstacle to overcome when meditating. According to some schools of yoga , if we exclude the outside world from our meditation we are only going to gain half of the experience of meditation.

Meditation can help your brain work more efficiently. You might feel anxious to get
back to your busy day or may even feel like dropping off if your tired. But consider this, a regular meditation practice can make your brain work better. Over the past few years, scientists have discovered that meditation helps the brain to process information more efficiently. Just as repeated practice of Sun Salutations builds strength and stamina, so regular meditation enhances the brain’s capacity for perception and awareness. It has been claimed that longtime meditators have a thicker insula, the part of the brain that links the emotional center with the thinking center. Some researchers say that the amygdala, the part of the brain tied to the fight-or-flight impulse, is more active than in people that don’t meditate. But meditators also seem to be better able to calm that response than others. Why not try our simple meditation intro. session. Find yourself a quiet space and give it a go.

Simple Meditation

Sit comfortably in an upright but relaxed position. Close your eyes and bring your attention to your nostrils. As you breathe notice the subtle sensation of cool air passing into, and warm air passing out of, your nose. without manipulating the breath, simply notice the sensation.

Maintain your attention to every breath. Staying relaxed and mentally alert become curious about each passing one as if it were your first.

If your attention wanders, simply notice the distraction and patiently return to the sensation of the breath. Your ability to stay present
deepens by consistently returning to the current moment.

Do this exercise 10 minutes once or twice a day, gradually extending your sessions to 20 or 30 minutes each.

Recently I was asked by a client about whether yoga helps you lose weight, so I thought I would attempt to put the answer down in writing.

Yoga can help you lose some weight, although results do vary, and also depend upon the types of yoga one does.

Hatha yoga, does cause some weight loss, over consistent practice of at least one class a day. It can also cause muscles to become more toned and flexible, a desirable benefit. A study conducted by Alan Kristal in connection with the National Cancer Institute showed that those who practiced yoga one hour a week lost an average of 5 pounds over a four-year period. This data was compared to those who did not practice yoga and gained 14 pounds during the same time period. So practicing yoga, even once a week theoretically helps one shed a small amount of weight, while keeping weight gain at bay.

Some believe that yoga causes some weight loss because it focuses on mind/body awareness. Such awareness may translate to different eating habits, and more care regarding what kind of food one puts into the body. People who have greater body awareness may also notice when they feel full and stop eating. This belief actually suggests that it is not the exercise but the philosophy of regular yoga practice.

“Yoga is a phenomenal way to put you in touch with your body the way nothing else can, and yes, it can help you lose weight,” says instructor Dana Edison, director of Radius Yoga.

Celebrity yoga trainers Ana Brett and Ravi Singh, who have worked with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, also believe in yoga’s weight-loss powers.

“We have seen it in ourselves, we have seen it in our clients – yoga can give you a real workout even if you are a beginner,” says Brett.

How Does It Work?

In 2005, medical researcher and practicing yogi Alan Kristal, set out to do a medical study on the weight-loss effects of yoga.

With funding from the National Cancer Institute, he led a trial involving 15,500 healthy, middle-aged men and women. All completed a survey recalling their physical activity (including yoga) and their weight between the ages of 45 and 55. Researchers then analyzed the data, teasing out other factors that could influence weight change – such as diet or other forms of exercise.

The end result: They found yoga could indeed help people shed pounds, or at least keep them from gaining weight.

For the study, he says, practicing yoga was defined as at least one 30-minute session per week for four or more years.

Kristal says it’s not clear just how yoga might help people keep off the pounds, at least from a scientific standpoint. His own opinion is that the effects are subtle, and related to yoga’s mind-body aspects.

Adds Edison: “Yoga makes you more susceptible to influence for change – so if you are thinking you want to change your lifestyle, you want to change the way you think about food, you want to get over destructive eating patterns, yoga will help give you the spiritual connection to your body that can help you make those changes.”

Even if yoga does not offer huge weight loss benefits, it certainly offers fitness benefits, specifically for the muscles. Greater body awareness and honoring the body may also result in changing habits or attitudes toward eating.

It’s a New Year and we have decided to start a little feature devoted to the pets in our lives. This month’s award goes to Che, who enjoys taking part in the cat pose now and again. He’s a yogic cat at heart and likes to spend most of his time getting bendy when he’s not trying to get a few treats from Mariel (his proud owner).

The American craze Yoga with Pets is available throughout London and may eventually be exported to the rest of the world. Animal therapist Dan Thomas is head of grooming at London’s Pet Pavilion Company which introduced the scheme to the UK. He says he is amazed at the effect of the classes on the pets taking part.

“A person who does yoga classes usually ends up becoming more placid. For pets it’s just the same, even if they do occasionally require assistance to contort their bodies into the required yogic positions.”

Latest statistics from the US suggest that 15 million Americans now include some form of yoga in their fitness routine – twice as many as five years ago. Backers of Yoga for Pets hope that it too will quickly catch on and show a similar statistical upsurge. We would love to see photos of your yogic pets, so get them sent in.

I droped in on a class in North London over the weekend. Fifteen minutes into the sequence, the teacher calls the class together to demonstrate some alignment details. Half the women in the room move forward. The rest turn on their mobile phones and begin checking their messages.

Those women could have been doctors on call. But I am guessing that they have a bit of internal busyness syndrome—the breathless, stress-addicted feeling of having way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Internal busyness, a complex of internally generated thoughts, beliefs, and bodily responses, can certainly be triggered by an especially busy day or a lot of competing demands. But unlike external busyness, which is the more straightforward state of simply having a lot to do, internal busyness doesn’t go away when tasks are done. External busyness—the pressure that comes from juggling a job, children, and all the tasks of running your life—can be managed. It can even be a yogic pathway, if you know how to practice with it. Internal busyness, however, manages you.

So when people say to me, “I’m so busy I can’t find time to practice,” I always ask them which kind of busyness they’re distressed by: external or internal. One clue that you might be suffering from the internal busyness syndrome is this: When you don’t have an immediate task at hand, when you have a moment that could be devoted to a few Ujjayi breaths or just spacing out, do you find yourself still mulling things over, wondering what you’ve forgotten to do? That’s internal busyness.

The paradox of busyness is a bit like the paradox of stress. On the one hand, human beings are built to be busy. We’re hard-wired for action—when it comes to our minds, muscles and life skills. To live is to act and there’s a lot of bliss in using our skills. Given the choice, most people would opt for a full life, even at the cost of having too much to do. Happiness, so elusive when we’re pursuing it, has a way of sneaking up when we’re fully absorbed in something—even if it’s just washing the dishes.

One powerful way to work with a tendency toward internal busyness is to periodically pause for two to three minutes during the day. While you’re at your desk or doing the laundry, play with a yogic practice like the ones described on these pages. The idea is to do it for its own sake, without expecting results.

Anti-rushing Practice

This practice releases the compulsion that often arises when you’re in a hurry. Try it now, and then practice it the next time you feel yourself rushing.

STOP. Stand or sit totally still for one full minute. First, say to yourself, “I have all the time in the world.” Then, bring to mind the image of a buddha in meditation. Hold the thought of the image in your mind while you breathe deeply and slowly five times. Keep that image in your mind as you continue on your way.

Six simple acts that can lead to a happier, healthier life.

Health, harmony, endorphin-rich happiness—there are as many reasons for practicing yoga as there are styles to choose from. But ultimately, you practice yoga because it helps you live your daily life. As a practice in self-awareness, yoga is an infinitely rich guide to how you spend the hours you’re not on the mat. But it’s not always easy to access the heightened awareness you find during yoga. One way to find that connection is to become more aware of how the small choices you make every day affect you, your community, and the world around you. Maybe next year you’d like to take better care of your body, help others, or reduce your impact on the planet. Whatever your intention, when you make positive changes grounded in self-awareness, you can connect with who you are and why you do what you do. Here are seven small acts that can help you understand yourself, connect with the world around you, and live your yoga.

Shift Your Perspective

To radically shift your outlook, break out of your regular routine. Go a different way to work, try a new food, it’s always a good place to start. Then notice how one seemingly simple change affects the way everything else appears to you. “The opening verse of the Dharmapada—an anthology of quotes attributed to the Buddha—says, ‘We create the world with our thoughts and our perceptions.’ This means that the only thing we know about this world we are living in is how we perceive it.”

Waste Not

Commit to a single day free of disposable products. And don’t be discouraged if achieving a waste-free day proves harder than you think. Just becoming aware of what you’re discarding is likely to usher in other changes that will eventually have an even greater effect on the environment.

Restore Health and Happiness

As an antidote to striving for success in all that you do (including asana), devote one practice a week to poses that quiet, nourish, and center. Begin your restorative practice by sitting quietly for a few moments and connecting with your breath.

Experience Silence

Spend some time in silence. Practicing silence can also be a way of conserving prana, or “life force.” See if you can appreciate all the noises: the sounds of birds, wind in the trees, the movements of other people, even traffic. You might find the respite from speech to be deeply restful.

Be a Creator

Creating something with your hands can be an active meditation, an opportunity to take a break from conscious thought and allow yourself to freely engage with your creative side. Make an Offering

Make an offering

Commit to one selfless act each week. You’ll be surprised at how even a simple act like offering your seat on a crowded bus can foster a sense of connection and a respect for the welfare of others. All yoga begins with karma yoga, which is action done as a service to others.

Insomnia—the inability to get to sleep or to sleep soundly—can be either temporary or chronic, lasting a few days to weeks. It affects a whopping 54 percent of adults in the UK at one time or another, and insomnia that lasts more than six weeks may affect from 10 to 15 percent of adults at some point during their lives. To get a decent night’s sleep, some people are turning to pills.

“Sleeping pills are not always a cure; they treat the symptom but not the underlying problem,” explains Sat Bir Khalsa, a Kundalini Yoga teacher who’s also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a neuroscientist at the Division of Sleep Medicine. Beneath the symptoms of insomnia are the anxiety, fatigue, and stress that our increasingly fast-paced world seems to be creating. These days, who hasn’t worked long hours without taking a break?

You may feel that you’ve adapted to the intense rhythm that modern life requires, but if you’re experiencing sleepless nights, your nervous system is probably rebelling. It may be stuck in a state known as arousal, where your sympathetic nervous system is triggered. In this state your mind will race or your palms might sweat. Your body will secrete more stress hormones, and your temperature and metabolic rates will rise, as will your heart rate. “There is very good evidence that people with chronic insomnia have elevated levels of arousal in general,” Khalsa says. “And some insomniacs have higher levels right before they go to sleep.” But Khalsa, who is studying how a form of Kundalini Yoga breathing called Shabad Kriya helps people with insomnia, offers good news: “Treating the arousal should treat the insomnia.” By creating a routine of soothing rituals, you can bring your nervous system back into balance and transform your sleep patterns for good.

Rituals for Relaxing

Whether it’s yoga to reduce muscle tension, breathing to slow the heart rate, or an herbal massage to calm a racing mind, a simple routine can be the most effective and safest road to a better night’s sleep. There is growing evidence that small behavioral changes can make a big difference in getting some good shuteye.

To find out which rituals will work best for you, it helps to understand insomnia from an Ayurvedic perspective. Yoga’s sister science and India’s oldest known system of medicine, Ayurveda is based on the idea that the life force that exists in all of us manifests as three different energies, or doshas, known as vata, pitta, and kapha. Though everyone has some of each dosha, most people tend to have an abundance of one or two.

Vata, ruled by air and ether, governs movement in the body. Pitta, ruled by fire, governs digestion and the metabolism. And kapha, ruled by earth and water, governs your physical structure and fluid balance. Ayurveda categorizes insomnia as a vata imbalance, because vata is controlled by air—and air controls the nervous system. Calming yoga and Ayurvedic rituals reduce vata in the body.

Nosh and Nibble

The diet mantra “Don’t eat before bed” isn’t always the best advice. Some folks benefit from nighttime noshing. “When you sleep, you are repairing your tissues,” says Aadil Palkhivala, a certified Ayurvedic practitioner and the founder-director of Yoga Centers in Bellevue, Washington. “The body needs nutrition when it’s going into a state of healing.”

Keep a Journal

When it’s time to go to sleep, do you start replaying the day’s events or think of what you need to do in the morning? A great evening ritual is putting your thoughts on paper: Write down the contents of your mind to get all of your worries out before your head hits the pillow.

Guide Your Relaxation

After getting into bed, try a body scan as you lie in Savasana (Corpse Pose): Progressively tense and then relax each part of your body. If you have trouble doing this on your own, get an audio CD of meditations, guided imagery, or Yoga Nidra (yogic sleep), to help. “This is good for people who have mental chatter,” says Cole. “It takes their mind in a different direction.”

Whichever ideas you take on, we hope you are able to find peace and rest easy.

Happy Sleeping

YWx

The BBC have just launched what is predicted to be one of the most successful children’s programmes. It’s called Waybuloo, and in it, the characters (piplings) practice yoga (or yogo as they call it).

A source said: “It focuses on emotions. Each Pipling represents love, wisdom, happiness or harmony. Put simply, Waybuloo is a journey to happiness.”

Toddler Yoga is an adaptation of traditional yoga and is great fun and can be enjoyed by the whole family. It encourages pre-verbal communication and enhances physical confidence. It teaches both adult and child how to relax together. Waybuloo is a great to get way to get toddlers started on there yoga journey.