Gabrielle (The Hot Yoga Doctor)

You’re so welcome, Daniel!

There’s nothing like a success story to make us both feel great. :cheese: I am so pleased it has worked for you with such great results.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Tajana

You may also need to address a weakness in your hamstrings. It’s possible that the stretching is aggravating that weakness. You may choose to go and see somebody (physiotherapist) have them check out the functioning of your body in certain movements, massage out some of the fascial adhesions and give you some exercises.

You certainly shouldn’t be feeling such pain and aggravation especially not for years!

I hope it resolves quickly for you. You are obviously very flexible. Just wondering if you ever find that you can’t seem to stretch as far as before.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Kristin

“Just a fellow forum member”? Hmmmm. :cheese: Thank you for your incredibly insightful and valuable post. If it weren’t for people like you I would be here FULL TIME answering forum posts. This is a public forum and although a very large number of them need to be answered by me I truly value everybody’s participation and input. I do love hearing others’ opinions and ideas. It helps me grow. So thanks again.

I look forward to Amy’s response.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Sarafina

It would be wonderful to work with you. Let’s see what we can work with here. You can write to me on email if you need to talk about training, or visiting. Thank you for the trust.

So what I need you to do now is go and see the blog post called Opening Up Your Hamstrings With Hot Yoga.

If you’re having such terrible issues in that area then this technique should help you physiologically be more gentle and more effective in opening your body up. It will help soothe your hamstrings, psoas and your sacral area and you’ll feel so much more ease and yet great challenge in this pose. Then you will want to apply this same technique to similar poses.

Let me know how you go and if you need more help in working out how to apply it.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Laura

Just occurred to me that I needed to ask you something. I am wondering how you release out of wind removing pose. Do you raise the leg up in the air and straighten it? Or do you just let the leg move to the floor from the bent position foot near the bottom and then lengthen out the leg?

As for the shoulder, you would do well to work out if you have good posture when you walk and stand (let alone when you write papers!). Go and take a look at thevideo about using your arms and shoulders. You’ll find it by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page. It’s called a Transformational Technique For Your Practice For Your Life

Both you and Wayne would probably do well to have someone take a close look at that… Sounds as though it’s time for a massage 😉

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Rob

I believe that the reason you feel this way is highly likely that you are not being heard nor understood by the people to whom you have paid a significant amount of money.

Maybe it’s because you’re conflicted: You know you can feel great with this yoga, you HAVE felt that way and now when you have a problem, all the studio is doing is trying to convince you that the yoga will fix it. If all someone can do is offer solutions that suit them, without honoring your feelings and needs then emotionally you’re being shortchanged.

You WANT to be able to trust that teacher and that everything will be OK but basically your emotional bank account is overdrawn.

Does that seem to resonate for you?

I could be wrong.

What do you think/feel after reading this?

PS Thanks for the email. 😉

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Alex

I am sending you an email too.

In order to answer all your questions one would ideally need specific information.

For example, and I am sure you will find this other information on this forum in places with judicious searching 😉 you can waste a lot of money on many different aspects of fit out if certain aspects are not dealt with properly.

Eg, spending a little more to over insulate will save you bucket loads of cash in the long term. You will even need less power to heat the place and you may even need a less powerful heating system.

A lot of the information you need can be gained by hot yoga studio visits, working out what you liked, how controllable the environment was, whether the teacher was constantly fiddling with the system. There are many variables…

Fitout also depends on what’s in the place to start off with. And many landlords will install these assets as part of the agreement.

Get back to me and I will be happy to help as much as I can

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Claudia

Let me see if I can approach your issues in the same order you broached them… 😉

“in Pranayama, when I bring my elbows together it hurts and my shoulders tend to raise”

>> The answer to that is only move your arms as much and as fully as you can WITHOUT allowing your shoulders to raise. If you read pages 36 to 45 you will get a LOT of information about the whole head neck shoulder area that is highly beneficial.

>> That theme continues in many of the pose chapters. It’s a crucial element of your practice to ‘get’. So if your shoulders are raising then may I humbly suggest a review of these pages? :cheese:

“… but i can hardly come down in the pose”

>> Don’t worry about your depth in the pose. In Half Moon you want optimum alignment and you want to focus on the side that elongates to keep working length into it. This will help you alleviate much of any pain that can occur in this pose.

“although I get the feeling that I am surrendering the neck,it feels tight and strained.”

>> If your neck is feeling tight and strained then there is definitely an issue there. It’s possibly one or a combination of several things: You’re not looking back, your fear is making you react by dropping your chin a little and straining your neck, your arms are too straight, or you could do with another quick microbend check of the arms while you’re in the pose. Let me know!

“With ‘Hands to Feet’ I also tried the variation of getting my hands flat on the floor for the forward bend but even when they are far away from the body, I find it impossible to balance and my feet raise up. Is it o.k to just have the finger tips on the floor and do the stretch?”

>> Have you looked at the video chapter dedicated to Pada Hastasana on DVD 1. Perhaps there’s something that could be revisited. It should be MUCH more satisfying to get your hands on the floor (taking the lion’s share of the weight) than to bend forward with only fingers touching.

>> It’s worth the effort to nut this out. When you ‘get’ this, you’ll NEVER go back, I promise.

“when you engage the biceps and your hands are at the bottom of the legs and not the feet do you pull down or up? It feels like I am engaging the biceps when I pull down.”

OK, so what I would like you to do is aim to lift the elbows up (and the shoulders away from the ears). Then press the heels downward and the hips travel upwards, without focusing on straightening the legs. Leg straightening will happen naturally and more easily I might add, if you do it this way.

“i can’t get my bent leg down in tree. It just darts out in a right angle”

>> Don’t be concerned with the angle. Keep the hips even and then just let gravity work on that ‘flying’ knee. It’s opening your hip. I am sure you’ll be feeling that and some stretching on that inner thigh, and some work in that knee (separately or in combination!).

:cheese: Phew. I hope that helps you.

‘See’ you soon

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Vijay

I’m back! Finally! Phew. 😉

OK, here are 4 things for you:

In Pranayama. Try NOT to lock out your bottom and hips on the tallest extent of your inhale. Keep your legs locked out as much as you can and inhale as much length as you can in your lower back by loosening through it. Then just before you move into your exhale (on the longest extent of your back) tighten your bottom, tuck the tailbone under, check into your locked out legs and then exhale.

The other thing is that I have a hunch you are trying to get your arms up by your head here AND in your backbend. I think you are introducing too much tension in your neck and shoulders. I think that it’s possible that you are introducing way to much tension in your back from the hips and the shoulders in both Pranayama and Half Moon.

If you need more description then please ask. Basically you may need to introduce a micro-bend into your arms and allow the neck to soften for both these poses. The squeezing the arms to the side of the head and locking out elbows is one of THE most insidiously damaging instructions in Bikram yoga.

There is quite a lot of information on the forum already. Plus there are full details in the Hot Yoga MasterClass.

Please go and verify if you are approaching Separate Leg Intense Stretch in the best possible way. It seems as though you could be. Just Confirm It Here!

In Janushirasana: Can you confirm if you’re reaching out for your foot and then popping your head on the knee? Or are you tucking the chin and finding that your head lands on the knee (whether bent or straight) and your hands find themselves under the foot? It’s a ‘need to know’ question! :cheese:

Thanks for the GREAT details. I hope I can get back to you faster than I did this time.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Kristina

Thanks for the private message (PM). Yes I agree, one does not need to be a doctor to own a surgery or medical facility. No, you don’t need to be a yoga teacher to own a studio either. Your inquiries will ALWAYS be welcome here.

I thought I would check in and find out where you are in your journey now.

If you need some teachers for your studio, then there will be a whole bunch of graduates in less than 2 months. There may be 2011 grads may be interested in helping you out too.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Eva

Oh, you must be very concerned. As I would be too.

Your teacher probably has this right. Unfortunately I don’t think a little coconut water is going to do it for you.

I would strongly suggest getting some unprocessed sea salt into you straight away. Go and check out recent posts. Pop the word “himalayan” into the search box up the top and start reading. Then go out and buy some sea salt and take it on your food and or in your water (i recommend it with a dash of lemon juice! Yum).

You should see results very quickly. You seem electrolyte deprived. Perhaps you may want to get a base reading of your condition with a doctor. The word is 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt a day when you’re needing to reoptimise levels, and about 1/2 for everyday use.

If that resonates with you, then… hop to it. It won’t hurt to see a doc or get a blood test for big picture view.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Sarafina

With every movement there will be adjustments! It’s interesting that most people would believe you can bring your body to the side in Half Moon in a pure movement of sideways bending. But you would know (with your background and your condition) that at every moment you are working with counter-rotations of hips to shoulders (with vertebrae that are irregular in shape and stacked in curves) in order to simulate that pure sideways movement.

When it comes to you and your interesting back (!) my sense is that you have to work extra hard to keep alignment without surrendering at all to the now habitual curves your back has developed. Moving to first point of resistance for you and then working like crazy on alignment (but no struggle) would be what should work. Of course this goes for any movement you make – half moon was just an illustration.

There is definitely a part of me that wants to see you to work with you, to get beyond the words here. Meet me in Costa Rica on May 19! Just kidding. 😆 But I will be there for teacher training. I would want to spend time watching your habitual movements and how to master better posture. Being a pilates instructor i have faith that you are describing the issues well. But I still don’t have a clear picture of what you are moving like in poses.

We will start with some questions about a particular pose. Then we can move onto different poses as required to try and get a better picture.

I notice that you have mentioned an your issue with the sacrum area. A common question you’ll see me ask on the forum is whether you have legs locked out in Standing Sep Leg Stretch. Do you? If you do, is your back straight? Or rounded? Can you describe what your arms are doing and where you grip your foot.

Let’s see what you have to report 😉 and we’ll take it from there

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂