Rachel Ishiguro Yoga

July often invites us outdoors, into travel, family gatherings, and full schedules. Gentle Yoga offers a dedicated hour each week to slow down, reconnect, and care for yourself.

Join me on Wednesdays for a nourishing practice that combines meditation, gentle movement, breath awareness, and restorative poses to support your body and mind.

🗓 Wednesdays in July
⏰ 10:00–11:00am PT on Zoom
✨ Recordings included

Whether you're staying close to home or squeezing class in between summer adventures, you're welcome exactly as you are.

👉 Registration link in bio.

This month, we've talked about how play can help us stay present, reduce stress, and improve mood and energy levels. Play can also build connections with others. Whether we're playing on or off the mat, bringing a sense of curiosity and exploration to whatever we're doing can help expose us to novel ways of thinking and build new neural pathways to support creativity, problem solving, and habit change.

Play can be as simple as taking a new path, or a complex game with many players. Either way, it may feel challenging at first but should eventually start to feel fun!

If you're having trouble conceiving of play as an adult, it can be helpful to think about all the different styles of play that exist. (This is based on the work of Dr Stuart Brown.)

🤸 Create: think art, music, writing, jokes, performance, building and crafting, etc.

🤸 Explore: think adventure, tinkering, research or study, entrepreneurship, etc.

🤸 Compete: perhaps in sports, games, puzzles, or debate.

🤸 Organize: yes, organizing people or objects can be playful! Think collecting, directing, and connecting.

🤸 Dream: think daydreaming, roleplaying, reading/ immersing yourself in storytelling, and watching others play (sports, movies, plays).

🤸 Move: think yoga, dance, sport, physical thrill seeking

You may have more than one play style. You can get more resources regarding play style on the National Institute for Play website.

Which play style(s) appeal to you most? Has this changed over time?

Does the way you're approaching the pose match what you want?

If your goal is to get good at doing the pose in one particular way, on your yoga mat, for a certain length of time, then by all means practice it that way!

Personally, I like to approach a pose more as a laboratory, a series of "what ifs". More exploratory―more playful, if you like.

When I approach a pose with curiosity, it helps me stretch outside the bounds of my clinging to rules & forms. It encourages me to be real & kind in the way I approach myself in the practice. And it can give me more varied movement skills, ones that I might even be able to take off the mat.

I don't need to be good at Ardha Chandrasana/ Half Moon. I'd rather have strong hips that can move in lots of ways, and keep my feet on the ground even when my center of gravity is somewhere unusual.

With that in mind, I tend to approach balance in lots of ways. There's way more than I can put in a single carousel, but you can start with these ideas (and use the link in bio to check out next week's YouTube practice & see some of them applied).

1️⃣ Move your eyes around, look up to the ceiling, or (hardest) close your eyes.

2️⃣ Move your joints! Circle ankles or wrists, move legs and arms, slow or fast. Maintain your steady center.

3️⃣ Change the surface you're standing on. Go outside in the grass. Use a block. Try a soft carpet or hardwood.

4️⃣ Use support. Having the lifted foot on a block or holding a chair improves steadiness & confidence, provides more input to help your body figure out what's going on, and builds strength & control in different ways than freestanding. Eventually, if it feels appropriate, try both supported & free.

5️⃣ Look around. Real-world balance rarely involves a fixed gaze. Maintain your steady center while you look around.

What's your favorite way to practice balance poses?

Happy Summer Solstice! ☀️ We've reached the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and the first official day of summer.

When I think of summer, it has the flavor of being a school-aged child and that wonderful feeling of beginning a long, less-structured period with lots of time outdoors (and reading many dozens of books). And though I no longer get to have that as an adult, I do think that trying to recreate this feeling from time to time is valuable.

Nobody writes about the connection between human and nature like Mary Oliver, so she's the perfect poet to describe the contrast between our structured and stuffy human capitalist endeavors and the freedom to explore the world we live in.

As we enter the summer season, it seems like a good time to reflect on how I can make time this summer for unstructured adventuring and connection with the natural world.

This is how we build health and resilience, and heal from the pressures of modern life.

I hope you have a wonderful summer. May we all be balanced and well! 🙏🏼 Poem below for your reading pleasure.

➖

Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer

I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught —

two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.

By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember

the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

Mary Oliver
From Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Introducing more play as an adult can feel intimidating, especially if you're already stressed or overwhelmed. Who has time for that?

But when you're stressed is the perfect time for play's power to reduce stress, improve cognition, and increase energy, so here are some ideas for how to start to play with intention.

🪁 Go outside - the outdoors tickles our senses and encourages us to explore and move. It naturally stimulates curiosity and awe.

🪁 Rekindle old hobbies or start new ones.

🪁 Connect with others who want to engage in the same activities.

🪁 Schedule formal play or unstructured time to help you prioritize it.

🪁 Explore creative projects.

🪁 Engage in competition if you find this motivating.

And in your yoga practice:

🪁 Experiment. Allow for creative movement, guided by what you feel in your body. Feel free to "color outside the lines" or known poses or movement patterns.

🪁 In a pose, vary small things and notice what changes. Some examples: reposition your feet, try different mudras (hand gestures) or arm positions. Move your head, or just your eyes, in different ways.

🪁 Play with the same shapes in different positions (lying down, seated, standing) or different relationships to gravity (lying on front/ back/ side, sitting or standing, maybe even upside down!)

🪁 Incorporate breathwork into your postural practice. How does that change how poses feel?

🪁 Use visualization. Embody different animals/ emotions/ colors/ or whatever you want.

🪁 Try new things. Be willing to mess them up. Laugh lots.

What are your favorite ways to incorporate play? Please share in the comments.