John Friend’s Wider Mat
If a yoga company approached you to make your dream mat, what changes would you make to the standard mat design? John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga dubbed by a July NY Times article as “the yoga mogul” for his business savvy, got exactly that opportunity with his partnership with yoga mat company Manduka.
Friend’s biggest complaint about these sticky pieces of rubber was that they weren’t wide enough to give his students the support they need in some poses. Friend recommends students practice poses like Upward-Facing Dog with their hands wide apart to give a broader foundation and more optimal alignment for the shoulders.
The human body is pretty much functioning like a high-tech machine. A reliable machine as we well know must go through maintenance and a period of complete readjustment, cleaning, realigning, refurbishing – and so should our body, too. In our busy lifes, we often forget to listen to the signal our bodies send out when something is not working as it should. We especially ignore our body when it comes to certain topics we feel embarrassed to talk about. Bowel movement and colon health are such topics. We don’t live healthy and therefore “forget” to take care of our bowels and as result, we sometimes become less efficient than we are supposed to be. The res