Four major barriers to a fulfilling yoga practice and a fully functional life are: 1) Knee, foot, and ankle instability, leading to painful knees in transitions and bent-knee poses. 2) Tight/weak hip muscles leading to lower back pain, limiting our backbends, forward folds and crossleged poses. 3) Weak deep core,  manifesting in neck/back pain: Yoga poses like boat pose turn into back-splitting hurdles rather than power-boosters. 4) Tech-neck, office hunch posture leading to neck and shoulder stiffness, making Camel, Cobra & Co. give us a ‘crick in the neck’. 

This 4-session workshop series addresses all four barriers and helps you systematically open and stabilize YOUR body from head to toe, using the intuitive alignment system of Anusara® Yoga and techniques from neighboring movement sciences to help you remove the barriers in your personal yoga practice. You will emerge with greater strength, ease and aliveness for  your daily journey.

This is Workshop 2 ,’Happy Hips’ of the four part Empowered Yoga series. See ‘Empowered Yoga Bundle’ to purchase all four workshops (recordings available).

Goal: Dissolving the barrier of weak, tight and imbalanced hip muscles that can result in lower back pain, SI joint pain, adding increased wear and tear to your knees and feet. In Asana this manifests in limited, painful backbends, forward folds, gnarly transitions, and impossible cross-legged poses. 

This is what we will explore:

• hip openers and knee strengthening drills from functional movement & physical therapy

  • Hamstrings, Quads, Inner & Outer Thigh openers and strengtheners

• supporting transitions in standing and balancing poses (warrior I/II, warrior III/half moon)

• leveraging open hips in cross legged meditation poses (sukkhasana & co.)

• an understanding of movement & stabilization of the hip joint and how it affects the knee joint during walking and asana

• Poses: using your glutes and deep core to prevent instability in Split-legged poses like the Warrior Group, Hanumanasana, Pigeon

This practice-based workshop is for beginners, intermediate and advanced students and teachers, includes a warm-up, and applied anatomy throughout. This course counts for CE credits and can be applied toward the Anusara certification.

Cost: $36.50 USD for one workshop, $125.00 for Empowered Yoga Bundle (all 4 workshops).

Location: in person AND online. Online: individual attention and inclusion in the group. In person: Workshops 1,2,3 take place at Yogakula in Berkeley, Workshop 4 takes place at 354 Panoramic Way in Berkeley, and online. Recording will be available after the workshop for those who have registered.