Yoga with Iriis

Lately I have been thinking a lot about trauma and how we deal with it.

I am not talking about a big trauma but rather something that might have developed over the years and that when it’s triggered it appears in form of anxiety or stress.

An overwhelm of stress on the system can be a actually pretty toxic for our bodies and mind. Many of us try to manage where we are going to go, with who we are going to be around, what actions we’ll do in order to keep everything safe so we don’t experience anxiety again.

The reality is we cannot stop stress or traumatic experiences from happening, they are an inevitable piece of life. We need stress to build our resilience and our strength and I find that sometimes, it can end up making us who we really are.

With this post I want to highlight what trauma really is, its different forms and how yoga can help.

In my next post I’ll be adding a short sequence to deal with a specific emotion that comes from trauma.

Hope this helps to bring awareness into your life so you can take more care of yourself✨

• Atelophobia•

The fear of imperfection. The fear of not being good enough.

I believe we all experience atelophobia in many different ways. I do it quite a lot, I tend to bring myself down because I believe I am never good enough.

People with atelophobia think about the fear of making a mistake in any way; it makes us avoid things because we would rather do nothing than do something and risk a mistake.

Think about it, how many times have you thought about changing lifestyle? Maybe you are not happy with your job? Maybe you want to dress in a certain way? But you end up not doing it, because it’s a risk. Because what if leaving your job is a mistake, what if, what if, what if...

This way of thinking often leads to a constant judgement and negative evaluation of yourself. Like you are not doing things as they should be done, or correctly or in “the right way” whatever that means.

Life happens at the other side of any risk. And if you look around, there are actually people who are following you closely and are inspired by you. You might not see them but they are there. We need to learn to be at peace with imperfection. Because this is exactly what makes us fall in love with our partners, what makes us laugh when we do a stupid mistake, what makes us human and most importantly what makes us unique.

We won’t get too far if we are constantly bringing ourselves down. The challenge is to live day by day and when you look back, realize how far you’ve come. We may fall many times but we’ll learn to walk again.

I challenge you to do one thing this week: think about something you’d love to do but you have not because of fear. Start working towards it a little bit everyday, it does not need to be immediately, give yourself time to sink in. Listen to yourself. And every time the sentence “what if..” appears in your mind you can come back to this post, or even better, remember why you started.

I’d love to know a bit more about you maybe we can help each other our. What would you wish to accomplish and what’s stopping you? ✨

Hello amigos✨

This weekend was the spring equinox and with it, the ritual of 108 Sun Salutations.

It was my first time doing so I thought I would share some main information as I believe the meaning behind it’s really beautiful.

First of all let me tell you that it was not an easy thing to accomplish. I started with a lot of energy, moving way to fast and at some point my mind was like “Why the hell did you decided to do this?”.

I knew my mind was going to play me some tricks so instead if counting onwards I started counting backwards (108,107,106) although the number does not really matter.

If you swipe completely to the left, I shared my main 5 learnings of this experience (I decided only five but there are many more).

This practice was for me a clear way to understand that how we talk to ourselves is really important. We need to be our own heroes and supporters, when the mind is completely off you can hear yourself way better.

Did you practice the 108 Sun Salutations? How was it? 🌞

Happy spring to everyone! 🌸🌿✨

• Living my endometriosis •

I’ve always had painful periods. Since I was a teenager I remember crying myself to sleep because of the pain.

I’ve had many irregularities on my cycles and I never fully understood why. Last year was particularly hard and painful. In 2019 I decided to try the coil contreception to see how it would affect me, by then I did not know where all my pain was coming from. As usual before using the coil they run various tests to see if everything’s ok. No one found or said anything.

Once I started using the coil my pain got multiplied x3. I ended up in the emergency room many times due to pain in my uterus and lower abdomen, including vomits, mastitis (breast infection) and dizziness. I could barely sit on a chair or lay on the bed. The most comfortable was laying on the ground, on a hard and stable place.

In December 2019 I went back to the emergency room and they told me I had a hemorrhagic cyst of 2 cm but that one would go away on my next period. So I went home with a lot of painkillers thinking the pain, that I had for may years, was caused by these cysts that appear sometimes when you are ovulating and then go once you have your period.

The pain never left. It got worst.

By June 2020 (about six months later), I had intense pain throughout all day, at random times, pain that would make me fold myself as much as I could and sit on the ground. I decided to pay a specialist to check, I thought the coil was causing me problems so I went. She told me indeed I had a cyst but in was nothing to worry so once again I went back home thinking the pain would go away. About a week later I went back to the doctor asking her to remove my coil, I had so much pain I could not take it. She then said and I literally quote “Ah but you have endometriosis, so the coil helps you.” I did not understand. I had what? I insisted and she took off the coil, and went back home lay in the bed with do much pain researching about endometriosis. I thought she was wrong and I believe the same story that doctors had been saying tl me. That pain was normal.

*continues in comments*

This month of March brings together women, families and medical communities for Endometriosis Awareness Month.

This movement began in 1993 when Mary Lou Ballweg was one of the eight women who founded it: first as a week-long time to recognize those suffering it and eventually it became an awareness month.

I suffer from endometriosis myself and I will explain my journey on the upcoming posts. Today I wanted to bring awareness to what is endometriosis and how it can affect women.

Because this occurs largely in areas we cannot see, endometriosis is called the “Silent Disease” or “Silent Epidemic”.

Throughout all my life I have been told that painful periods were normal. There tends to be a “suck it up” mentality in which teens and girls are advised to take painkillers and wait for the pain to go. As we get older, we become use to minimizing this experience.

Today I wanted to share something important: it is not normal that pelvic pain interferes on your life. Speak up, be heard, share your experience and most important seek care from someone who listens and cares.

Unrecognized pain can lead to so many other conditions such as depression, infertility and abnormal function of some organs.

In my upcoming posts I will guide a practice for endometriosis, created by my experiences in yoga and I will also talk about how I got diagnosed with it.

Let’s support one another and break this silence ✨

📸Lesions can appear on your ovaries, fallopian tubes, and the lining of your pelvis / wildpixel/Getty Images

Today I wanted to talk about a specific topic and I’d love to read your opinion on: taking a break.

I mean taking a break from everything. Last week, I was in a really low state of mind. Nothing happened particularly, maybe it was the full moon, or my menstrual cycle or that I just needed a break.

I could not manage to do any practice by myself and I struggled when having to teach private classes (although afterwards I felt way better).

While I was acknowledging that both my body and my mind needed to rest, I was struggling with the fact that I was not moving my body. Fighting with myself because I could not do a practice still knowing how good it would do to me.

Sometimes during the pre menstrual part of our cycle, it’s normal to slowly move towards our inner world. We don’t feel like going out so much, we feel way more sensible, everything is more confusing and our energy levels drop down. It’s a moment to reflect on what our eys cannot see.

Our concentration is not so good because our emotions and intuition are kicking in. This phase of the cycle finishes with our menstruation where we retire ourselves to the deepest state of our emotions, far away from rationality.

This last phase it’s a moment to release the old habits and open the door to new ideas and perceptions. We give birth to ourselves again and it’s a time to reflect on our lives (things we don’t like, projects that are not working, toxic relations...) and manage them according to our needs.

In a society where we constantly have things to do, places to go, people to see and where we keep our minds busy, how do you take a break?

How do you feel when you stop completely and listen to your body? Do you actually do that?

✨

So, a few months ago I had no F idea of what the fascia was.

When I started to dig in I realised this is actually a big topic!

Let’s try something: pull somewhere in the shirt you are wearing now, a little tug changes the way the shirt fits you. A little pull in one small spot leads to tightening in an area and loosening in another. This could be imagined as your fascia.

The information on this post is just a tiny little bit of it. There’s much more to learn!

Would you like to know some ways to work on your fascias?

Stay tuned✨

Ahimsa is commonly referred as “nonviolence” but more literally in Sanskrit means “absence of injury”. It is an ancient concept from the Vedas, Indian spiritual and philosophical wisdom dating from as far back as 1900 BE. It is part of the eight limbs of Yoga, concretely the Yama.

Yama practices are meant to free us from our own impulses and also linked to cleaning techniques in our minds, bodies and spirits.

There are many ways to practice Ahimsa, and I think about it often “don’t wish any harm or violence in act or thought to anything or anyone”.

In a time where we are constantly connected on our social media, now more than ever, it comes often to my mind the pre judgement that we have when seeing someone through IG accounts.

Every minute spent on social media we are fed with a lot of irrelevant and unnecessary information, filled with fears, doubts, inhibitions and distrust instead of love, faith and support.

It becomes amazingly easy to spread hate on social media but not only that, we start to live in a world of “i wish it would be that way” instead of appreciating what we have.

I have had many conversations with my friends about deleting instagram because it was more harmful for themselves than positive. We are self injuring ourselves and prejudging other people’s live.

The exercise for me is to learn when this thoughts pop up in my mind and stop them to second guess the veracity and the real source of them.

The path to ahimsa is difficult and long, as much in the virtual world, but it is the right direction✨

Today I wanted to talk about Ujjayi Pranayama.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (a collection of aphorisms on the theory and practice of yoga) states how pranayama carries us to samadhi (state of meditative absorption, enlightenment).

Sutra 2.49 mentions that once we have established ourselves as stable and comfortable in our practice, the slowing of breath is what follows.

Ujjayi is considered a cleansing breath, as is all nostril breathing. As the air passes through the nose, it is humidified and tiny particles are removed.

The ocean-like sound, should be loud enough for you to hear and it helps to hold attention to you breath.

In my next practice I’ll be guiding us through Ujjayi 101🌊

Do you practice any pranayama? Which one?

One of the reasons why I started getting more serious with yoga was my inability to breath properly.

Since I was quite young I had the kind of anxiety where the panic would trick me into thinking my lungs where not getting enough air.

When I first started ashtanga yoga, to follow up with the primary series was a real challenge, to coordinate my movement with my breath was nearly impossible.

I remember everyone on the class breathing into their Ujjayi and me counting the seconds to get out of that pose.

My mat is my safe space now. It is where I breath deeply and where my body allows me to flow without worrying too much about what is going on outside.

I am not going to lie, sometimes it is still a struggle to breath properly outside my practice but at the end of the day, yoga is about healing too.

And that includes learning to breathe again.✨

Recently I have been in so many conversations about sleep disorders with my friends.

The truth is that all of us go through different periods in our life and this can affect our sleeping patterns and result in serious consequences.

Anywhere from 50 to 70 million American adults have a sleep disorder. The problem is so bad that the Center of Disease Control declared insufficient sleep a public health epidemic in 2018.

With health sleep comes an overall boost to quality of life including lower rates of depression, anxiety, and blood pressure as well as increased resilience, optimism, memory and creative problem-solving.

Yoga can help you going back to your sweet dreams.

As you might have guessed, my next video is going to be a guided practice that you can use before going to bed.

Happy Tuesday! 🍀

Sometimes we get cramping because of the tension of the soas so we will be working with hip flexor openings, same with low back pain, it tends to happen because there is tension on the front of the hips. ANd we will also do some opening for the back of the hips.

In Chinese medicine a lot of reasons why we have pms is because liberty stagnation which then leads to depression or anxiety. So having that moment helps to spread.

Sometimes during PMS we get cramping because of the tension of the psoas and low back pain because there is tension also on the front of the hips.

During this practice we will be working with hip flexor openings as well as some openings for the back of the hips.

In Chinese medicine a lot of reasons why we have PMNS is because liberty stagnation which then leads to depression or anxiety. So having a nice practice can help relieve the pain.

Hope you enjoy it✨



https://www.instagram.com/tv/CLJ97twhq3b/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Sometimes we get cramping because of the tension of the soas so we will be working with hip flexor openings, same with low back pain, it tends to happen because there is tension on the front of the hips. ANd we will also do some opening for the back of the hips. In Chinese medicine a lot of reasons why we have pms is because liberty stagnation which then leads to depression or anxiety. So having that moment helps to spread. Sometimes during PMS we get cramping because of the tension of the psoas and low back pain because there is tension also on the front of the hips. During this practice we will be working with hip flexor openings as well as some openings for the back of the hips. In Chinese medicine a lot of reasons why we have PMNS is because liberty stagnation which then leads to depression or anxiety. So having a nice practice can help relieve the pain. Hope you enjoy it✨ #yoga #yogaforwomen #yogaforbeginners #pms #pmsrelief #yogapractice #dailyyoga #yogainspiration #yogaeveryday #yogabarcelona #yogaeverydamnday #yogaanywhere #anatomy #pmsrelief #pain #Thursday #thursdaymood #thursdaymotivation #selfcare #selflove #love