Gregory Ormson

Writer, musician, yoga-loving motorcyclist.

YOGA AND LEATHER – new moves for riders and yogis

Shipra Saraogi (pictured) at the Usery Mountain Regional Park, Mesa, Arizona.

#MotorcyclingyogiG teaches yoga for riders (YOGA AND LEATHER) at Superstition Harley-Davidson in Apache Junction, Arizona. His classes demonstrate to riders how they might use their bike for a prop to stretch when taking a break from the road with the goal of  keeping riders in the saddle.

Shipra Saraogi, yoga teacher and performance artist from New York City, stopped by Superstition Harley-Davidson and the Arizona desert for some warm up-on Greg’s 2016 HD Road King. This not recommend or taught in Yoga and Leather.

March 31, 2019 is the date for our next “Stretch Ride,” in Arizona led by #motorcyclingyogiG, Gregory Ormson. Meet at Superstition Harley Davidson 10:30 am. Ride to the desert, stretch, breathe, pose.

 

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Yoga Inspirationals #31 Asana Back to the Innocent Age

Tika

Link: http://asanajournal.com/asana-back-to-the-innocent-age

Asana Back to the Innocent Age

On an overcast February day, my move toward balasana (child’s pose) began easily enough; “breathe into your truth, breathe into your center,” my teacher said.

The words moved me like someone taking my hands and gently walking me backward into a calm refreshing lake. I would have welcomed this after a slow and voggy day; I mean a day full of vog – volcanic gas cloud residue – suffocating everyone within miles of my writing desk. Things just weren’t happening. I blamed the vog.

Like anyone, I’m involved in making a living and positioning myself for security. I hope for happiness and peace for myself and my extended family. And like others, I want to register my mark in the world and hope my contributions help move the human family in a compassionate direction. I’ve had a good education and learned my civics lessons, so I also embrace my role in helping to alleviate suffering of those less fortunate than myself.

In my best efforts to make a mark in the short time I have to walk the Earth, I’m required to sift through ever-increasing complex data and stimuli that comes to me through my senses. Like all yogi’s living in a material world, I’m obliged to select what I’ll take-in or reject based on my priorities and values.

HARD CHOICES IN AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD

A yogi’s awareness of the world’s interconnectedness leaves him/her with sometimes agonizing choices over what course of action is least-harmful. One approach to this post-modern dilemma is to adopt the ethical creed of non-malificence, or do no harm, a part of the Hippocratic Oath.… read more...

Making Contact, excerpt from #YogaInspirationals

contact photo  Yoga improves brain and bodily intelligence though its attentive repetition. It’s the discipline of one asana at a time. In the midst of each asana, our brains search to interpret the intelligence of our bodies and picks up the yogi’s growing ability to learn from the soles of their feet, from the twists of their spines, from the mindful placement of their palms and fingers.

Focus on the contact figure opens the mind and allows for it to receive the body’s intelligence, and in doing so, the soles of our feet become like a microchip feeding information to the mother board. It’s stunning to think that this is a two-way communication and that our brains are enriched by feedback from the soles of our feet. Breathe deep the gathering wisdom and learn what your bodily contact is teaching

 

Think of standing on your mat in class holding tadasana, mountain pose, and that your mat is the entire focus of your attention. In your mind, shift your awareness to the place where the soles of your feet make contact with your mat and pretend as if that place is all that exists. Your entire world is made up of the space that forms two outlines on the bottom of your feet. This is what Gestalt calls the figure, and everything else – except that one patch where your two feet make contact – is the back ground/landscape of perception and awareness.

Now imagine standing in mountain pose, lifting one foot from your mat. With one foot lifted, only a small patch of earth/foot contact is directing your life and that one patch is the outline of your right foot.… read more...

To Breathe or Not to Breathe: Lessons from Yoga and Freediving

It’s odd to think of yoga and freediving as complementary activities, for it’s accurate to identify yoga as bodily movement led by breathing and freediving as bodily movement while breath-holding. Yet yoga practice can help improve freediving by expanding lung capacity and improving tissue flexibility; and lessons learned beneath while moving under pressure can improve yoga practice.

Living in Hawaii provides me with the opportunity to practice both yoga and freediving as often as I like. These activities are intimately related and both connect to the same core principle: breath work.

But the subject is important to anyone taking 20 to 30 thousand breaths a day, and that’s a big group, including everyone living.

 

breatheBut since practicing yoga, I’ve noticed a big improvement in my ability to hold my breath while diving. In yoga, I do breath-work to make yoga practice satisfying and my dives into the Pacific extraordinary.

It’s not so much the depth to which I can go in either the asana or the dive, but the satisfaction of getting the most from my potential as a diver, a yogi, and a breathing and grateful sentient being.

Growing up in the Midwest, I never dreamed that someday I’d be freediving in the ocean and swimming next to sharks, dolphins or rays. But it’s happened. Neither would I have thought that one day I’d be bending like the palm trees outside the yoga studio, experiencing the depths to which yoga would take me. But that happened too.

BREATH, YOGA’S FOCUS

Anyone stepping into a yoga class learns immediately that the first action focuses on breathing.… read more...

Excerpt from Yoga Inspirationals, Day 17, “A Yoga Parable”

steam vent shot looking away  THEY were fueled by energy drinks, but gross with anxiety and unexamined ambition. The land was drunk on money and the illusion of freedom fired the people’s imaginations. The ‘eight limbs’ twisted in the wind of post-modernism and creative chaos. And in that land, people learned diversity was a source for creativity and road to enlightenment.

In time, the practice prospered and many realized the travelers brought good medicine. It seemed to help prisoners, alcoholics, those suffering pain and even angry youth. But some feared its power – especially its counsel to sit alone in silence.

There, in the counsel of the quiet, the student found reasons for the false prophecy of money, misdirected ambition, the severance of limbs, the medicine of movement. He heard surrender and its yield: balm for the captive and great music composed by stones.… read more...

Yoga Inspirationals

breathe

“Because breath is life, the art of judicious, thoughtful

ungreedy breathing is a prayer of gratitude we offer to life itself.” B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life.Camel scan

 

 

 

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O Rings Teaching How to Catch

Teaching is talking and showing. A teacher can’t be stingy. Teachers share their energy by demonstrating, illustrating, explaining and giving examples.

A teacher invests, gives something of him or herself, and a good teacher is aware of pacing as they give  … stopping frequently to listen. Did this sink in? I just wrote … stopping frequently to listen.

It’s a silly pet peeve of mine, really. And I suppose if anyone really wanted to annoy me they would, at my final resting, throw a football back and forth while dropping it on purpose. If I am watching you from the great beyond,  I’ll be saying, Dammit… don’t reach for the ball, touch and cradle.

That’s my saying as a catching coach, touch and cradle.

Touch and cradle arises from years of playing ball and watching people throw to one another. What I’ve noticed is catching technique. People, when you are getting ready to catch something like a ball, don’t lunge, or reach out for it. You let it come to you.

In the act of catching, it’s okay to extend your arm(s), but not very far. Let the ball make contact with your hands (touch) then cradle it softly into into your arms. Once the ball is in your hands and arms then bring it in to your body. The movement of both your arms and ball are coming into your body as you catch.

This is a weird post I suppose, but I write this after I watched people throw and catch at the beach. I watched what appeared to be a family of two adults and two children.… read more...

MUSIC It’s an Endless Summer on the Dance-Floor

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form] The Endless Summer band-members grew up with vinyl. They remember hits of the 60’s though 90’s and they rock them. “I guess you could best categorize our music as Beatles to Doobies,” said Kurt Jarvis, lead guitarist and band leader.

Going to an Endless Summer show, listeners will hear some bluegrass and country with the band’s rock staple, and an occasional surprise like “Sweet City Woman,” with Jarvis on banjo. “Our music is an eclectic mix of recognizable songs and dance tunes,” he said.

Other numbers that show the band’s appeal are called “medium paced rockers,” by Jarvis. These are former hits like, “Why Can’t We be Friends,” by War; “Hummingbird,” by Seals and Crofts, and “Draggin’ the Line,” by Tommy James.

“We don’t do any Reggae because there are a lot of other bands here that do a good job with that and it’s just not part of our background,” Jarvis said.

Endless Summer formed in Kona when Jarvis’ friend from Oregon, Russ Kendall, moved to Ocean View in 2012. “We had played together in 1974,” Jarvis said, “and when Russ arrived in Hawaii, we started amassing equipment. My wife, Serena (Jarvis) started singing with us a couple years ago, and then we all decided to be a band,” he said.

Two years later, they are a band and their name, Endless Summer, captures the essence of what they want audiences to experience when they play. Jarvis said he would be happy if audience members came to their show and said, “Wow, those guys are having a lot of fun up there, let’s do it too.”… read more...

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