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Easy Seat: How to Sit With Less Pain: Book Review

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AS PUBLISHED IN YOGA JOURNAL

Given how ubiquitous hatha yoga is today, it might be surprising to learn that just a few decades ago it was frowned upon by many Buddhist practitioners. In his forward to Jean Erlbaum’s well-informed book Sit With Less Pain: Gentle Yoga for Meditators and Everyone Else, Buddhist teacher Frank Jude Boccio confesses that at one time he did postures secretively at Buddhist retreats, afraid to be chastised for stretching his body between long sits.

Today, it’s clear that asana has many benefits, among them preparing practitioners’ bodies for meditation. Yet we haven’t seen an onslaught of books like Erlbaum’s that can help us learn to sit in contemplative practice longer while also showing us how simple yoga movements can ease tightness from routine tasks like sitting at a desk all day.

Erlbaum’s presentation is straightforward and clear, with just enough detail for non-experts to understand how to do the simple poses she outlines. She helpfully categorizes the offerings into upper body, mid-body, and lower body. Chair-based postures are included for those whose lack of mobility limits them from getting up and down from the floor.

In the least, Erlbaum’s gentle stretches and well-designed sequences can help people with chronic pain, stiffness, or a limited range of motion. At most, hatha yogis who do her suggested poses mindfully over time will understand how to cultivate their asana practice to establish a lasting easy seat.

AS PUBLISHED IN YOGA JOURNAL

Paint Your Plate

AS PUBLISHED IN YOGA INTERNATIONAL

Discover a Culinary Rainbow With Simple Summer Recipes That Pack a Colorful and Nutritious Punch

Summer’s abundance presents a tantalizing problem: how do we choose what to eat from this embarrassment of riches? One way to organize your pleasant amblings through the farmer’s market is to shop by color. As simple as this sounds, the concept is backed by research. Phytochemicals, the vitamins and minerals found in plants that give them their brilliant hues, have been found to prevent and treat disease, and we require a variety of these nutrients from across the color spectrum to stay healthy.

When you “eat your colors,” as Michael Pollan advises in his book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (and maybe your mother also mentioned), you get healthy doses of fiber, potassium, and vitamin C, as well as antioxidants, such as carotenoids and flavonoids. These protect our cells from the effects of environmental toxins and from free radicals, which increase dramatically as we age, and in turn age us. Antioxidants have also been shown to help battle heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

Vegan chef and cookbook author Colleen Patrick-Goudreau says shopping and cooking by color actually makes nutrition easier. Simply look at your basket: folate makes kale green, betacyanin makes beets red, lutein makes corn yellow, beta-carotene makes mangos and carrots orange, and so on. Try buying and cooking a different color every week, or assembling the most colorful dishes you can.

Blueberries, a key ingredient in the chilled blueberry mango soup recipe that follows, are packed with one of the most powerful antioxidants around, anthocyanin. The avocados, peppers and greens in the accompanying summer salad provide lutein, more antioxidants, folate, vitamins A, C, and K, and manganese.

These refreshing summer recipes are simple to prepare and require the freshest ingredients available (buy organic when possible). They taste as rich as the season, and their appetizing rainbow of colors provides excellent support for overall vitality.

Read the full article, plus recipes, here.

Raw and Order: Matt Amsden Begins Raw Food Delivery

AS PUBLISHED IN TIMEOUT NEW YORK

Matt Amsden launches his L.A.-based raw-food delivery service in New York.

Do you like broccoli when it’s been boiled so long that you can mush a floret with your tongue instead of chewing it? According to raw-foodists, you’re not getting much more nutrition than you would from a bowl of air. The raw-food movement is already well under way in New York and if you haven’t jumped on board yet, Matt Amsden will come to you. The 30-year-old founder of RAWvolution, an L.A.-based meal delivery service, began eating a diet of exclusively uncooked, vegan food at 21. After becoming an integral part of the West Coast raw-food scene, Amsden launched RAWvolution in 2001, and soon was counting Cher and Alicia Silverstone among his clients. This month he brings his convenient, healthy food to Gotham.

Why did you decide to launch RAWvolution in New York?
New York is ready for raw food. And most of our shipments out of L.A. are to the East Coast already. This is a takeout oriented city: If it’s made easy, people will do it.

Why go raw?
The benefits are innumerable, but the main thing is how great it makes you feel. Not long after I started [eating this way], my mind got really clear. And if you need to lose weight, you will—I know people who’ve lost more than 100 pounds. Raw food has 80–85 percent more nutrition in general. In cooked food, the enzymes necessary for digestion are mostly destroyed. Enzymes are involved in every metabolic process in the body. If you’re always eating denatured food, you’ll always be hungry. I don’t get headaches or colds anymore and my digestion is great.

When you first went raw, did you miss things?
Definitely. I went cold turkey from eating junk food to 100 percent raw. It’s not what I recommend, but it’s what I did. I had a visceral craving for corn chips—corn chips were like heroin.

Any particular brand?
[Laughs] Any kind of fix would have done it at the time. As long as it was salty and crunchy.

Where did the name RAWvolution come from?
There’s a lot of craziness, fighting and unhappiness in the world. We all need to clean out. I became calmer and happier with a better diet. We call it the RAWvolution because it’s a revolution with food, but it’s also doing something better for the world.

Visit rawvolution.com or call 800-9976-RAW. $110–$140 per delivery (includes two soups, four entrées, four side dishes and two desserts).