Self-Care Tips For Winter and Spring

Self-care means taking time for yourself so that you can find a sense of wellbeing and balance in your life. There are three basic types of self-care: foundational self-care, which gives meaning to your life; structural self-care, which gives your mind, body, and emotional life stability; and practical self-care, which supports your daily functioning.

Few of us take care of our whole being (though many of us are good at maintaining our superficial needs). Plagued by anxiety, stress, poor nutrition, insomnia, and exhaustion, we get sick. I have worked in hospital settings in New York City and Haiti—and I teach three restorative classes a week at Shanti—and the one thing that everyone I work with has in common is a lack of balance. Everyone I meet is striving to be the best that they can be, but very few people are asking the question, “How can I work this hard and still maintain a level of balance in my life?”

Self-care can be just another item on your to-do list, or you can create new patterns in your life that include self-care as a way to maintain health, balance, and longevity. Here is one way I like to take time for myself:

I lay a soft blanket on the floor with a second blanket folded once to support my head. Then I swing my legs up onto the couch so that my calves are resting on the cushions, and my thighs are perpendicular to the floor. After that, I cover my eyes with an eye pillow, and put a few drops of a nice essential oil like lavender on a cotton ball nearby. If I have some time alone, I set a timer for 10 minutes, and just let my breath be easy. (If my son is around, I stay in that position until he jumps on me.)

We have asked our team of Urban Zen teachers at Yoga Shanti to share with you some of their go-to self-care techniques to regain balance through the winter…

Mary-Beth Charno

Certified Holistic Oncology RN, NP-S & Lead Teacher

My favorite home remedy for fatigue, exhaustion, and over-stimulation? I start with a cup of herbal tea, like chamomile. Sounds good already, right? Here’s what you do next: to a bathtub full of hot water, add 2 tablespoons of baking soda mixed with a generous amount of Young Living’s eucalyptus and lavender oils—about 20 drops each. Make sure to pre-mix the oils in the powder before adding them to the water (oil and water don’t mix, and will sit on top). Then slowly step in. If candles are lit around the tub, even better! Set the timer and begin your self-Reiki practice, taking in the scents of the gorgeous oils: eucalyptus to clear out the lungs, lavender to decompress. Come out of the tub like you do after savasana.

Then head to your yoga mat for a 30-minute restorative practice. Keep the lights low. Start with supported child’s pose for 3 minutes. Then side-lying pose for 5 minutes. From there move into a simple supported twist for 3 minutes on each side. Then an easy supported backbend for 5 minutes. After that do constructive rest for 5 minutes, and finish with legs up the wall or calves on the chair. It’s the best gift I can give myself, and I feel so much more spacious and at peace afterwards.

Gillian Cillabrasi

When I’m wiped out but need to keep going, I do some gentle movements, set myself up in a flat-back version of supta baddha konasana, cover myself well, apply the essential oils Joy or Valor to my hands, and do self-Reiki. It’s a no-fail 15-minute pick me up!

Keely Garfield

Whenever I feel a cold coming on, I rub massage-quality sesame oil into my feet, put my socks on, and go to bed! After that, I usually wake up feeling much better. Sesame oil is very warming, and draws toxins out of the body. Try it. (It works with my kids too!)

Maggan Soderberg Daileader

My favorite home remedy is using the therapeutic-grade oils for kids: peppermint on the stomach for bellyaches, PanAway for growing pains, and Peace and Calming when waking up from a bad dream.

Fanny Oehl

I’ve made this remedy a ritual two or three times a month. I do it in the afternoon, when I know I have a chunk of time. I lay down towels on my bathroom floor, and run a hot Epsom-salt-and-lavender-oil bath. I get out of the bath the same way I do from savasana—trying to move as a little as possible as I make my way to the floor and warmly wrap myself in my towels. In constructive rest, I run through the self-Reiki positions and finish with a belly massage. I stay until I’m ready to come out. I do not set a timer!

Kirtan Smith

Staying healthy during the cold winter months in New York City is a challenging proposition. One of my favorite tools for staying healthy is Young Living’s Thieves essential-oil blend. This powerful blend combines some of nature’s most potent remedies: eucalyptus, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon and clove, which, according to the FDA, has the highest antioxidant rating of anything they’ve ever tested! This is a powerful oil, so I suggest you diffuse it. Using a diffuser in your home or office can kill many airborne microorganisms, and the cinnamon-y/clove smell feels like the holidays!

Yoga Scholars

My old buddy Rod Yee will often tell people that I’m a yoga “scholar,” which is akin to calling the heavily tattooed, long-haired dude who works over at our neighborhood pizza joint a “gourmet chef.” Rodney, bless his heart, knows a ton about yoga, but to paraphrase a famous line from an old VP debate, I know scholars, and, sir, I am not a scholar. I’ve had the good luck over the years to be friendly with several of our most noted yoga scholars, among them the late Georg Feuerstein, for whom I served as the assistant director of his now defunct Yoga Research and Education Center, and Mark Singleton, author of what is, in my humble opinion, one of the most important yoga histories of modern times, Yoga Body.

So yes, I know yoga scholars. What set these two gentlemen apart from an earlier generation, which, for the most part, was made up of eggheads only, is that both were extraordinary practitioners—they not only talked the talk, they also walked the walk.

A few years ago I began running across the yoga essays of a man by the name of James Mallinson. I’m not, I repeat, a scholar, but I like to think that after 34 years of study, I know a little bit about hatha yoga. It became crystal clear, however, after two or three encounters with Mr. Mallinson’s work, that I would have to downsize that “little bit” of knowledge to a “teensy little bit.”

Then it came to pass that the aforementioned Messers Singleton and Mallinson teamed up for a Kickstarter project, and asked me—me!—to endorse it. To get some idea of how honored I felt, as a lifelong Yankee fan, it was akin to being asked to give my seal of approval to the Commerce Comet and the Chairman of the Board—Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford to you, Mets fans.

Then one thing led to another, and I soon had an occasional email correspondence going with Mr. Mallinson. I was a bit intimidated when I first wrote to “Dear Mr. Mallinson,” wondering if he’d even bother to reply, but the very next day there was “Jim” in my inbox. He turned out to be a regular guy, incredibly generous with his time (he’s a master Sanskritist who helped me immeasurably with a translation I was struggling with), humorous in that dry British way, and most of all, incredibly dismissive about all his amazing accomplishments.

Like Georg and Mark, James is not only a scholar but a most dedicated practitioner of the venerable discipline of yoga. Many of my yoga friends take great pride in their three or four trips to India over the years to study, but Jim has been every year for the last twenty-five years. Have you ever been to India? I have, and to paraphrase an old Army promo, it’s not just a trip, it’s an adventure. Twenty-five years running counts in my book as remarkable. His time there has been spent studying yoga in the traditional way—the way it was done for a thousand years in India—face-to-face with an acknowledged guru.

Yoga Shanti, the best yoga school in the country east of Piedmont Yoga in Oakland, will be hosting James in Sag Harbor on Saturday, August 23, and on Wednesday, August 27, at Shanti’s Big Apple venue. If you fancy yourself a serious yoga practitioner, there’s absolutely no excuse I can think of for not being in attendance. I’ve been to a couple of his talks out here on the Left Coast, and had the great good fortune to sit down to a dinner with him. I promise, guarantee, and assure you, that you will come away from the talk if not enlightened, then a heck of a lot smarter about yoga than when you arrived. I’m coming—to paraphrase another famous Brit, wild horses couldn’t keep me away—so see you there, or be square.

August Practice

One of the many reasons I have fallen head-over-heels for yoga is that it makes clear for me the relationship between what can be seen and what cannot. It shows me how the obvious and the subtle are actually interpenetrating each other—they’re woven together. We get to witness this phenomenon up close when we show up for a downward dog or two.

True, we may be drawn to the practice for very physical reasons—to heal our low-back pain or tone our derriere. But then one day something hits us while we’re shifting into triangle pose, and suddenly we get a whiff of the life force moving inside of us. Suddenly, that pulsation is more interesting than how we look in jeans. There is reverence, at least for that moment.

At least for that moment, because it’s so easy and human to go back to the obvious. Eventually, I find myself wondering, has the tone of my arms improved? Are my abdominals getting stronger? Is my low-back pain gone? Am I sleeping better? How does my bakasana look?

I’m now nine months into being pregnant for the first time, and am surprised to discover how much being pregnant has in common with yoga—it’s that same majestic relationship between what can be seen and what cannot. There it is again: reverence, awe.

Your body goes through so many changes when you’re pregnant, most of which are out of your control. It’s a lot like puberty in that way. And the changes to your physical form become, for better or for worse, a topic of conversation with friends, acquaintances, and even people you meet on the street. Throughout my early pregnancy, many people observed that I “didn’t even look pregnant,” which I often found a little disturbing. (Admittedly, I had made this same observation to friends and acquaintances before I understood how slowly the metamorphosis towards “looking pregnant” unfolds.) It’s a dissonant thing to hear when you feel so much movement on the inside.

I don’t think the issue is about not “looking” pregnant, but rather that we often don’t know something—anything—is there until it’s nine-months obvious, so to speak. I’ve come to understand that being pregnant is very similar to bearing the fruit of anything new: there are often subtle changes, which precede, or accumulate into, big shifts. What can be seen and what cannot are slowly altering with the steady, sattvic pulse of life. I’ve learned that the various stages one goes through when they are gestating a new idea, developing a new project, or creating a new life form may not be so obvious to the naked eye. And laboring anything into existence is typically an arduous process.

Truthfully, I think we are all pregnant most of the time. Not in the literal sense, but, rather, we are constantly impregnated with ideas, goals, worries, and seeds of potential for the life we are living and the life we are helping to create before us.

Noticing the small differences in our various states of pregnancy requires quite a bit of sensitivity. This sensitivity is what I’ve come to learn is the bridge between the obvious and the subtle. I wonder, if we spend our time on our mat nurturing this sensitivity to the small and nuanced, can we become more fertile in the seeds we plant for our future?

Can our yoga practice help us to better wield these tools of sensitivity and attentiveness? Would that help us to avoid injuries and patiently deepen our backbends? Can we better notice the small ways that we hold ourselves throughout the day and recognize that our posture develops or atrophies from these physical habits? If we can experience these patient changes in our physical body, what implications does that have for our lives? Will we notice a deepening relationship between our physical habits and our spiritual well being?

In the August of this hot summer—when we may have more time and opportunity for falling in love, practicing with our favorite Yoga Shanti teachers, relaxing at the water’s edge, and reflecting on what’s to come in the autumn ahead—how can we use this time to become more sensitive, more tuned-in, to the nuances of life? Let’s take the time, so that, as we move towards the harvest of fall, we feel nourished beyond our own needs, and capable of being more sensitive and present to others as well.