Get Well Soon! Love, Your Teachers

Cold and flu season are upon us. Feel a sniffle coming on? Here are some tips from your teachers to help you get well soon.

Epsom salts ease muscle pain and encourage rest. 

I usually do oil pulling with coconut oil at the first sign of a sore throat (*Instructions below!*) Tons of vitamin C. Ample sleep and rest. Lots of hot herbal tea and local raw honey. Neti pot with Alkalol added. Oil of oregano can knock out most bugs, and if you can't handle the taste try colloidal silver instead. Keep up with the probiotics. Restorative yoga is great when you get sick! - Matthew 

I take lots of ashwagandha, vitamin c, and some wellness formula. A nice Epsom salt bath can be very helpful, and truly give myself good time to rest. - Shoshana

Healing myself from a sickness is a practice in itself. The moment I feel symptoms, I go to Eagle Rock Juice Co. and get myself a "Flu Shot" (2 oz. of cold pressed lemon juice, ginger, oregano oil & cayenne). Then I ingest foods high in probiotics such as kombucha, miso soup, sourdough bread and take probiotic pills with every meal. I take echinacea and goldenseal herbs with colloidal silver. And drink all kinds of fluids- ginger tea, licorice & marshmallow root tea (for the throat), hot water with apple cider vinegar, and lots of alkaline water. If that wasn't enough I see my Traditional Chinese Herbalist and gives me these herbs tailored to knock the symptoms out almost immediately. Last but not least, I always give myself Reiki while I'm resting. - Chona

Ingest probiotics like those in Health-Ade Kombucha 

When I get sick I feel like the world is coming to an end. I like to be active and outdoors so being sick really interrupts my day to day life. I have found that nothing cures an illness like rest. I try to get as much sleep as I can, coupled with as much water as I can drink. If it's an upset stomach I limit my food intake to just bread, rice, apples or applesauce, and tea. These are very easy for me to eat and help to settle my upset stomach. - Steve

This is a "when I think I'm getting sick" or "when my allergies are bad," remedy. I make a healing juice (*recipe to follow!*) My other go-to for sinus troubles is raw garlic. All it takes is chewing and sucking on a single raw clove to get my nasal passages nice and open-- it's nature's spicy, mean lozenge. I do usually spit it out, as raw garlic can be a little rough on the digestive system. Lastly: zinc. Whenever I'm feeling run down, I take a zinc after dinner-- 9 times out of 10, I wake up feeling back to normal. In addition to nutrients and liquids, the best possible thing really is rest. It took me many years of trying to "work through" being sick, only to realize that if I take just one day of rest (usually the first day of symptoms), my sickness doesn't last nearly as long. Oh, and by rest I mean actual sleep-- if I am dying to watch netflix, I opt for something monotonous that might put me to sleep. Okay that's my 2 cents :) - Ani

When I start to feel as though my health is suffering, I use it as an excuse to downshift. I curl up on the couch with my dogs and a mug of tea and read books for hours. I do this a lot even when I'm perfectly healthy, but it's nice to take the time to mindfully relax and let the rest of the world fall away. - Jamie

Start the day with hot water, honey, lemon and apple cider vinegar. Sleep a lot, snuggle your pets, and call your mom if it gets really bad! - Bethany 

Ani's Killer Cold Kicker

• 4 oranges
• 2 lemons
• 2 cucumbers
• 1 palm-sized piece of ginger
• turmeric (to taste, I shook it maybe ten times)
• cayenne (to taste)
• 4 drops oregano oil
• 1 tsp raw honey

From Ani: FYI this juice is no joke and will really burn-- but it really opens up the sinuses and cleans everything out.

Matthew's Oil Pulling Secret

The Sound That Makes the Bath

Namaste Highland Park Instructor Sondra Sun-Odeon collaborated this summer with musician and recent LA transplant Ian Paige for a yoga class with soundbath accompaniment. The second in the series celebrates the full Hunter Moon and takes place at the studio October 27th at 8pm. The two musicians and yoga enthusiasts sat down for a conversation about how the two worlds intersect.

Sondra Sun-Odeon: I wanted to have you be part of the classes and, with the Full Moon Yin Class, the sonic component helped move the subtle body. Being a musician myself, I've always been interested in sound healing and its power so I'm glad you can join me for the Full Moon Flow and Restore with Sound Bath. Why does this collaboration appeal to you?

Ian Paige: When you invited me to the Yin class, I made sure to attend as a class member before actually performing. The pace and intentionality of that program reminded me of the kind of music I gravitate to. Holding the poses and settling the mind through that slower pace felt like the yoga equivalent to the music I love to make.

I also like that it is live. I'm bringing sequences and predetermined stuff to the set but really i'm working completely off the audience which, unlike a regular concert when you're blinded by the stage lights, it's an interactive situation to feel the audience participation in this really intense way. You can literally hear breath and it becomes the rhythm! So the music itself changes. What i had imagined for that class didn't happen at all. Instead it rolled along with the program itself and they spoke to each other.

SSO: Well you may find in this next class we'll have more movement since it will be both flow and restorative. It'll be interesting to see how you react to the energy of the class differently from the last one.

IP: So what's your intention with the class?

SSO: The Flow and Restore that I usually teach is 45 min of Flow followed by half an hour of Restorative. Since it's the Full Moon though I think we'll go more half and half and it'll be a more gentle flow.

IP: Yeah, that's good for me to know that there's an entrainment for that first half that's a little less droney.

SSO: Does that change things for you? You shouldn't be stressed! You look stressed!

IP: Ha! No, I'm glad we're having this conversation! I literally haven't started planning it yet! No it's cool to know so I can make some preparations for that ... the dynamics ...

SSO: Tell us about the instruments you use in creating these sound baths and what you hope to do for the experience of the listener and yogi participant.

IP: The synths are analog. Digital synthesis is ubiquitous right now and that's a-okay but for this particular scenario, it's like vinyl versus mp3. The waves are deep and real. They hit your eardrums and move through your body in a different way. I use a Roland Juno 60, a Sequential Circuits Six Trak and an old Nord Modular which is admittedly digital but it requires patching voices on a computer (I had to resurrect my 13 year old PowerBook to talk to it because Nord won't support the synth anymore) and I love the flexibility that instrument allows in building sounds and sequences from scratch.

SSO: What artists are informing and influencing the kind of music you make?

IP: I'm into music that creates states. States of being and mind. Psychedelia, less as a genre and more as an approach, has always been important to me. The first LP I ever nabbed out of a bin was Stereolab's  Emperor Tomato Ketchup. I'm thinking of it now because there are elements from the last album from the YIN class that remind me subtly of Stereolab. I dunno, maybe there was a sixteen year old kid a generation before me where it was an ELO or Floyd record or something. For me that band was my entry point. Then of course the decades go by and you trace out all of the branches of the family tree and what I'm looking towards now is more focused and rarified. Anywhere from Terry Riley to Robbie Basho, not that I purport to be anywhere at that level musically, I just feel the spirit of it. JD Emmanuel has become very important to me as a touchstone. Suddenly a lot of these New Age dudes don't sound so cheesy.

SSO: Like Vangelis and all that?

IP: Weeeeeell, he has more than a few moments of being cheesy but there are gems! I guess for me, as an untrained musician, I come at it caring more about the witchier aspects, the incantatory aspects of making music? Is that a word? Does that make sense? I'm from Maine; we're weird woodsy folk. Lots of pagan vibes so I'm less about techno futurism and more about the the more ancient aspects of music as transformation. Ooooh, here's an example. Kraftwerk is another touchstone and they're mostly known for their hyper futurist tropes like in their hit "Pocket Calculator". That album "Computer World" is total genius but my favorite albums from them are right at the moment where they're straddling this transition from psychedelic band with traditional instrumentation into the super synthey group they became famous for. "Ralf and Florian" and "Autobahn" show that beautifully uncomfortable transition. That parallels with the yoga practice. It's not supposed to hurt but you are supposed to be pushing your boundaries to arrive at your destination.

Sondra is a musician and yoga teacher. She will blend her artistic ear for music with her careful eye for energy in this special class to create an irresistible environment.

Ian's latest album, recorded live at Namaste Highland Park, is called YIN I and is available at his band camp site here.

All attendees of the Full Moon Flow and Restore class will receive a free download of the album. The latest video from the album can be seen here.