Pages

Tuesday 31 July 2012

Lil Buck: Aria on Nowness.com.


Uniform Exercises on Nowness.com.
“For these beautiful old ladies who meet every morning it’s a routine in their daily lives, it’s part of their identities. For the past 30 years the group has gathered daily to practice luk tung kuen, a specialist Chinese form of exercise."

Temporary Tattoos






top set from Culture Label and the rest from from Tattly

Monday 30 July 2012

Going for gold




Vintage Olympic photographs. Found here.

Mathilde Roussel






These beautiful and delicate sculptures, made of paper and glue, were made by French artist, Mathilde Roussel. Meant to emulate human skin, these folded sculptures serve as a metaphor for everyday human change:
"We imperceptibly change everyday as if we were changing skin. The Mues sculptures make visible this metamorphosis through imprints of a body at the specific time. They are clothing of empty skin that we fold and keep to put on a new one. This skin becomes the trace of the time passing and the memory of an anterior life."
See more on Mathildes website

Friday 27 July 2012


image from here

Pose of the week


Savasana (Corpse Pose)

Savasana is a pose of total relaxation, which can make it one of the most challenging poses to be in.
  
After a balanced practice, the entire body will have been stretched, contracted, twisted and inverted. Savasana allows the body a chance to regroup and reset itself.  This means that even the deepest muscles will have the opportunity to let go and shed their regular habits, if only for a few minutes. Most importantly the physiological benefits of deep relaxation are numerous.

In the classic pose you lie out flat on the ground, like the image above, with no support, but this isn't a truly comfortable position for us all. Comfort is essential in the pose! The fairy tale of The Princess and the Pea always comes to mind when preparing for this pose. The slightest point of discomfort can be endlessly distracting. There are a few things you can do to support the body in this posture, for example placing a bolster or rolled blankets under the knees to help relax the low back, or placing a blanket under the head to help lengthen the neck and release tension at the base of the skull. You might also like to have something over the eyes, if that helps you soften the face,  and make sure you are warm enough.

Savasana can come at the beginning and/or at the end of a practice. I often start and always finish my practice with a version of corpse pose, and there are loads of visualisations for relaxation out there, but i like the simplicity of melting, with a focus on the breath.

When you come into the pose it's nice to start by internally patrolling the body, releasing tension bit by bit, from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes. Have the idea of simply allowing your body to melt as a whole, like butter, into the floor.
As you continue to let go you'll feel like your body is spreading into the ground, the whole of the back of your body literally taking more and more space.

Just enjoy watching all your muscle tension melt with gravity and an easy breath into the ground. It's bliss!

One of the most challenging aspects of this pose is keeping your attention on what you are doing as you are doing it...a challenge in all yoga asana!
Your attention often seems to want to run ahead of you, so that you feel like you are constantly trying to keep up with it. It may help to think of your attention as a young and eager puppy. Every time you catch yourself wandering off call your attention to heel so that it follows what is happening rather then trying to lead. Over time you'll find that you've trained it into to staying with you for longer and longer.

Last of all, and most importantly (i think) is to be careful not to judge what you you come across when relaxing. See if you can be with yourself without judgement and accept what ever you come across in each moment. Let yourself be, allowing your attention to linger in the places that you feel it might benifit from most. 

image from here

Thursday 26 July 2012

"It seemed to me now that a lot of people were invested in defining yoga as one particular thing. But for me, to experience yoga was to encounter its very slipperiness. This was the beauty of it. With so many overlaps and falsehoods, yoga's most defining characteristic was not its legitimacy but the very uncertainty of its paternity. Yoga was something we assimilated into our contradictory, multilayered world, something that was never wholly Indian, never one particular anything. "

-- Elizabeth Kadetsky, First There Is A Mountain

Björn Johansson's Garamond Corpus





Björn explains his inspiration:

 "My purpose was to examine the individual letter, its shape and typographic qualities. Our letters have many characteristics comparable to the human: there’s big and small letters, thin and fat, there’s an indication of movement in the italic letter and every upper-case letter has a younger sibling, the lower-case. 

Within the field of typography we have a definition for the different parts of the letter which is called the anatomy of the typeface and partly reminds of our own anatomy: the letters have arms and legs, eyes and ears, spines et cetera." 

All images belong to Björn Johansson via streetanatomy

Rachel Whiteread



Rachel Whiteread

























haha!
Found here

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Tattly




Temporary Tattoos for grown -ups from Tattly. Way cool.

Bluegrass Clog Dancing

I love Youtube!! And the Grandad at 1.54-1.55 : )

Only Breath


ONLY BREATH

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system.

I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.

I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story.

My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

 --Rumi

Saturday 21 July 2012

oooooooooooooo!




Melty disco balls. LOVE. from here


Aled Lewis

soooo i tried Bikram Yoga...


This is how i felt.

 “The Dying Swan” Danced by Yvette Chauviré
 (Source: kaketeiruhoshi)
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.


--  Lao Tzu - Tao te Ching

Friday 20 July 2012