Found via thesartorialist

Inversion Confusion.

Is it safe to go upside down when you're having your period?

By Timothy McCall, M.D.

Most yoga students are accustomed to hearing their teachers ask whether anyone is menstruating before leading the class into inversions. In many styles of yoga, such as Iyengar, doing inversions during your period is considered strictly verboten. Yet not all teachers consider menstruation an absolute contraindication to going upside down. 

From a yogic perspective, the reason for not inverting during menstruation has to do with apana, the hypothesized downward pranic force that is said to help facilitate things such as bowel function, urination, and menstrual flow. The concern is that reversing this normal energetic movement could interfere with the period, leading to a cessation of flow and possibly heavier bleeding later on. 

It may be wise to avoid inversions while menstruating. But from a medical standpoint, the belief is based mostly on speculation. Women are often warned that if they invert during their period, "retrograde menstruation" could occur. That is, blood could flow in the opposite direction and lead to endometriosis, a painful condition in which small clusters of uterine cells grow in the abdominal cavity. One study, however, found that retrograde menstruation naturally occurs in 90 percent of women, most of whom never develop endometriosis. So we do not know for sure if inversions increase retrograde flow or whether the backward flow increases the risk of endometriosis...

To read more click here 

Article by Timothy McCall from Yoga Journal.

Sequence: Asana for period pain.

I found this sequence online at Yoga Circle and decided to try it out last week. I found it really helpful.  I especially recommend Supta Virasana supported with a bolster and/or blankets...in fact one pose might just be all you need... The following is all from www.yogacircle.com This is an asana sequence for menstruating women or for those who want a quiet practice. The poses should be done in the order given. Hold each posture for the timings indicated. The most important element in this practice is to work calmly and quietly, without straining in the poses. The illustrations are intended to remind you of what each pose looks like.  For a more complete explanation, consult   Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar or Yoga:  A Gem for Women by Geeta S. Iyengar, or your teacher.

Supta Virasana: 5 minutes Use a bolster and/or folded blankets to support your back and neck as necessary. Arms may be over the head or by the sides.   Supta Padmasana: 3-5 minutes each side Use support behind your back. neck and/or under your legs. as necessary. If full padmasana position is not possible, put legs in half-lotus.   Supta Baddha Konasana: 7-10 minutes Tie belt tightly around top of pelvis and under feet. Use a bolster and/or folded blankets to support your back and neck as necessary.

Forward Bends: 2-3 minutes on each side unless noted In all of the following postures, the forehead must be supported on a blanket, bolster. block or chair seat, depending on your flexibility. ln bent leg poses, support knee if necessary. Janu Sirsasana Ardha Baddha Padma Pachismottanasana Triang Mukhaipada Pachismottanasana Upavistha Konasana 2-3 minutes each - right, left, center Pachismottanasana 5 minutes

Supported Backbends: 10-15 minutes The following two backbends can be done with different prop setups. OR Viparita Dandasana On backbender (left) with head on bolster, or on chair (right) with rolled mat or blanket under low back for additional support. OR Setu Bandha Sarvangasana On bench (left) with thighs belted together and blankets or bolster under shoulders as needed. Elevate feet to relieve low back pain. Or, use two blocks (right) - one under pelvis just below the waist and the other under the heels. Feet should be flat against wall in this version. Shoulders rest on folded blanket(s). Place blocks on a sticky mat if they slip.

Savasana: 10 minutes

Painting Reality

500 liters of water based environmentally-friendly paint on asphalt spread by 2000 cars.
2010 Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin.
IEPE & the anonymous crew
Found via honestlywtf

Lenneke Langenhuijsen

All images belong to Lenneke Langenhuijsen.
Found via the COS blog.

Maxence Cyrin

Glacier Caves

1. Greenland Glacier Cave. Photograph by Carsten Peter. National Geographic.
2. Anderson Glacier Ice Cave. Photograph by Larry Workman Qin.
3.  Woman in bathing suit near ice caves in Paradise Glacier, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, ca. 1925. Photographer unknown.

Emily Rothschild

I love this locket from Emily Rothschild 
"...A re-design of a turn-of-the-century mourning locket, this necklace now contains a USB flash drive. Given new life, this locket stores all of your most important photographs and files to be shared or to be kept safe as memories..."

The Cure - Friday Im In Love

Tom Waits - Train Song

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.”

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image by Paula May Evans

BREATHING

Breathing is the essence of yoga.
Breath naturally, without forcing. No pressure , no disturbance, nothing should interfere with the simple, tide-like movement of our lungs as we breath in and out.

- Vanda Scaravelli, Awakening The Spine

Josef Konczak

Something I came across at the Brighton Photography degree show at Free Range.
See more of Josef's work here.

Cy Twombly 1928-2011

Good outfit. If I owned this skirt I don't think I would ever take it off.
Image from here

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenonemon before - but they also report that there are now less mosquitos than they would expect, given the amoungt of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitos are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

Picture: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

Text

Spider Webs

"In humans, we associate getting older with cobwebs of the mind; in spiders, it's the cobwebs themselves that suffer...as spiders age, they build shabbier, less perfect webs than they did in their youth. As a young creepy-crawly, the European house spider, Zygiella x-notata, weaves intricately patterned webs with regular spacing and exact angles, like this one in the left photo, built by a 17-day-old spider. The web in the right photo was built by a 188-days-old spider nearing the end of its life, and its web design is far more irregular and shows numerous gaps."

 

Webs made by drugged spiders photographed by Dr. Peter Witt: 1. undrugged,  2. benzedrine,  3. caffeine

Witt's photos via Neuroscience Art Gallery. More here + here.

To many spiders, the web is everything.

For the approximately 15,000 species of web-building spiders, most of them nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey, meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a man marooned on an island of solid rock, totally out of touch and destined to starve to death. A fly could walk unmolested right under the nose of a webless spider.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Dr. Peter N. Witt, a physician-pharmacologist who 37 years ago was seduced into a career-long study of spiders and their silken domiciles. In 1948 a frustrated zoologist at the University of Tubingen in West Germany turned to his pharmacologist colleague for help in photographing orb-web spiders in the process of constructing their homes. The spiders normally perform this task in the dark around 5 A.M., which is not exactly ideal for movie making. The zoologist wondered if his subjects might be drugged into changing their construction time.

Young Dr. Witt had no trouble feeding the spiders sugar water spiked with various stimulants or tranquilizers ... but the movie-making zoologist was not exactly pleased with the results. The drugged spiders still built their webs in the early-morning darkness, and now the resulting webs were bizarrely abnormal, as if built by a drunk.

The zoologist abandoned the movie, but the pharmacologist was hooked. Here, he explained in a recent interview, was a reliably reproducible means of assessing the behavioral effects of drugs with mind-altering potential. Each drug seemed to produce characteristic aberrations in the spiders' webs, changes far more reliable than the behavioral effects of drugs observed in laboratory rats or human subjects.

Jane E. Brody, writing in the 9/17/1985 NYT.
I found all of this via evencleveland.  No wonder so many artists are obsessed with spiders webs...

Tomas Saraceno

All work belongs to Tomas Saraceno

Maps of Life

Maps of Life from warrenfrederick. Found via thingsmagazine