Dowel, Down Dog Determine Great Digestion!

Dowels, Down Dog and Great Digestion At Stouffville Yoga Life!
February 27th 2016

At the beautiful studio of Stouffville Yoga Life, Isidora our yoga teacher led us through a series of simple exercises using a dowel. This piece of wood is about the size of a broom handle and about two feet long although a quick google search demonstrates longer dowels used for other postures.

I placed my feet directly on the dowel, just behind the padding follows my toes. We hung out for a few minutes, our feet dangling, as Isidora taught the meaning of the pose.

Immediately I felt sensation up my left side inside my skin. The organs responded to the dowel and the loosening of fascia in my feet!

Feet have at their base, fascia. Fascia is what creates muscle to hold its shape. "Without fascia, muscle is no more than ground meat," Isidora said. Fascia extends throughout our bodies like a wrapping, and especially in our feet, creates a buffer between skin, ground, and other flesh.

When fascia begins to tighten, as it will over time and experience, in one place, all the fascia in our bodies begins to tighten up.

The experience of loosening continued, with a kind of sensation I've come to recognize as loosening of tissue. We alternated between dowel and Downward Dog, or Vinyassa Flows.

The next day my body registered the experience through signals of gentle fatigue and a feeling of being slightly out of sorts. These are the communications I've learned to accept from over four decades of meditation, bioenergetics, deep release breathing and dreams as the way my body reconfigures to a more relaxed, more deeply tuned position. As the old, held tensions release, the cellular intelligence flushes the toxins creating newly experienced space, opening and looseness within.

As an added bonus, my digestion improved markedly the next few days, another sign of body cleansing, clearing and calming.

This cellular intelligence responds to our efforts. Learning to trust this intelligence, far greater than what we currently call intelligence, means we learn to trust life, that thrust of kundalini that provides knowledge about our true path in this life.

Come to Stouffville Yoga Life and experience the power of the dowel! Or ask your yoga instructor to help you learn how to dowel your fascia into its free flowing natural state. When we heal ourselves we help heal the entire planet! Now that's worth doweling!