Frameworks Yoga / Richard Gartner

12/31/2024

For New Year’s, Resolve to Omit Shame

Exercising is a common resolution and a good idea. But many people make this resolution based on a sense of shame or lacking. Here’s a more compassionate approach: Focus on the benefits of your resolution.

It’s been easier for me to embrace exercise over the years because I pore over the research. It’s easy to find studies on how exercise improves our lives, and what kinds have specific effects.

When trying to develop a new habit, focusing on benefits will get you more firmly established. The same goes for meditation, nutrition, and any other habit. Determine what effects are meaningful to you. Keep these in mind when designing your resolutions, and also as you are navigating 2025. Happy New Year.

#2025

12/16/2024

Client gifts are wrapped and sent! Over the past 19 years I’ve had so many great clients, and am grateful for their practice. I hope they enjoy locally-made chocolates.

11/28/2024

TY to the volunteers and all for making the Turkey Trot happen!

11/27/2024

It seems we bid adieu to outdoor practices until the spring. Here’s how to keep your practice vibrant indoors:

🧘 Set your yoga space up before you want to practice
🧘 Put practice time your calendar
🧘 Make notes on what you’d like to work on
🧘 See me Saturdays at 9am at in the Strip for that irreplaceable group energy.

11/11/2024

⛈️ Toxic Positivity and the Yoga Sutras ⛈️

Patañjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras lists tapas (the “heat” or will to practice) as an internal ethic. It’s an important aspect of yoga; we don’t evolve without developing willpower. However, willpower is not the first internal ethic named.

Patañjali lists saucha (good intention) and santosha (contentment) before tapas. For good reason: What good is willpower if we don’t give it a helpful direction? And what good is trying to accomplish something that we cannot actually do? Patanjali asks us to figure out why we’re doing all that we do. He’s asking us to get real.

Here’s how I outline the realness:

Saucha (intention) - getting real about your views
Santosha (contentment) - getting real about your abilities
Tapas (willpower) - getting real about your processes

In yoga marketing, there is plenty of toxic positivity, what one online essay defines as “the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations.” Many influencers coddle their followers with relentless idealism.

Toxic positivity is the opposite of getting real, and does more harm than good. If we can learn to see things how they actually are, we will be better able to cope with our views, abilities, and processes. Through all of this, we make peace with both who we actually are and who we see ourselves becoming.

11/10/2024

Thanks to everybody who signed up for this morning’s “Reviving Your Low Back and Hips” workshop! I’ll see you in an hour.

10/29/2024

Last run before the EQT race this Sunday. See you in the 10k pen!

10/25/2024

It’s always a joy to run through Central Park in the fall.

10/14/2024

This Sunday! HIIT, Yin and Release launches at 10:30am in the Strip District. Info and registration here: https://www.frameworksyoga.com/schedule/4ed2276e-6155-4b1f-8f21-da2c1f213d59_1729434600

09/10/2024

This Sunday’s theme is “Toe Taps,” which require the entire body to act. Toe taps also improve proprioception (the sense of where we are in space). Balance, cardio, metabolism improve.

“HIIT, Yin and Release” is a monthly movement series at in Strip District. We launch at 10:30. My bio has a link to register.

08/26/2024

**THE POINT IS THE POINT** [blog post]

This is my 47th birthday post, and I couldn’t be more grateful to get here. My years have been getting better, and it is thanks to the Yoga Sutras. Specifically, its suggestion to establish clear intentions.

One of the worst feelings is doing something we feel is pointless. The Sutras prompted me to ask: What’s the point of everything I was doing? When I was 26, my job, my relations, how I was spending my time; everything was up for examination.

Intention-setting is one of the reasons I’ve been teaching yoga for 19 years. The biggest question I needed to answer in 2005 was: What’s the point of my life? I was working as a compliance auditor at a firm in Washington DC. If I continued down that path, I knew how I was going to feel in 20 years. If I quit and gave yoga a go, I would have no idea how I was going to feel.

Of course, we never really know what’s coming. But I decided the point of life was to experience the unknown; to study the human condition; and to try and help others feel better.

I wouldn’t recommend starting with a big-life question like that, though. I got used to setting intentions in smaller ways:

• Why do I drink coffee? (I like it)
• Why do I run? (The cardio seems like a good idea)
• Why do I listen to music? (it’s both emotionally and intellectually satisfying)

I got good at examining my life, and realized some habits were fine as they were, some habits needed adjustment, and some habits needed to be retired. Including waking up, grabbing my laptop, and hopping on a plane to another audit site.

At 47, a fair bit of my life is now known. The journey has been rewarding, and much of that feeling has been because I was on point. For my life, the point is the point.

08/09/2024

**Disorder is the norm. We are the exception.**

In “Fabric of the Cosmos,” Brian Greene describes entropy as an inevitable process of time. It’s inevitable because, statistically, disorder happens so much more frequently than order.

Greene uses War and Peace as an example. There are 693 pages in the book, and there is only one way they could be in order. If we threw all the pages up in the air, let them land, and then bunched them all back into a stack, how many ways could they be in disarray? Greene calculates 10^1878 ways for the pages to be in disorder, a staggeringly large number.

(I can’t put the written-out number here on social media because it would exceed the character limit. Find the blog post in my bio link to see it. And you need to see it! It’s so much larger than this parenthetical statement.)

Despite the odds, we are here, creatures who are able to think and perceive thanks to a bit of gravity and the material of dead stars. The odds also convince me that disorder is always happening to us. My yoga practices help counter this disorder.

Take our fascia for example. As we sleep, our bodies lay down new connective tissue in the body in a disordered way. We humans can only organize it with passive and active movements. The movements burn away the tissue that’s not useful and reinforce the tissue that is.

We can also keep our DNA from disorder. Writing about a 2003 study, Jorge Pinto Soares et al. (2015) writes “it is expected that exercise may decrease nuclear DNA damage, reducing the risk of developing cell mutations associated to [sic] several diseases.” Mutations are an expected disorder in the system, and we can mitigate it somewhat.

I also see my meditation practice as a way to shield my mind from what the world dishes me. Happenstance is happening, and our minds can latch onto all these random events. Meditation can help us see these events for what they are–entropy–and help us reorder our outlook.

07/17/2024

I’m happy to say that a positive Covid test is only bringing stuffiness and some coughing with it. I’m quarantining until Tuesday. Stay well.

04/24/2024

Weekend workshop alert! If you’ve been concerned about your balance as you age, or perplexed by difficult balance poses, I’ve designed a workshop to understand both. Sunday Strip District. Link in bio.

04/16/2024

🔸Balance Focus in April🔸
Many of us know somebody who has fallen, injured themselves and never recovered. I wanted to share some ideas around balance that inspired my “Balance Frameworks” workshop. It’s helpful to examine balance at any age, and I designed this workshop to address everything from handstands to moving with confidence.

Falling is one of the leading causes of both fatal and nonfatal injuries in adults. In 2021, the latest year information is available, over 2,000 Pennsylvanians died due to an unintentional fall. Falls are also the leading cause of injuries in the same group.

A study from two orthopedic surgery institutes identified 11 factors that contributed to falls in older adults:

• Weakness
• History of falls
• Gait deficits
• Balance deficits
• Assistive Device
• Vision impairments
• Arthritis
• Impaired ADLs
• Depression
• Cognitive Impairment
• Age

Yoga can positively impact several of these factors, simply by studying balance and our own body weight. This will help in more complex poses, but will also help prevent falls as we move and live.

“Balance Frameworks” examines concepts like postural control and base of support. We explore these concepts using familiar yoga postures. Also, we’ll review exercises from peer-review studies that have improved balance.

Balance isn’t even second nature. It’s first nature. From the first life on earth, every species has evolved to thrive in gravity. As we age, we face balance challenges, and there are practices that can help us meet those challenges.

I think it would be so helpful if everybody spent just one afternoon learning how the human body conceives of balance. You can register for “Balance Frameworks” at Schoolhouse Yoga below, (link in comments) and please reach out with any questions.

Richard Gartner is a yoga teacher based in Pittsburgh, PA
Private sessions | Workshops | Videos

04/13/2024

The routine for tomorrow’s “HIIT, Yin and Release.” Plenty of warm-up, plenty of options, and so many benefits. 10:30 . Link in bio for info and to register.

04/01/2024

I attended a ten-day Goenka Vipassana retreat, and it changed my life for the better. That said, this article is accurate. It's intense, and there isn't proper mental health assistance. You could take it for free (you're asked for a donation at the end), and as a result, the retreat is bare-bones. I hope the organization takes this feedback to heart and finds another way to offer this retreat without such danger.

For many people, meditation retreats bring peace of mind. But for some, it's the opposite. Reporters heard from dozens of people who experienced hallucinations, paralyzing fear – and worse.

03/27/2024

We’ve seen pieces in so many places. He was an amazing artist. Condolences to his family and friends.