Image
  • Home
  • About
    • FAQ
    • About Heavyweight Yoga
    • About Abby
  • Media
    • Media Coverage
    • Media Resources
  • Calendar
  • Events
    • Classes
  • Shop
  • Blog
  • Contact

Archive for Travel

Food as a time machine

Posted by Abby Lentz 
· April 13, 2017 
· 1 Comment

This time of year I find that food turns into a time machine. As Easter quickly approaches I travel back to my childhood becoming 12 again.

Easter 1952 w/Nancy

Easter 1960 w/Nancy

A time when dying eggs was an all day project that lived on under your fingernails in crescent moons of red, blue and green. Clear waxed crayons would let you draw or write mystery messages that only appeared after dipping them into jars of warm dye.

Holidays were always my mother’s moments and no one did Easter as well as she did. Each kid had their part of the living or dining room where the Easter Bunny would hide the decorated eggs — the center prize being our very own basket.

A nest of shredded colored paper layered the woven bottom where jellybeans would jiggle down to be found just when you thought all had been eaten. A full array of yellow and pink Peeps, shoulder to shoulder with petite foil-wrapped chocolate marshmallow bunnies, surrounded a large hollow bunny stamped to look just like the rabbits on the pages of our fairy tales.

After all the eggs had been found, like clockwork, our Aunt Ethel’s package would appear. My Grandfather Briar’s sister was considered to be an “Old Maid” — never married, no children and not really liberated. Her father had left her inheritance in a trust fund that didn’t provide for her by the 1950s, which required her to work in her later years. Of course, as kids we thought that we were the luckiest ones around to have an aunt who worked at the candy counter in Wanamaker’s.

Aunt Ethel’s Easter eggs came carefully cushioned in layers of white tissue paper creased and folded smooth. To protect the script names, each egg was individually wrapped in clear cellophane gathered and twisted on top secured with a thin strand of real ribbon tied into a small bow. There would be no fighting about who got which egg since they were clearly marked as yours. Names in white surrounded by new growth green vines, each tipped with crafted candy flower buds in pastels of yellow, blue or pink. Inside the thick chocolate coat was a mystery flavor, hidden until mom would slice each egg carefully with a knife too sharp for a child to wield. Chocolate, vanilla crème, coconut, or sometimes even tiny chunks of candied fruit glued together with white sweetness, only to be revealed then.

Not a very good cook, my mother would excel at Easter. Canned ham was spiked with whole cloves to hold up golden rings of pineapple — always packed in syrup back then, never in juice. Each empty center ready to be filled with a maraschino cherry tacked in place with the point of a toothpick. canned hamIf you helped in the kitchen, chances were good that you would be rewarded with a taste of the coveted red cherry juice, sipped straight out of the jar. Baked sweet potatoes lost their tin-taste under a thick layer of gooey toasted marshmallows. Green beans would bathe in real butter, not oleo, for the holiday table. Of course no dessert was necessary. The Easter bunny’s bounty left plenty of sweets for us to eat all day and into the night. Once all the dishes were done we turned on the TV to watch the same show, all together, at the same time.

So, it’s no wonder that I love Easter time and all its many tastes. That the simple sight of grocery shelves loaded with sugar and chocolate transport me to a different time. A time when I was young and all was possible. When I could run like the wind and read without glasses. With my mother feeling accomplished, smiling and gay, and we were a family if only for that day.

Peeps Car

 

 

1 Comment
Categories : Awareness, Featured, Off the Mat, Surprises!, Travel

Layovers to yoga over!

Posted by Abby Lentz 
· June 29, 2016 
· No Comments

If you’re flying to your vacation destination you can appreciate that some airports now have yoga studios available. According to Rodale’s Organic Life here’s the best of the airport yoga studios.

More than likely however, like me you’re not going to intersect with any of these half dozen airports. No worries however, it’s easy to integrate yoga into your layovers without standing out as much as you might think.

Feel a low backache from the entire sitting? Do wall or sink support downward dog. Grab the sink or place your hands on a wall or door about hip high, step back until your hips are level with your hands (soft bend in the knees) and then press the hips away to lengthen you back and stretch your hamstrings.

Feel like you’ve been curled up all flight? While sitting reach back with both hands and hold onto your seParis Legsat, ground both feet and press your heart center forward squeezing the shoulder blades together as you stretch out across the front body shoulder to shoulder.

While you may not want or be able to stand on your head like the woman in the picture, you might find enough courage to get your legs up a wall or up on a chair. Here I am outside the Louvre in Paris giving my feet a thorough rest.

If being upsidedown in public isn’t your style simply slip off your shoes and do the Point (toes pointing away to stretch the top of the foot); the Demi-Point (press through the ball of the foot while pulling the toes up and apart); and the Flex (press the heel away to stretch the Achilles and calf). In girly-girl shoe talk, that’s a ballet toe shoe, sexy high heel and an earth shoe negative heel.

Check out my many travel stretches on YouTube on the HeavyWeightYoga channel. You’ll find complete tips not just for flying but driving as well. My favorite prop to pack is my 10-foot strap. Put it somewhere you’ll often see it to remind you when you’re at your vacation spot to sprinkle a little yoga once you get there.

Most important travel with ease!

No Comments
Categories : Featured, Off the Mat, Poses, Travel, Uncategorized, Yoga Off the Mat

The Path For Best Laid Plans

Posted by Abby Lentz 
· April 29, 2015 
· No Comments

Holidays are often a way to carve out time for yourself that’s sanctioned by the calendar. This Memorial Day you can kick-start your summer at the HeavyWeight Yoga Women’s Retreat at the serene Camp Allen.

Path at Camp AllenInstead of a holiday to get away, we’re all coming to understand Memorial Day as a family holiday, one of the first of the year. But what if you consider taking care of yourself a holiday gift to your family? If that’s true, you will want the support and love of others around you as you create that gift. The benefits are not just for you, but for everyone who loves you. That all starts with loving yourself. It’s the third A of the HeavyWeight Way: Affection.

A retreat often is a special and even a sacred event in our lives. You make plans for your future at a retreat, because you’re laying a foundation. A few days away can truly deliver best-laid plans. My Spring HeavyWeight Yoga Women’s Retreat will let us explore time, yoga, and you. Consider this retreat as a pathway to find the time to deliver to yourself. Lay down that path for your time to come.

Join me for a weekend of retreat this spring. Let’s find joy together in time we will spend on ourselves.

No Comments
Categories : Featured, Travel
Tags : Retreats

Expect the Unexpected

Posted by Abby Lentz 
· October 25, 2010 
· No Comments

Before we left Austin for our Second Honeymoon trip to California we made plans. Not only where we were staying, but also where we were eating.

  • Breakfast at MaMa’s — a café that was on everyone’s top 5 list.
  • Fancy dinner at the Grand View Hyatt — boasting to be the last sky-view restaurant in San Francisco.
  • The Sunday Grand Brunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel — our reservation timed to be at the cross over from breakfast to lunch so we could sample everything they had to offer.

So imagine our surprise after driving across Yosemite to Mono Lake to be treated to a 5-star meal at the Tioga Gas Mart. Fish tacos with fresh mango salsa and Buffalo meatloaf with seasoned steamed julienne vegetables all served on real plates with real silverware to be eaten outside on a weathered, well used picnic table. Gas pumps out front, the inside surrounded by refrigerator cases filled with the usual soft drinks and beer. The register decorated with last minute auto items hanging in their bubble packs. There was no hint of the delicious food we were about to savor.

In life there’s only so much we can plan. Out of that, there’s only so much that goes the way we hoped it would. After all Robert Burn’s poem written To a Mouse in 1785 is now a proverb:

The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awry.

So it seems for generations we have been planning for things to not work out.  So what would happen if we also planned for the unexpected to be good? Things we don’t see coming that add to our day in a positive way.

The trick to this, I think, is letting those pleasant things be small. Receiving a smile from a stranger. Noticing how good our body feels after a little stretch. Hearing the birds in our front yard serenade us while sipping our morning coffee. Once expecting the best becomes a habit it’ll be easy to have little good things pool into a pond of joy you can soak in.

Be open to receive all that comes your way, let yourself exhale all that negative junk you might be carrying as you prepare for the worst to happen. Instead open yourself to receive the inhale breath and all the joy that it can bring.

No Comments
Categories : Awareness, Breath Work, Off the Mat, Surprises!, Travel
HeavyWeight Yoga®
Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved
iThemes Builder by iThemes
Powered by WordPress