How to Perfectly Combine Coffee & Yoga | R'stoyours Review

Some days are must-have-coffee days.

In the true yogi spirit, though, it's hard to stomach the massive amount of trash, clutter (k-cup stash!), and environmental impact of k-cups. Finally having a Keurig to simplify life = not so simple. Well... having a k-cup machine at the school parent group anyways; I'm donating these to the school after writing this.

Being a systems person I am pretty excited to share my solution to yoga happiness + coffee bliss.

Weekend Crush: Michelle Stanek, A True Angel

This week the pole world was shocked, appalled, and yes, more than a bit upset over the overt plagiarism of one of our most loved pole stars. What makes this story special is not that it happened, because art forms are so often subject to not-so-flattering imitation. It isn't even that it made waves, because as we know the pole world is extremely close knit, maybe even to a fault. An issue that could have rightfully lead to legal action and enmity turned out to be an example of true kindness and respect.

Lisa Fedele of Italy performed Michelle Stanek's routine, down to the same music, for Canale Italia. You can see the similarities in choreography for yourself, you will want to watch at least the first 30 seconds if you haven't seen it before:

Now compare that to Lisa's version. Déjà vu, right? Lisa was right to challenge herself with attempting Michelle Stanek's choreography as there is a clear difference in technical execution. She has an amazing talent for the contemporary pole dance style on top of being an amazing sexy pole dancer.

Michelle's response:

How sweet is that? She could have been well in her right to get a lawyer on this and instead reached out to Lisa. And it looks like Lisa Fedele, along with the rest of us, is an even bigger fan of Michelle's for it:

Translated within an inch of it's life by Bing: "She [Michelle] was very kind and cute [sweet?] with me, we have solved the thing in 'friendship'..." I love that. We can be a very close community and protect our own while reaching out to others. Well done, Michelle, we could all do to take a page out of your book!

I lost flexibility! Now what?

So you've been working hard at getting crazy flexy when life happens. Suddenly there is no time for stretching, or you have health issues, or just plain old fall off the wagon. Lost splits, back flexibility--it happens. But now what?

 It's time to find motivation again. 

 For some people, this might mean watching videos of your favorite muses or searching flexy pictures. Maybe you just need to listen to the right music, like the songs your favorite flexible dancers perform to. For me it is most helpful to combine those ideas with scheduling time to stretch. Just do it. Stretching for the sake of repeating tried-and-true stretches and for that happy, good stretching pain.

Don't look back.

The splits I could get before,
without a proper warmup.
Taken in chat (hence mess + blurriness)

This is horrible for me since I have a couple fuzzy pictures of myself in my front