Luckily, in my study of essential oils, I’ve learned which ones I can use on my body to promote skin regeneration and healing. I’ve seen remarkable improvement in my skin and the appearance of scars by using essential oils daily. Even my worst scars and stretch marks (aah! God forbid! those nasty little reminders of what happened when I “lost” my anorexic body) have visibly decreased after consistent use with my magic oil blend.

My formula for a scar removing oil blend is not super precise and it changes a bit each time I make it, but there are a few important and necessary oils to use in order to make the most effective blend.

These are helichrysum, vetiver, lavender and carrot seed.

These oils all have anti-bacterial qualities, skin-regenerative healing properties and can help restore elasticity in the skin.

I like to use both almond oil and jojoba oil as the carrier oil or base. Both these natural oils are very moisturizing, nourishing and easily absorbed into the skin.

Here is my basic recipe:

1 medium size bottle of sweet almond oil mixed with jojoba oil

15 drops of helichrysum

15 drops of carrot seed 

10 drops of lavender

10 drops of mandarin

10 drops of roman chamomile

5 drops of vetiver

5 drops of frankincense 

5 drops neroli

5 drops of rose geranium

These oils are all fantastic for promoting healing of scars. If you can’t get a hold of all these oils, no biggie. Just invest in the most important ones that I listed above.

Other oils that are very beneficial for reducing the appearance of scars and stretch marks are myrrh, jasmine, rosewood and sandalwood and patchouli.

I find that I get the most benefit from this scar removing oil blend if I massage it into my skin at least once a day after showering. I often put a few drops of this blend in my baths to soak up all the healing goodness.

Have you ever used essential oils to heal your skin?

Blessings,

Frances

I hope you are having a beautiful and relaxing weekend. I’ve had a very busy week working my two new floral jobs – yippee! Wedding season is crazy but I’m having so much fun being a part of the creative scene.

Here are a few links of things that have caught my eye recently.

Enjoy!

♥

This wedding made my heart melt. So sweet, simple and perfect. Swoon…. I want to do mine all over again!

This discussion on what is “traditional Ashtanga Yoga.” Good stuff.

Permission to do what you want, from one of my favorite eclectic blogs.

A perfect summer lunch: cold soba noodles with cucumber, avocado and sesame.

I love these vintage snapshots. They make me smile. If you dig on this too, follow my adore board.

I’ve determined this is the summer that I learn to love my thighs, so that means I’m starting to wear shorts (previously unheard of behavior in my sartorial world). I recently got these cute printed ones and I’m a fan. Next up, I want to try to wear shorts for yoga…eeek!

This uber-clean, green, all-natural, chemical-free sunscreen. I could not survive in Colorado without this magic stuff.

Summertime garden prettiness.  I’m obsessed with flowers and gardens, as you can probably tell.

Thad and I enjoyed spying these pics of Mike D’s very chic yet comfortable home in Brooklyn.  I want a chalkboard powder room!

What’s been inspiring you lately?

xo

Frances

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I have a fickle personality in that I am both a persistent, stubborn perfectionist and totally lazy at the same time.

I’ve quit many things in my life simply because of my insecurities about not being “good enough”, and by “good enough” I mean, the best. Mostly, I never met my lofty expectations of perfection because I didn’t put in the time and practice needed to succeed. Instead of doing scales and boring exercises, I resolutely decided that I should automatically be fantastic at everything and if this wasn’t the case, I would just bail.

Now that I’m primarily practicing just Second Series (up to pincha), my Ashtanga yoga practice looks like a reel of bloopers. It’s a daily sequence of epic fails.

I can only visit the ease and familiarity of Primary Series once a week now. I no longer have it there to open up my body for the more vigorous poses of Second Series. When I do occasionally try all Primary and half of Second, it totally trashes me for the next day of practice.

Second Series is full of challenging and unglamorous poses. It requires a different strength than Primary Series (lolasana pickups? Hullo!) and even more openness in the hips and back.

Despite the fact that it is hard, I really love it. Even though I have these waves of severe and utter hopelessness that accompany my painful kapotasana attempts, I couldn’t even fathom quitting Ashtanga. I really don’t mind that I kind of suck at it. It’s good for my ego to struggle and have to take my sweet time building this practice over the course of years.

I realized this when I went to a Level 2 Corepower Yoga class a few months ago out of curiosity. The class was a total snore for me. Nothing challenged me, and even in the 95 degree heated room, I barely broke a sweat. The class consisted of a lot of crescent lunges, warrior flows and a few scattered vinyasas. The peak pose, ashtavakrasana, was impossible for most of the students in the class. This wasn’t their fault though, because the practice leading up to it did nothing to make that pose accessible or understandable, in my opinion.

But I was good at it. In fact, I kind of rocked at Corepower. And that was weird. I’m not used to that in my practice. Honestly, I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like how easy it was to move through all these poses. I got bored too quickly.

Occasionally going to a Vinyasa class can be fun for me. It feels kind of cool to be able to easily bust out these showy poses like birds of paradise, hanumanasana, side crow, full king pigeon – all these poses that Ashtanga has made so available to me, despite the fact that they don’t show up in my regular practice.

But I’m not really practicing yoga to show off to myself or anyone else. I don’t need my practice to make me feel good about myself, like I’m some rockstar.

I like that I have to work my butt off in Ashtanga. I like that I have to work on something repeatedly for weeks or months before I have a breakthrough. That doesn’t make me a masochist or a life-denier or whatever else you could think about that.

I think what it means is that I’m learning patience, despite my ingrained predilection for instant gratification for most things in life. In yoga, I don’t mind waiting. I don’t mind looking like a mess.

I’m just happy I get to practice every day.

Love and Blessings,

Frances

Truth be told, I hate summer.

The heat makes me feel lazy, heavy and disinterested….and sometimes, angry (it’s that fiery pitta hiding under my flaky vata constitution).

I tolerate summer by taking plenty of freezing cold showers, drinking gallons of water and avoiding the piercing mid-day sun like the plague. I know, I sound like barrels of fun. I’m just more of a snow bunny than a beach babe, can’t help myself.

Anyways, hydration is so essential to health and well-being, especially when you live somewhere as dry and sunny as Colorado. Drinking that extra glass or two of water makes the difference between a headache and a good day for me.

I always drink at least one full glass of water before I eat anything in the morning so that I’m starting off my day on the right foot. When I started that habit a few years ago, it made a huge difference in my hydration level.

As the day goes on, when it’s hot like it is now, I love drinking what I call “spa water.”

Water is perfect and lovely just the way it is, but I find that sometimes in the summer, chilling it with some refreshing natural supplementation is a surefire way to get me drinking more of it.

Last year I purchased a Bodum iced tea pitcher and it got me jazzed about making more herbal infusion and flavored waters.

One of my favorite infusion is a few mint sprigs and a handful of dried lemon balm. This is a very cooling mixture.

This week’s spa water consists of a few slices of organic washed lemon, cucumber and crushed mint leaves from my little garden.

So tasty and fresh.

Do you make “spa water?” What’s your favorite concoction?

Blessings!

Frances

There’s a lot going on in the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. Breath, bandhas, drishti, movement, focus, alignment, jumpbacks, jumpthroughs and more fill the long and rather complicated sequence.

Because of this, sometimes I find it is helpful to set one particular point of focus for my asana practice. This doesn’t rule out the other factors of course, because they are all in relationship with one another as I move through the sequence. In fact, in seems to enhance the quality of my practice because having one thing to focus on gives me a better chance of finding any focus at all in my crazy monkey-mind.

I remember when I first started practicing I often chose just to think about drishti. This encouraged me in finding a sense of centered calmness within all the movement. My natural orientation is to become completely engrossed in the postures and their alignment (I’ve spent enough time in Iyengar studios to be a bit obsessive in this regard). It’s more important for me these days to focus on the more subtle aspects of the practice – in particular, the energetic movements and the orientation given by the bandhas. Just focusing on the alignment puts me too much in my head, and then I lose touch with my breath.

I know this isn’t exactly profoundly groundbreaking stuff I’m sharing with you, but this has been the reoccurring theme of my practice recently. In particular, the feeling that has been so present with me is a deep conscious engagement at my center by tapping into the “flying up” sensation of uddiyana bandha. I’m really tuning into the sensations in my entire abdomen, from the drawing back of my lower belly, to the tight lifting of my solar plexus area and this point of focus makes dramatic shifts in the ease, fluidity and strength of my yoga asanas.

When I practice Ashtanga, I like to visual and sense that every motion is initiated and activated by this place of power at my center. It’s more than just engaging my core and physically lifting the abdominal muscles in and up, it’s an actual conscious orientation for guiding my movements. By turning my attention to my center, the dantien, to hara, to the 3rd chakra, it becomes like a physical axis that each posture builds upon with integrity. The more attention I can bring to my center, the more automatic my mula bandha becomes as well.

The more connected in at my center I am, the stronger my practice is, and the more beneficial it is for any lingering pain or tenderness I have in my lower back and SI joint. I like to imagine that it is the point of strength at my solar plexus that swooshes my hips back into downward dog from up dog. I like to feel my uddiyana bandha lift my heart up to updog from chaturanga.

In fact, every motion benefits from this squeezing, lifting and simple awareness at my center.

It makes the difference between a clunky foot swinging forward into warrior in a Sun B to a direct and easy placement that moves all the way up to the rising heart and upwards reaching arms. It’s the thing that facilitates a soft precise landing in chaturanga, alert, solid and ready for the next move. In fact, I think that Sun B is the perfect place to start really tuning into this engagement because it’s so essential for graceful and fluid movement. Surya Namaskar A works too, but I find that I’m still just waking up and getting a stretch in my first few salutations, whereas the B variation is when I start “working.”

Uddiyana bandha is the deciding factor for a smooth graceful jumpthrough versus a loud, messy baseball slide. Without this awareness of moving from center, when I jump into a posture (as I do into my Standing Postures – I am a student of DG’s after all! We are jumpers!) my feet land out of sync with each other, sending a disharmonious shock through my limbs and a sense of unsteadiness in my posture.

By physically moving from “center”, my asana practice supports my mental and emotional journey of finding center. Orienting my awareness in this way, I have a greater opportunity in accessing the sthira and sukha, the steadiness and sweetness, in my practice and in myself.

Just a few simple practice thoughts from my yoga mat.

Love and Blessings,

Frances

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