LENA BLOG

David Sunshine, my friend and the owner of the Dallas Yoga Center ( www.dallasyogacenter.com ), wrote the following article about the importance of yoga. I highly recommend finding a class in your area and giving this type of exercise a try. Yoga is wonderful for young and old alike. The classroom is packed with people of all shapes and sizes. A teacher walks through the rows of brightly colored sticky mats as students move through a variety of yoga postures. The teacher calls out the next pose, “downward facing dog,” and suddenly from all fours, hips lift into the air and bodies shift into the position that is similar to the way that dogs stretch into after waking from a long nap. Forearms quiver as the instruction is given to extend their hands into the floor and ground their heels, and skin glistens with sweat. Until recently, the term yoga brought to mind images of a bearded man sitting on a mountaintop in a posture resembling the shape of a pretzel. However, ov...

I swim a lot. Is there something special I should do for my skin? Is there anything I can put on my face before I swim to protect it? What about after I swim? If you are a swimmer, you don’t need me to tell you how hard the chlorinated water in a pool is on your skin. I have lots of clients who are avid swimmers (several are on Masters swim teams), and at different times in my life I have been a regular swimmer too. So I know firsthand about how hard chlorine is on skin. Chlorine , as defined in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is “a nonmetallic chemical element that is found alone as a strong-smelling greenish yellow irritating gas and is used as a bleach, oxidizing agent, and disinfectant.” It renders anything it is added to free from any type of antibodies and/or germs. A client once asked me if she should put Vaseline ® on her face before swimming in order to keep the chlorine off her skin. Well, that is an interesting idea, but unfortunately I think it will do more harm...