Before I became a yoga teacher, I assumed all my teachers must have had it all figured out. They always had such great lessons, and seemed so calm and collected. I wanted to be like that.
Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The first yoga teacher I ever really fell for, yogically, was Coco Finaldi, because she was so darn real with us. (She also ended up becoming my business partner.) She admitted it when she was going through hard times, she told dirty jokes, and she taught the...
I have a confession to make. I haven’t been practicing yoga.
But I HAVE been flossing. Every night.
Sometimes, too, I do put on some sweet tunes and roll around on my mat for a while. In the five-to-twenty minute range. I just can’t bring myself to feel bad about it.
It’s not an issue of discipline. Note the flossing. See, yoga and I have been fighting for a while. There have been insults: moments of disconnection. She’s been bossing around my hamstrings and poking me...
In last week’s post, I talked about the vital importance of emotional intelligence. Medical professionals are learning that a huge, overlooked reason many North Americans get sick with terminal illnesses is our cultural tendency to repress emotions.
Perhaps one of the reasons yoga is so lauded for its apparently miraculous health benefits is that it helps us to feel: to break the cycle of emotional repression. The chakra system is one of the languages yoga often uses to...
I’m reading a book right now that is absolutely blowing my mind. I really like it when books do that. It’s called When the Body Says No, by Dr. Gabor Maté. It’s about how stress can make you sick.
Well, I do yoga, so I knew that already. My body and my mind are not separate, and what happens in my mind will inevitably affect my body. No problem: I’ll just never have any stress again in my life, ever.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way. I was thinking about stress all wrong....
I was talking recently with a fellow yoga teacher about a student who takes three to four classes every day. He was a little worried about the effect that might be having on her body, and was wondering if he should say something to her. I said,
“You know, we are yoga teachers. We’re not here to tell people how to live their lives. ...Wait....”
We both laughed. Much of what we do in our yoga classes is literally to tell people how to lead their lives. How strange: We are...
I have a mantra. I say it to myself daily, in many situations, and it helps me immensely in my life. It’s this:
Why am I doing this?
I don’t even think the answer to that question is particularly important. I just think it’s important to ask. Your intentions may change, they may shift and grow, but as long as you have an intention, any answer to why you are doing what you are doing is great.
I’ve probably had millions of answers to my...
It’s Spring 2012, and we just had a super full moon: The moon was closer to the earth than it’s been all year. Here in Vancouver, it’s just starting to get warm, though the cherry blossom trees have been undressing for weeks. Spring has always felt like a transitional season for me, but this year is special.
Traditionally, the full moon is a good time to consider what you want to let go of: what are your dead leaves, cherry blossoms, ripe fruits ready to fall? According to several...
“Close your eyes,” my yoga teacher says. “Don’t open them again for the next 90 minutes.”
We laugh a little, like, Is she serious?
Then she says, “I’m serious. Don’t open your eyes.”
So here we go: sun salutations, lunges, warriors, balancing postures, crow pose, taking our mats to a wall and practicing handstand, returning our mats to where they were (who knew?) and continuing our flow right down into savasana. Eyes closed.
...
Earth Day 2012 was just a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about what that means to us now, as yogis and as human beings.
Humans are a funny species: We love to shout “Save the Planet!” as if we were not one of the species needing saving. It makes me think of deep sea shrimp organizing to save the oceans.
Perhaps it’s all the fault of the Bible. God did say, after all:
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of...
As some of you already know, I am a spoken word poet, which means, generally speaking, that I talk about my feelings in front of half-drunk audiences on Monday nights at a neighborhood cafe.
Poetry slams are competitive events in which poets sign up to battle with each other. Random members of the audience hold up scores, much like at the Olympics, and the highest scoring poets go forward to win money or chances to compete at larger venues.
Yes, it’s...
Lately, I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching. It’s the seminal text of Taoist philosophy, a system of thought that I’ve been attracted to since I was a stressed out, straight-A university student with two jobs sitting in a class on Eastern religions and learning that there was an entire philosophy devoted to the universal principle of “going with the flow.”
Going with the flow has never been easy for me. I worry a lot, I say yes to everything, I fill my schedule to the brim and forget...
As many of you already know, I am not what I would describe as a ‘sunshine and flowers’ yoga teacher. Listening to teachers talk about how wonderful all creation is and seeing inspirational (but philosophically empty) quotes on my Facebook newsfeed gives me an involuntary facial twitch some would call an eye-roll.
And this is not (necessarily anyway) because I am attached to my pain body or living in negativity. I don’t, I’m quite hopeful (most of the time) but I don’t...
Happy first days of Spring!
It’s a celebratory season, and one that just can’t help but invoke change, transformation, and rebirth. It’s spring cleaning time–get the dusty clothes out of the closet, shake off the heaviness of the winter, and clear the hangers for something lighter, more sprout-like.
It’s natural to want to clean out our insides as well as our closets, and many of us take a few days or weeks to do a cleanse: drastically change our diets and even take...
There’s a principle in Patanjali’s classical text on Yoga, the Yoga Sutras, called pratyahara. It’s usually translated as “withdrawal of the senses,” and it’s a part of the classical yogic plan to get ourselves out of the pain and suffering of everyday life and escape to someplace else.
This idea that there is a “someplace else,” that we can, through spiritual practices, escape the daily toil of being a self, pervades many different spiritualities. Heaven, Nirvana, Purusha, Samadhi:...
If you’ve ever wondered and searched with the greater population of the world for the true meaning of happiness, you’ve probably heard, at some point, that it’s some form of seva, or service to others. Philosophies across generations and geography, from Hinduism to Christianity to self-help books will tell you that devotion to others is all it takes to escape the anxious emptiness of your life forever. The idea is that individual “me” is meaningless: the “I” that I understand is an illusion...
Well, we’ve finally made it to March. Here in Vancouver, that means it’s still kind of cold and raining, but there are little shoots coming up under still-bare trees, and there are actually some blossoms appearing here and there.
Spring has always been emotional for me. I lived in Montreal, Que. for six years, and every spring, I would wake up astonished that I had actually survived the winter. I remember the moment when you would see the huge banks of snow on the university campus...
Yin yoga, in case you’ve never heard of it before, is a style of yoga in which you wiggle yourself into a pretty intense stretch and just try to relax there for five minutes or sometimes longer. One of my students affectionately calls it the “Torture Chamber.”
It’s a very deep practice; it can be very relaxing, and sometimes incredibly emotional. It’s called “Yin” in opposition to most other “Yang” styles of yoga that stretch, strengthen, and heat the body more dynamically. If...
I was once at a workshop about managing grief through yoga practice. I remember a girl in the back piping up and saying, “Sometimes you just need to discover that it’s pain from a past life, so you can just let it go and know it’s not really yours.”
I thought she was nuts. I thought, Okay, even if you do believe that to be true, don’t say it in front of 50 people who will now think you are crazy.
That was a couple of years ago. And guess what I found myself saying to my two...
It’s 2012: the end of the Mayan Calendar, the year of New Age spiritual transformation, year of the Water Dragon. I started off 2012 learning about the Divine Feminine with Shiva Rea, and now I’m listening to weekly talks on the goddess mythology with Eric Stoneberg. Eric introduced me to Akhilandeshvari, the “never not broken” goddess who inspired this article about the hidden possibilities of lying broken in a pile on your bedroom floor, and became one of the most read blogs on elephant...
I've been practicing yoga on and off since I was 12 years old, but when I really, deeply started to get into it, it was during my Master's degree in English Literature. See, I can be a bit of a workaholic, and yoga gave me a loophole for taking a break from my work to practice. It was this: Yoga made me smarter, more focused, and more efficient. Not only was the work done faster, it was better. It was more creative, more expansive, and more fun to do. I found creative ways to write...
