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“Vi” = in a special way
“nyasa” = to place
“krama” = step by step
Change is challenging.
When confronted with change, it’s easy to get swept up in anxiety, discomfort, depression, or panic. We distract ourselves, or seethe as we create a million contingency plans. We cling to our “creature comforts” – those small habits we’ve created that anchor us in an easy ride of familiarity, that soothe us when we get ragged around the edges.
So how can we cope?
While she was going through a particular challenging time, my Mum said to me, “It’s not one day at at time, honey. It’s [read more...]
From the New York Times. Some food for thought: What is yoga? What is your yoga community? Does it reflect what you need? As a side note, Yoga for the People, based on Gumucio’s model, is now here in Vancouver.
ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds [read more...]
I loved this article from the NY Times Magazine. At some time or another, most of us have experienced a slide out of the comfort of our lives. Whether it’s been through trauma or an internal shift, we’ve experienced a descent that leaves us clutching our habits and stripped to the bone. Dominique’s journey reminds us that transformation does come, and that joy arrives in smaller packages than we might expect.
Losing It, by Dominique Browning, from the NY Times Magazine
For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House [read more...]
I got disconnected three times.
Three times.
In a row.
“Just hold one moment while we transfer you to confirm,” they’d say sweetly, just before I heard a strange sound. The sound of silence. The vacuum of a disconnected phone line. The sound of my impotent, mediocre frustration growing to a boiling point of irrational, helpless rage.
Nothing can be quite so delightful as customer service, eh?
Or how about when the woman in customer service would ask me for all my details, “I’ll just need that information before transferring you,” and the guy in cancellations would say, “I’ll just need all that information again, you’re [read more...]
Last Thursday evening, I attended a talk by Reginald Ray, founder of Dharma Ocean and tantric buddhist practitioner.
He spoke about the intimacy and the power (and terror) of really Seeing another person.
What is Seeing? It’s when we strip away the filters through which we most often see the world and take the time and space to witness what is actually before us. Usually we half-ass our seeing. I look at my partner, but what I’m really seeing is what I expect to. I impose upon him everything that I think a partner is, or should be, or what my own expectations [read more...]
So it’s New Years. So you made a resolution. What is it this year?
I’ll share my typical checklist:
-lose five pounds
-go to yoga EVERY DAY
-finish writing book
-resolve all unresolved psychological issues
-do something really important that will make everyone love me
Hmmmmm. Lofty, anyone?
Resolutions are excellent. They invite us to visualize, set intentions, make goals. Like many of us, I love the idea of a clean slate. From this brilliantly cleared slate, my life is an open book with nowhere to move but forward into greater and loftier etheric realms of evolution. [read more...]
The chakras can seem a little…well, out there. Whirling wheels of energy? Rainbow light? Huh?
But if we think about the body and its functions, the chakras do seem to match up pretty well to how we work.
The root chakra – muladhara – is at our pelvic floor and deals with earth, downward energy, and groundedness. If we think of our hips and legs as what connects us to the earth and literally roots us, well, it makes sense. If people are “ungrounded,” they tend to be light, frenetic, “in their heads,” and not connected to their lower body.
The second chakra below [read more...]
Our ego is like a sheet of glass that exists between the world and our mind. As information from the world filters through our senses, it passes through our ego on its way to our conscious thought. We screen though everything we perceive: “I like this because I did something like it before and that was good,” “This has made me look bad in the past,” or “This reminds me of the time…”. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our mind is continually making lightning quick assessments based on previous experiences in order to organize ourselves in the world.
Through the [read more...]
My session at the Vancouver Yoga Conference had taken a pause. An hour-break, then we’d all come back for four more hours of chakra realization. So far, I’d been banging my hips and sacrum on the ground, trying to tune into my pelvis and the first three chakras. Now I was fantasizing about tuna sandwiches.
Such musings were interrupted by a voice to my neighbor to the left. It was one of those rich and resonant voices that reminds you of James Earl Jones. The kind of voice that Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan spent years in drama school to [read more...]
So for that past few years I’ve been practicing ashtanga. Flow, flow, breath, breath. There is a cycle and rhythm to the practice. You move. You keep going. You jump around. You breath some more.
But here I am visiting my old Yoga Works crew. And they study Iyengar.
See, in the yoga world, there are three main lineages: Ashtanga, Iyengar, and the yoga of Desikachar. Most our our Western yoga springs from the same teacher (the granddaddy of yoga as we know it, Krishnmacharya). But where ashtanga focuses on movement and breath, the Iyengar tradition [read more...]
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