The Thing About Other People (and Why We Need Them)

September 13, 2017

“There’s nothing we could know about ourselves or another that could solve the problem that other people actually exist and we are utterly depend on them.” ~ Adam Phillips

When I first began practicing yoga with others, I used to walk from my university residence to the studio in another part of town, my yoga mat bag slung over my shoulder. I would go to a class just about every day (the freedom of being a student!) and attempted to be discrete about the whole thing. “What are you carrying in the bag?” I would sometimes get asked. “An instrument?”, “A fishing rod?”, “A gun?”. “A yoga mat,” I’d say and quickly carry on away from the stranger with a perplexed look on their face.

The Big Magical Words of Yoga

November 30, 2016

“Poets have never used the word balance, for good reason. First of all, it is too obvious and therefore untrustworthy; it is also a deadly boring concept and seems to speak as much to being stuck and immovable, as much as to harmony. There is also the sense of unbalancing that must take place in order to push a person into a new and larger set of circumstances.” ~ David Whyte

Yoga is full of big words. Words like balance, and bliss, and peace, and love saturate the market of the yoga industry. We are asked to ‘open our hearts’, ‘finder our inner peace’, and blissfully let go into the vastness of this potential freedom. While we are yearning and perhaps hopeful of these tags lines, many of us spend our first yoga experience trying to simply decipher our left hand from our right hand and wondering if our agitated minds are actually insane.

Asana: A Language of the Body

November 21, 2016

“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” ~ Katie Cannon

We know that our body language shapes who we are. Each time we put our body in a position, any position, we give it a message. We also give off a message. Do you understand what your body is saying? How often do you listen to it? While any simple movement we make is a way to explore and engage with the world, exploring our bodies through yoga is one way of striking up a conscious conversation between our interior lives and our exterior surroundings.