Using Yoga for EmBODIED Awareness

Conscious Eating, Active Living, Habit Change Can the tools of yoga help us change our habits?  Yoga is a powerful practice for transformation and change.  The tools of yoga can be applied in specific ways to help us strengthen will and change habits around food, exercise and body image.

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Cultivating Contentment

con·tent·ment noun kən-ˈtent-mənt : the state of being happy and satisfied : the state of being content We all want happiness and contentment.  My teacher, Gary Kraftsow, says that santosha, the Sanskrit word for contentment, is “the way you take experience.”  It’s an internal state of mind and attitude that permeates your internal being, words and actions.

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Yoga for Upper Back Pain

The skeleton is an amazing chassis, the support structure for movement and a protector of our internal organs and glands.  Just like a car chassis, we may start out with our own unique skeletal attributes and over the years add wear and tear.  Upper back pain can occur due to our work or lifestyle, our […]

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Grow Your Roots – A Stable Base of Support

Your feet, ankles, legs, knees, hips and sacrum (the wedge-shaped bone at the base of the spine) provide a base of support for moving, working, and playing.  It’s when you start slip-sliding around on the ice that you come to appreciate strength, flexibility, tracking and alignment in that base of support.  Viniyoga has great tools […]

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Awakening To Awareness

Many people who have practiced other styles of yoga say that Viniyoga is different. You have to pay attention. You have to be aware. It’s not the same sequence of postures every time or one size fits all yoga. There is active participation of attention in the process of awakening to who you are.

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Yoga & Winter Seasonal Changes

“This season of the year grinds the very soul out of me.  My nerves lose their tone, my teeth ache, and my courage falls to the bottomless bottom of infinitude.” – Henry Adams in a letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell, 1869

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Apples – Symbolic of the Journey of Transformation

My husband recently turned his own harvest of apples into crowd-pleasing apple bread (see recipe below) for one of my yoga retreats. It struck me how long the journey is for that wonderful apple bread.  We can learn something for our journey in yoga from the patience it takes to nurture apples from seed to bread.

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Feel Your Best with Yoga: Cancer Treatment and Recovery

Life changes in an instant with a diagnosis of cancer.  It’s like a big wave crashing through the house rearranging everything.  How do you manage the big wave?  The ancient science of yoga provides useful tools for coping with the diagnosis and treatments and supporting optimal health in recovery.

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BEing vs. DOing

The other day I read something very “new-agey” about yoga.  The author said that yoga is being, not doing.  I immediately visualized the packing of my bags to trek to the Himalayas to meditate, to just be.  It made me chuckle. Reality set it.  It’s rare that a person of the modern world has an […]

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Transitions and Transformation

Change in our life comes in many different ways.  Sometimes we plan for the change.  A retirement, career change or getting married are examples of things that we often consciously choose.  And then some changes blow in like a strong wind taking with it any sense of order and stability.

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