With the ebb and flow of studio openings and closings, I've started off 2021 with live hath-flow classes on my youtube channel every Wednesday morning. Yes, live. The perfectionist in me resisted doing livestreams because I couldn't edit out the mistakes, the technical blips, the stumbling over words. However, I know not to let perfect …
Lunar Monday Essential Oil Blend
Over on my youtube channel, I'm working on two series of videos--one vinyasa, one yin--to provide a sequence for each day of the week so that by the end of the week we cover all the areas of the body and the principle poses from the respective type of yoga. The organization of each series takes …
Valentine’s Day: Heart and Hips
Like many instructors, I've often drawn from holidays to inspire a yoga class. Valentine's Day naturally lends itself to heart-opening sequences. However, Valentine's Day is not all about heart chakras. The love celebrated on February 14th has a lot to do with sensuality (dark chocolate, red wine, sexy underwear) and that is sacral charka territory. …
What’s with All the Pretzel Poses?
This video is less a How-to and more a chat about the wacky poses we often see in yoga--and in memes making fun of yoga. Bound twists, arm balances, upside-down and sideways--I thought yoga was about de-stressing and zoning out! https://youtu.be/2_0PnGRtuVo Actually, yoga is rarely about zoning out, even though that might happen now and …
Tapping into Gratitude
Since we are pretty much smack-dab between Canada's and America's Thanksgivings, I thought I'd put up a short gentle sequence of poses designed to bring out the gratitude. https://youtu.be/wfrFX6HPCS4 Gratitude gets us out from under the pressure of the ego. The ego is the eternal critic: you’re not good enough, fast enough, you’re not …
Lowdown on the Five Tibetan Rites
Early in the week the forecast declared that a 5000-mile-long "river in the sky" (that's over 8000 kilometers for my metric friends) had the Pacific Northwest targeted. Sure enough. All the rain that didn't happen throughout the summer is happening now. I experimented with a new venue. I probably won't use it again--too echoey though I …
Breaking down the Suryanamaskara, part 1
I still remember early ventures into the yoga studio where it seemed everyone (except me) had been born doing the Sun Salutation--or at least had picked it up during childhood, some time between crawling and walking. These days, it is pretty much the new normal. If I go too long without starting the day with …
Fall Equinox Flow
Happy Fall Equinox! Today at 1:02pm Pacific Daylight Time, the sun shines directly over the equator (the plane of the equator intersects the centre of the solar disk) giving us approximately 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night, and popularly the first day of autumn. For many cultures, the day marks a balance …
Yoga Journey 108 