Inner Body Bright

If you take an Anusara-influenced Yoga class, there is a big possibility that you will hear this phrase. Allowing, encouraging, and guiding your inner light to shine more brilliantly is a main focus of the Anusara style. To describe what the inner body is takes more art than science, but having a bright inner body has very practical applications. When I describe inner body, I usually say that I think inner body is everything about you that you can’t see with your eyes. So it includes the inner layers of your skin, muscles, organs, energy body, your heart connection with spirit, and more.

When I came across the book by Donald Moyer aptly named “Yoga: Awakening the Inner Body” I had to check it out.  Donald begins his book by “defining” the inner body in this way, “For me, the inner body involves every aspect of a person’s being: the anatomical, the physiological, the mental, and the spiritual.” He then classifies different aspects of inner body as subtitles: surface muscles versus deeper muscles, anatomical body versus physiological body, the active mind versus the reflective mind, and the ego versus The Self. (The Self is the way that many yogic writings acknowledge the collective consciousness or universal grand energy of life. So, it’s not your individual self but the bigger Self.)

I used a passage from his Active Mind versus the Reflective Mind section as the inspiration for classes this week:

 “At the mental level, the active mind represents the outer world of thinking, doing, and acting: the reflective mind stands for the inner world of feeling, sensing, and responding. For the practice of yoga to be nourishing and creative, there must be a dialogue between the active, or intentional, mind and the reflective, or receptive, mind. If you are ruled by the active mind, your practice becomes forced and mechanical because you never listen to your body: you treat it like a machine. If you are ruled by the reflective mind, your practice becomes formless and inert, and loses its sense of purpose.”

This concept of using the reflective mind in harmony with the active mind in both practice and daily life allows us to stay in better touch with our inner body so that our actions have greater purposefulness and become more effective and fulfilling. Our inner body, which includes more that just the physical body, is often clueing us in to ways to make our lives more harmonious. Often though, we are so caught up in the outer world of form that we lose this connection to ourselves as individuals and to the bigger Self.

By cultivating an awareness of your inner body and encouraging your inner light to shine more brightly you will experience a greater sense of freedom and lightness of being. Here’s an exercise to help you experience this concept:

• Begin sitting or standing in a way that you can be calm for just a few moments
• Become aware of your breath without trying to breathe better and without judgement – just let yourself be perfect as you are
• Notice the effects of paying attention to your inner breath and inner body
• Reflect on what you feel and then allow your breath and your inner body to guide you in making subtle adjustments to allow your inner body to feel more free and expansive
• As you inhale encourage your inner body to become so bright and expansive that your outer body expands and as you exhale allow your outer body to relax and feel more settled. You might think of the way that we can see a sleeping baby or a peaceful animal breathe as they rest with ease
• Just breathing more fully in this way will help you experience greater harmony = vitality AND peace. You can add to it though by envisioning your inner light becoming stronger, clearer, and more free with each and every breath cycle. 

Your inner body is also what makes you unique. It is your personality, your interests, your talents, gifts, and skills. We all come here special to support and inspire each other. By shining your true light more fully into the world you add to the goodness and beauty of life.

Flourish Family Food

If you are following, I just wanted to say I've taken the week off to focus on my new blog. Flourish Family Food is dedicated to sharing my adventures in cooking, eating and feeding my family in a way that is healthy and enjoyable. Please check it out... www.flourishfamilyfood.blogspot.com

I'll be back here soon. Happy summer.

Savasana!

If you don't know what Savasana is, I'm going to have to say you are missing out! Savasana is often the final relaxation pose in a Yoga class. From the outside it just looks like your sleeping on your back, but on the inside there is a whole lot more going on.

Savasana, pronounced (sha-va-suh-nuh), is a place to pause and reflect, to relax the body, and and clear the mind. Savasana translates from Sanskrit to "Corpse Pose." Yes I know - maybe a little spooky but the idea is that it is a place to practice letting go of the ego mind so that one can settle more fully into your spiritual essence. 

Taking a nice long Savasana feels good and it can be a great tool to cultivate lasting harmony. As you relax into a more natural and balanced state of being, it is as if you hit a reset button for your body, mind and heart. Taking some time to fully rest helps your to feel refreshed and renewed.  

This Saturday, June 18th I'll be presenting a workshop at Shine Yoga Center in Hyde Park from 2-4 pm. This workshop has been designed to help people get more out of Savasana. In the Anusara-inspired style of yoga that I teach, we focus on alignment to cultivate better harmony. The same principles of alignment that we use in active poses can be used in setting up Savasana so that the body rests closer to it's optimal alignment to help harmonize the neuro-muscular and muscul-skeletal systems of the body. When the body is better aligned, everything responds in a more harmonious way. Relaxing in a balanced and supportive way works wonders to melt tension, discomfort and pain. 

The workshop 

will begin twith a gentle warm-up to help balance opposing muscle groups. We'll work with assistants to find greater symmetry and harmony in the Savasana position. Then I'll  give cues to find this harmony and expansion for yourself. We will of course top it all off with a nice, long, sublime Savasana complete with guided imagery and inspiration to help you melt more fully into your own heart center. You can find more details on Shine's web page www.shineyoga.com. This workshop is open to all levels including brand new beginners.

Yoga for Pregnancy

Hi all. This week as well as help my daughter recover from surgery, I'm preparing for a few upcoming workshops. The one I wanted to mention today is my Pre-Natal Yoga for Partners. I'll be teaching this specialty class on Saturday, June 11th  from 1:15 - 2:30 at www.shineyoga.com.

You'll hear me say time and again that a big reason I've stuck with yoga is that it is the best pain relief (on all levels) that I've experienced. Pregnancy is notorious for being both a time of wonder and beauty and a time of discomfort and pain. While there are many common discomforts, there is also a lot you can do to alleviate them. Having an involved partner can be very helpful for mom to enjoy her pregnancy even more and help strengthen family bonds. One of my favorite things about teaching this class is seeing the dads that arrive a little "shy" about yoga walk out of class with big smiles on their faces. The yoga is as good for the dads as it is for the moms-to-be. We work on techniques that are helpful in alleviating tension for everyone. We'll do some partner poses that are helpful for the moms-to-be to alleviate common pregnancy discomforts, we work on some things that will be helpful for both parents once the baby arrives, and we talk a little bit about how you can use movement  and positioning to help make delivery a little easier too.

While I feel "called to teach yoga," I feel privileged to teach pre-natal yoga. The process of labor and delivery really is miraculous and I love being able to help moms feel a little better as they carry their babies. I started teaching prenatal yoga when I was pregnant with my daughter 8 years ago. I was very active and kept up with many of my physical activities. Besides being uncomfortable because it was so hard to move with such a big belly, I felt really good. I continued much of my exercise and kept up with my advanced yoga classes. My prenatal yoga teaching reflected this go-get-em attitude. Even though my pregnancy was pretty easy, the delivery was very challenging. There was a lot that just didn't "feel right" during labor. After my daughter was born I learned about a philosophy called Optimal Foetal Positioning. My doula found a class for me to take and from here my teaching began to shift in a really positive way. I began to incorporate movements more specific to pregnancy rather than just modifying yoga to fit a pregnant body.

My second pregnancy came with quite a few little complications. I was forced to take it much easier being on modified rest for much of the pregnancy. During this time I kept teaching my prenatal classes but my style shifted into a much more gentle style. The response from students to my more gentle style was well received. I could feel a stronger connection between students and the class sizes increased. It was nice to slow down and enjoy this time in my life. When my due date approached I was a little worried though. I worried that I wasn't in good delivery shape and that it would be an even harder delivery. But the birth of my son really was just like the peaceful videos they show you in natural child birth classes. They say second deliveries are usually easier but after sharing so many birth stories with other women I know this isn't always the case. I credit the easier delivery to the Optimal Foetal Positioning exercises and being more relaxed with the process.

In both pregnancies and deliveries, I learned so much. It's been wonderful to be able to share the knowledge and wisdom I've gained through study, from my personal experience, and feedback from so many wonderful students and their families. Pain may be a "normal" sensation that comes with pregnancy but often it's not necessary to carry the pain with the baby. As it says in my daughter's hospital release papers, "Pain is an unpleasant feeling or emotion that signals the danger of injury or damage to someone's body... Most pain is a message that lets people know that something is wrong with their body and needs attention." Learning and using proper alignment and posture is essential to a healthy, harmonious body. Working with a teacher or a partner is a great way to optimize a yoga practice, especially when your body is shifting so much. Plus, it often makes it more fun to practice!

I currently teach on-going Pre-Natal Yoga classes at Shine Yoga Center on Wednesdays from 5:45 - 7 pm and alternate teaching class with Patsy on Saturdays from 12 -1. From my point of view, specifically designed Pre-Natal Yoga is one of the best things a mom-to-be can do for herself and her baby with numerous benefits for body, mind and soul. The Pre-Natal Partners Workshop happens this Saturday, June 11th from 1:15 - 2:30. I offer this workshop "once a trimester." You can join my email list if you'd like notices about the next one at my website www.flourishunlimited.com.

Expanded Vision

I've been away from the blog to help my daughter celebrate end of year parties, recitals and concerts and to prepare for a long awaited surgery. Bela was born without functioning muscles in her eyelids. As her eyelids covered a good portion of her eyes, her peripheral vision was limited. Thanks to an amazing surgeon not only do her pretty blue eyes shine out into the world, she'll also be able to take in a broader vision of the world around her.

For right now though, her "eyes" don't understand that they can move in different directions to take different perspectives because they are so used to looking straight ahead. For Bela to look around her, she has had to move her head. As is human nature, she became adept at adjusting, and really didn't even notice being limited. This is her second surgery so through experience I know that it wont take too long for her eyes to begin to wander and work more similarly to our eyes. But, if we hadn't had the surgeries done at any early age, science tells us that her vision could have remained limited. For the most part, healing occurs naturally and in due time, but there are also many times where this natural healing or correcting process needs help or can supported and strengthened through purposeful action. So we'll  play games and I'll challenge her eyes without her even knowing that we are working on improving the function of her eyes.

I think the lesson we can each take from an experience like Bela's is that there will always be things in life that limit us. Simply by being embodied, our spirits are limited in certain capacities. For every choice we make there is something we keep and something we resist or let go of. A treasure of the Anusara Yoga method for me was to begin to understand that being limited is not negative.Every limitation allows us to have a more full experience of something else. Having said that, it is also important that we allow limitations to fall away and move past them when the time is right, so that we may have fresh experiences throughout life and that we never feel confined or stagnant.

This week in my yoga classes, I'll be challenging students to reflect on their perceived limitations. A wonderful question to ask is whether a certain limitation is serving a useful purpose or perhaps maybe it's time to move past an expected limitation. We use a phrase in yoga called, "play your edge." When you play your edge you take yourself into a pose where you feel some tension, you feel a limitation but you don't bust through it. You sit on that edge of tension or challenge, you hold it and you breathe, you slowly shift your thinking so that as if by magic, the edge softens and often you can take yourself even deeper in a pose than you expected in an integrated and safe way. Playing your edge isn't always about going deeper in a pose but it is a great practice to expand your personal boundaries of what you think you can handle in life.

With the skill and precision of someone like an oculo-plastic surgeon, bring yourself to the edge of what is and what else may be, so that you too may begin to dissolve your own personal limitations. The use of breath, expanded self-awareness and purposeful action are tools we can use to pull back the veils that, at times, conceal our expanded inner vision. These practices help us see more clearly the fullness of who we are, which is so much more than a body with a brain. As you encourage your inner vision to expand, you will see more clearly your unique gifts, talents, skills, and heart's desires which are your natural resources that allow your light to shine more fully into the world.