Current students may enter Yoga Salon…
Sunday sessions 8.45 -11.30am
on 3rd Sundays - except June when session is on 6/11
Fee: $50 Dropin/ $40 Online Regulars
This monthly session will invite teachers and those involved in educational aspects of yoga to come together in practice and in conversation about some of the most relevant issues of our day. The program is also open to practitioners who want to dive deep and are willing to see teaching as a metaphor for practice.
This year, we will be using The Wakeful Body by Willa Blythe Baker as a reference text, along with other materials online. The emphasis on somatic insights and Buddhist wisdoms in this book will be the ground on which to touch into relevant issues in teaching and practice.
Topics - subject to change depending on group needs:
EARTH BODY
March 19 - Lung Life - Opening to Grief, Joy and Possibility - During covid, many of us whether we got covid or not, found ourselves psychically and sometimes physically holding our breath and/our creating habits of anxiety within the way we respire. Our lungs, as traditional Chinese Medicine and other wisdom traditions tells us, can hold our grief and also our joy. This workshop will cultivate a relaxed natural breath in all aspects of practice and life, and explore the lung and heart area as ways to open to our grief, our joy and the sense of possibility. Through a series of reclining, seated, standing and inverted poses, we will bring a sense of buoyancy and support to the upper body through the potency of the lungs. While we celebrate this spring time of the year, we will also acknowledge the challenges we have faced and will inevitably need to face, with calm and creativity. How do we meet sorrow with kindness, how do we avoid “somatic bypass” within our spiritual practices?
April 16 - Psoas Magic! The Psoas or Psoas-Iliacus is often described in terms of being a hip flexing muscle, sometimes it is referred to as a core element of abdominal and postural integrity. However, over the last few decades, much of what we understand about the Psoas has expanded and evolved such that one could consider this area a powerful energy field that has connections into our primal, evolutionary story, our emotional realities, and our ability to move fluidly and powerfully, and to breathe fully. This session will focus on the diaphragm to groin area of the body and use abdominal poses and thigh releases to find the freedom in this “muscle of the soul”! Our psoas invites us to slow down, to unwind, pause and it also asks us to re-examine posture, and the art of living in relationship to gravity as a recently evolved and evolving biped.
SUBTLE BODY:
May 21 - Lost Arts of Listening and Persuasion - Yoga is about listening, teaching is also about listening and the intention to create a deep conversation within oneself, and with one’s students. By cultivating the art of listening and observing in meditation, can we bring this quality into our entire asana practice? We live in a world where often the dominant and raucous voices have tremendous power, at the same time, many of us have stopped listening deeply to murmurings of truth within and among our quieter sages. This practice will aim to bring a compassionate inner conversation into our practice of backbends and twists. How do we entice/coax ourselves into these poses at whatever level we are at? How do we bring the arts of listening and persuasion into the cacophony around us? How do we let go of the cacophony of our own inner critic? Options given for those not practicing deeper backbends or inversions.
Our asana and breath focus will touch into the 5th Cakra and the area of the neck, mouth jaw in a full practice session.
June 11 (Note this is a 2nd Sunday) - Caste! - De-colonizing and liberating our collective divisions through asana and reflection. The worlds that we live in have helped create inner hierarchies and undemocratic categorizations within our own bodies! This session will explore the realities of creating “untouchable” or lower caste areas in our bodies, lives and yoga worlds, and explore the possibility of a truly diverse and equitable inner and outer life through balance poses, breathwork, meditation and discussion. How do we move out of our comfort zones and open to more inclusive possibilities? How can we stay grounded in the midst of changing societal demands?
TRUTH BODY
July 16 - Poetry of Nature - It is not just modern day yogis who sprinkle or inspire their practice with a touch of Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry. Over the eons, the poetic and imaginal has seeped into the yoga story. This session we will explore how the poetic and imaginative support the unfolding of the body and the breath and refer to writers - modern and ancient - that show that our yoga is interwoven with our sense of interdependence and respect for the natural world.
August 20 - Samadhi - Calm in a Distracted, Frenetic World Nurturing a tranquil emerging sense of presence and dissolving the notion of separation between self and other brings confidence, clarity and joy. Weaving the meditative into the active, the restorative into the challenging, our session will explore both non-doing and non-duality in a balanced practice of asana, pranayama and meditation. Our reflection time will look to the future and how we might maintain the “gathering” quality of samadhi in the myriad ways of supporting sangha…in yoga, in family/community, in our beloved planet.