About Kara-Leah Grant

Kara-Leah is the author of Forty Days of Yoga - Breaking down the barriers to a home yoga practice. She's also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of this fine website, The Yoga Lunchbox, a mother to a pre-schooler and passionate about writing, yoga and mountains. She's currently living in Glenorchy (near Queenstown), teaches yoga and loves to cook while blasting dance music.

Exploration of the no-self: A total waste of time?

No-Self? No identity? What is that?

by Kara-Leah Grant I started this article over two years ago... and never finished it. But thanks to suggestions from a YLB commenter, I found and read a book by Jed McKenna. That was enough to give me the missing piece of the puzzle... I finally got what No-Self is. What follows is that article, written two years ago, with a fresh conclusion. ******* There's been a great discussion going on in the comment section of Suggestions on what to do if you've had a Kundalini Awakening. … [Read more...]

I’m actually quite a spiritual guy. Oh really?

Where's my sacred???

By Kara-Leah Grant Can we, like, ban the word spirituality already? And spiritual. Like, if someone says, I'm actually quite a spiritual guy, I just want to gag. What the hell does that mean anyway? What does spiritual and spirituality mean?   I turned to that font of all modern knowledge to find out. Wikipedia. The term spirituality lacks a definitive definition, although social scientists have defined spirituality as the search for "the sacred," where "the sacred" is … [Read more...]

On letting life flow unimpeded through you – no drama, no angst, just… life

Let life flow through you, unimpeded. Emotions change in an instant.

By Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat Oh I'm giddy with delight right now. I was up at 6:15am, over an hour ago, and my child has yet to surface. I've written my morning pages. I've written an email to the 489 lovely subscribers on my book list. I've downloaded the software to review the Kindle and ePub versions of Forty Days of Yoga, which have just been completed. And now I get to write! Yes, write! I love writing. Love it, love it, love it, love it. Hence the website and … [Read more...]

Your thoughts do not create your reality. Stupid.

What filters your perspective on reality?

By Kara-Leah Grant Let's get one thing straight. You do not create your own reality. Your thoughts do not create your reality either. All the positive thinking and manifesting and vision boarding and dreaming is not going to get you what you want. What you do create is your experience of your reality. Your thoughts about your reality create your experience of that reality. This distinction is critical, and far too often it's glossed over, ignored or pushed aside in favour of the … [Read more...]

How identifying with NOT being something also causes great misery

Avoiding motherhood - causes misery when one is actually a mother

By Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat It's 7am and I've been up for half an hour. Child-free time and totally blissful. Made even more so because since I returned from my book tour I've had no childcare at all. When my lovely Porse childcare woman told me she was stopping work to have a second child, I could feel part of me wanting to panic. "No, you can't! I need childcare. I'm a single mum with a start-up business who's just written a book! What am I going to do?" After all, I … [Read more...]

Exploring the Niyamas: How does Svadhyaya affect our lives?

Who am I really?

by Kara-Leah Grant I've been pondering the yamas and niyamas for a few years now. Reading about them, thinking about them, writing about them... and of course, living them out. The niyama on my mind right now is Svadhyaya, often translated as study. Seems to sum up my entire approach to yoga really - the study of the practice and the study of the Self. Without that, there is no yoga, just a bunch of fancy moves thrown together on a mat. Svadhyaya is the difference between rotely moving … [Read more...]