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Kara-Leah Grant gets up close & personal about life on and off the yoga mat.

Trust those feelings of yours… they’re trying to tell you something!

February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The stream that runs alongside our house... heavenly!

by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat It's Monday morning and I have a stack of work to do. There's a multitude of emails in my inbox, two Wordpress clients expecting results, my personal website to re-brand, articles to load into The Yoga Lunchbox, numerous tasks for the website, accounts to do, workshops to prepare, classes to prep... The list goes on and on and I haven't even mentioned writing. Which - as you may have noticed in the last few months - keeps getting moved to the … [Read more...]

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Is Bikram Choudhury really an alien?

January 22, 2012 By 8 Comments
Bikram

by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat On Sunday I drove a 440 km round-trip to see Bikram Choudbury speak. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Not only did I get to meet more of the NZ yoga community, but I also got to check out Bikram The Man in person as he took the stage for a three and a half hour lecture. Yep that's right - Bikram spoke with barely a pause for breath for over three hours, and if it hadn't been for the insistence of the organizers, he would have kept on going. And … [Read more...]

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Walking the Path with Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat

December 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kara-Leah, Musings from the Mat columnist

by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat As I slowly introduce more regular columnists to The Yoga Lunchbox, you'll be getting to know them via this written interview. So it's only fair that I do the interview myself, even though I've now been writing my column Musings from the Mat for over three years. Some of you have been here right from the beginning of that journey, so know me well. Very well! But others have only recently begun reading the website, so this may fill in a few … [Read more...]

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How dropping my story helped me change my yoga practice

November 5, 2011 By 2 Comments
Why do my forward bends suck after over a decade of practice?

I've been practicing yoga for over a decade now, and I'm still tight and inflexible. That's not quite true of course, but when I compare my flexibility to that of the images of yoga we see in the media, or the popular teachers on DVDs... I fall well short. And I find it perplexing. It doesn't make me feel less than in anyway, and I'm well aware that the point of yoga is not flexibility, rather flexibility is a by-product of practice. But how long does it take to lengthen the … [Read more...]

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Home is where the heart is, heart is what the home needs

October 23, 2011 By 7 Comments
Ah... home!

The latest Musings from the Mat by Kara-Leah Grant Home. It's a deceptively small four-letter word, but oh how much punch it can carry. Our home is our whole world when we're kids, and when we grow up to be adults, we often unconsciously carry around that childhood home inside of us, even when it's not the kind of home we want to recreate in our lives. Home isn't just the place where we live though. Home is also a place where we are truly ourselves, where we let our guard, and our … [Read more...]

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Unravelling the stories that shape our yoga practice

October 9, 2011 By 5 Comments
The power of presence

My life right now is a fluid mix of story & yoga. I'm studying creative writing at Victoria University and I'm finishing off my Prana Flow Yoga Teacher Certification (posted off all the book work in the mail on Monday! Woo hoo... now just have the exam to sit.) This combination of story and yoga has dovetailed into a deeper understanding of how we write the scripts for our lives, how we cast ourselves and the people around us as characters, and how we react to these scripts and … [Read more...]

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