by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat Ok, the headline is harsh. I admit it. But also true. See, over the last while, I've been working with a relationship pattern (a samskara) of giving away my power by not speaking my truth because I was afraid of the consequences. It's an insidious pattern because it has all kinds of detrimental effects on one's self-esteem, and the relationships one is in. Plus it creates suffering as the desire to hold on to something while betraying oneself can … [Read more...]
Kara-Leah Grant gets up close & personal about life on and off the yoga mat as she puts her life back together after a Kundalini Awakening experience.
Dude, Love is the Guru
by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat Back at the start of last year I wrote a couple of posts be-moaning my lack of connection to a Real Yoga Teacher and a Guru. Dude, Where's My Guru? Dude, Where's My Teacher? This week I've been reading a most excellent book by Ram Dass (he of Be Here Now) called Be Love Now. And lo & behold, wouldn't you know, it's answered all of my questions about finding a guru, what a guru is, and the relationship we have with a guru. I'm stoked, … [Read more...]
If you can’t publicly own it, don’t do it (easy to say right?)
Forget the Ten Commandments. Forget even the Five Yamas or Niyamas. Here instead is the Golden Litmus Test. Apply it to all your behaviour. Everything you do. Everything you say. And everything you think. (If you really want to up your game...) Can you publicly own this action, word or thought? Can you publish it in the newspaper? Talk about it on Tv? Answer to it on radio? Yes? Sweet... do it, say it, think it. No? Don't do it, say it, think it... At … [Read more...]
Trust those feelings of yours… they’re trying to tell you something!
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...]
How dropping my story helped me change my yoga 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...]
Home is where the heart is, heart is what the home needs
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...]
Unravelling the stories that shape our yoga practice
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...]
The danger of thinking you know more than your yoga teacher
Back in February, I wrote an article called Why I may never take another yoga class ever again. And true to my word, I hadn't been to a class in six months, instead practicing daily at home. One of the reasons I'd been steering clear of classes was that in class I'd struggled with being told what to do by a teacher. Often it felt like what my body needed and what the teacher was sequencing wasn't right for me. But a few weekends ago I went to two yoga classes at a yoga studio that's … [Read more...]
I Didn’t Want This Life: Why am I Having So Much Fun?
by Kara-Leah Grant Life has been rich with opportunities to practice deep acceptance lately. Samuel is now 17 months old, generally awake from 7am to 7pm, and active, even measured by toddler standards. It's impossible to work around him anymore, or write morning pages, or meditate, or practice asana. These things were the mainstay of my waking hours - if I wasn't on the computer, I was doing some form of yoga or writing. In the last month, I've had to accept that this is just not … [Read more...]
On the Magic of Yoga Practice to Bring You Back to Presence
by Kara-Leah Grant I've had a rough few weeks, since moving into my new house with my three wonderful flatmates. First I caught a 12 hour vomiting bug that saw me curled up on my sister-in-law's bathroom for seven hours in child's pose, just moving to lift my head and vomit. Then I caught the flu and a nasty cough and was bed-ridden for over a week. Just as I was beginning to feel well, almost two weeks after first getting sick, I woke up with red welts all over my body and swollen … [Read more...]