by Kelly Fisher, Urban Yoga Typically when you finish your first yoga teacher training it can feel as though you're bursting with equal parts fantastic information to share and uncertainty about how or where to share it. Unless you've completed teacher training with an organisation that rolls new teachers onto an existing schedule, it can be a challenge to figure out how you can get into teaching in your town. Often studios will want teachers with previous teaching experience and/or … [Read more...]
Search Results for: anusara
Five Ways to be a Better Yoga Teacher
by Kelly Fisher, Urban Yoga After almost a decade of teaching yoga as my full time career, I have had the privilege of watching some of the students who have come to my classes eventually become teachers themselves. I have had the honour of fielding their questions and helping them through those uncertain first months and years of teaching. Plus, as a huge geek when it comes to neuropsychology, yoga anatomy, yoga physiology and yoga alignment, I often help new teachers from other lineages … [Read more...]
Why We Need to Take Our Yoga Practice Back to The Basics
by Melissa Billington, Ear2Earth Yoga is a self-regulating practice. It’s a yoke, a disciplined and regular practice that harnesses our innate animal power/prowess and enables us to see our own self-sabotaging habits and tendencies. And, armed with that awareness and new tools for transformation, we are empowered to change those tendencies and habits of self-sabotage into tendencies and habits of transmutation and transformation. We can become the opposite of our deepest darkest fear, … [Read more...]
Sun Salutations Video Series: How to do Mountain Pose (Tadasana)
by Kara-Leah Grant Welcome to the first in a series of articles & videos exploring the foundations of an asana practice through sun salutations. But first... In my ideal universe - besides living next door to Johny Depp and and down the road from Einstein (imagine that dinner party!) - every yoga student would be encouraged to start a home yoga practice the very first time they ever went to a yoga class. Yes, the first time. In fact, every yoga teacher would teach with the … [Read more...]
The great debate – Which is better, Yoga or Pilates?
by guest author Jude Mahood, Suburban Yoga, Dunedin I recently heard someone describe Yoga/Pilates fusion (or Yogalates as it is often called) as the coming together of natural soul mates. I couldn’t agree more. But there are still many people out there who think that bringing Pilates principles into their Yoga is somehow tainting or contaminating. There is nothing wrong with being purist in our thinking, but it’s also important to maintain an open mind. When we close our minds, we close … [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...]
Everything is stable… until it’s not
by guest author Katie Lane What the Christchurch earthquake is teaching me about stability. Just when I thought I’d found my roots...the ground shook. AGAIN. Tuesday morning, 11.32am. The biggest aftershock I felt since our original 7.1 magnitude earthquake in early September. Compared to the BIG event, this shake was minor. However, a 5.0 on any scale is really no small thing! The woman I was talking with on the phone started to cry and hung up the apologizing that she needed to call her … [Read more...]
Surviving and thriving in the Christchurch earthquake
Like many yoga workshops, the recent Anusara Workshop in Christchurch with Noah Maze shook up our concepts of reality, purpose, values and life. Only in this workshop, Heroes and Heroines: Stories and Practices of Yoga, it wasn't the teachings nor the practice or even the teacher doing all the shaking, it was the earth herself. On Saturday morning, at 4.35am... just hours after a stimulating two hour practice to kickstart the weekend underpinned by the mythology of Hanuman the Monkey … [Read more...]
How to set an intention for your practice
by guest author Kelly Fisher, Urban Yoga, Wellington From a yogic point of view, the process of setting a sankalpa (an intention) goes a little like this. Step one: Set a positive intention, focusing on the results you want, rather than thinking about what you don’t want (as tends to be the case when we set New Year’s resolutions). Step two: Let it go. The Universe conspires on our behalf. Where energy is placed, the Universe augments it. At a workshop I recently attended, Anusara … [Read more...]