by Felicity Molloy : PhD I MEd I GDHE I MNZ RMT I YogaNZ Council Senior Level 4 1000h I BodyStill massage & yoga clinic I must be honest – although I love the world of thinking, I have not yet fully thought through a framework that accommodates our future for yoga. Yoga that responds to a pandemic, keeping in mind the urgency, the devastation, remembrance, and the next wave of hope. I offer these thoughts as theoretical embryony, not to cut across anyone’s experience … [Read more...]
Our Habits Are a Path to Deep Transformation
by Tara Fowler, Tara Spice Creative Habits are our regular and repeating behaviours which are done unconsciously. For me, this is picking my skin. For as long as I can remember I’ve picked my skin. As a small child any itchy bite I would scratch and scratch, tearing it apart. Then when it formed a scab I would pick that off also, leaving my skin covered in scars. I remember when I was around nine years old, a friend noticed the scabs and scars on my legs and said to me. “Gross, do you still … [Read more...]
The Gifts of Applying Ahimsa to Daily Life
By guest author Mike Kuplevatsky The fundamental nature of happiness and our relationship between our inner world and the external world most often intertwine. Without realizing it, our happiness is often governed by the external world. For example, if someone frowns at us, honks a horn at us, calls us crazy, disagrees with with some of our viewpoints or thinks badly of us, our happiness most often instantly becomes interrupted. That can play out into violence towards ourselves or to … [Read more...]
Have You Given Up Reaching for Your Dreams?
by Kara-Leah Grant Never before in human history have we known so much. We have unlimited information at our fingertips, and that information is constantly being updated. We know how to maintain optimum health including how to eat, how to exercise and how to practice yoga. We can learn any new skill for free - a new language, a musical instrument, we can even get a degree for free. No matter what dream we want to pursue, the information required to do so is available to us. Yet … [Read more...]
What if Enlightenment was just Dropping into Total Ordinariness. What then?
by guest author Emma Fernbloom, author of Conscious Creation of Wholeness & Community It’s strange to find myself free of ambition. It’s been a slow change, but now it’s happened completely, it feels a bit weird. It leaves gaps in conversations, like when everyone is talking about some TV programme you haven’t seen and they’re all wrapped up in the drama of it, but you haven’t been pulled into it so your smile is merely polite with a tinge of enjoyment or irritation at their … [Read more...]
How avoiding feelings avoids the present moment and avoids life
By Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat This morning, the wonderful woman who looks after Samuel four days a week while I work told me she's finishing up with PORSE (home-based early childhood education) on April 6. This is a big deal. I live in a small town with no kindergaten or other early childhood education facility. There is no other childcare available (right now). I'm also a single parent working from home and those childcare hours are my livelihood - not just for my business but … [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...]
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...]
How yoga practice teaches you to listen to your intuition through life’s transitions
by guest author Lynda Miers-Henneveld of Yoga Unlimited Yoga teaches us to embrace the natural rhythms of life. Through our practice we can ground ourselves in times of instability, or motivate and energise ourselves when we feel stuck. A personal practice has to reflect our changing circumstances if it is to support us in our journey through this life. If we stay present to what is happening in our bodies, minds and hearts, we can adapt our practice intuitively. … [Read more...]