by Kara-Leah Grant Facilitating retreat is always a powerful experience, not just for the retreatees, but also for myself and the other facilitators. I know that I'm going to get triggered, that my ideas and beliefs will be challenged, and my unconsciousness revealed. This is the process of retreat, and it is immensely rewarding. In the middle of the fire though, it's damned hard work. Case in point: The Heart of Joy, Bali. I’m co-facilitating with Ben Ralston. It's only the second retreat … [Read more...]
Can You ‘Make Up’ a Yoga Pose?
by Kara-Leah Grant Recently I read a post on social media which went something like this: Here's so & so teacher making up a new yoga pose for you. WTF? Since when were yoga poses - asana - 'made up'? Since they began being taught through intellectual understanding rather than embodiment, that's when. Yoga postures are a physical result of an energetic process. They emerge from the flow of Prana within the body. Or here's another way to put it. Yoga is a state of presence. In that … [Read more...]
The Kiwi-Based Musician Taking the International Yoga World by Soundscape Storm [video interview]
![The Kiwi-Based Musician Taking the International Yoga World by Soundscape Storm [video interview]](https://theyogalunchbox.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/PeteLongworth-WL-Arli_014_grande-150x150.jpg)
by Kara-Leah Grant He started yoga because he had lower back pain, moving from Bikram to Vinyasa to Yin at East West Studios in Auckland. Then Nikki Harris, the studio owner asked musician Arli to play his soundscape ambient tunes for a yin class. Fast-forward a couple of years and Arli is about to go on a multi-continent tour playing music for top international yoga teachers like Shiva Rea & Elena Brower. It's a world away from his up-bringing in Israel, where he became a session … [Read more...]
How I Dropped the Ball on Day 338 of My 1000 Day Practice
by Kara-Leah Grant Today is Day 138 of a 1000 Day practice I'm doing. It should be about Day 500. But earlier this year, on Day 338 something happened and I dropped the ball. I've been doing Forty Day practices for nearly a decade now. At first, it took great dedication, commitment and mindfulness to practice yoga every day for forty days in a row, especially when I was doing the same practice each day. I learned so much about myself, how my mind worked, and where I was sabotaging … [Read more...]
Shiva Rea on the Evolution of Prana Vinyasa Yoga {video interview}
by Kara-Leah Grant She's sometimes referred to as "the Madonna of Yoga" - at least, that's what Vanity Fair called Shiva Rea when she did a desert photo shoot for them in 2007. But magazines love catchy monikers and as someone who grew up idolising Madonna and has studied with Shiva... the two women are nothing alike. "I'm not sure what exactly what they were referring to, whether it was my boldness, but I'm not into being a yoga celebrity at all. At all! Humility for me is a really important … [Read more...]
How I Found my Ground through Shiva Rea’s Taupo Immersion
by Kara-Leah Grant In February this year I spent five days at Wanderlust and then rolled straight into an Immersion with Shiva Rea. Now, a month or so later, everything around me is the same as it was. But I am not. I have deeply changed. I can feel it in the way I stand upon the earth. I can feel it in the way I wear my clothes, the way I walked my son to school, the way I'm sitting here now. Something in me has awoken - I have found my ground. Stepping back into training with Shiva was … [Read more...]
A Review of Wanderlust Great Lake Taupo 2016
by Kara-Leah Grant Holy Wanderlust. What a trip. It began like it ended last year - with Pete Longworth. We’ve become amazing friends over the last year since meeting at Wanderlust Great Lake Taupo 2015 (one of the best things about this gathering - the quality of friendships you form) and this year, Pete flew out early to hang with me. We drove over on Wednesday, stopping at Kerosene Creek to do a four hour photo shoot. There’s almost a novel in that experience alone. Suffice to say that I … [Read more...]
I’m Afraid my Students are Going to Get Bored with my Yoga Sequences
by Kara-Leah Grant This came up in conversation this week - a new teacher expressing a fear that her yoga sequences weren't interesting enough and that she was going to be boring her students. She wanted to know how to make her sequences more interesting. However, there is a fallacy of logic here. The teacher has a fear arising - that of boring her students. Her approach to working with that fear is to ensure that the external circumstance triggering the fear is removed - bored … [Read more...]
How Yoga Trance Dance™ Destroys World Weariness and Opens Up Creative Flow
by Kara-Leah Grant If you know me, you know I love dancing. Always have, ever since I saw Flashdance at age 8, and got hooked on the original Fame TV series. That was me... always dancing. But there was never any chance I could become a professional dancer because I had zero flexibility, plus at age 16 I had a spinal fusion. (I still remember the first day I danced again after that operation... the doctor said three months, I gave it two.) However... life moves in mysterious ways and in … [Read more...]
How to Use Breath Movements to Free the Body’s Spontaneous Movement {video}
by Kara-Leah Grant Welcome to the third in this series of Yoga Explorations. You've now learned two breath pairs - the Ascending and Descending breath, and cultivating the core and radiating from the core breath. We're going to take that understanding, and use Downward Dog and Three Legged Dog to look at how tuning into the breath can allow our body to move spontaneously within the structure of a posture. As I mentioned in the first article on the Ascending and Descending breath, … [Read more...]