The Yoga with Eve Grzybowski Blog
I’ve been blogging for 15 years now. At first, I was quite nervous about publishing my thoughts. Because I was shy about writing, my old posts were almost exclusively photos of the view from our bedroom in our Tambourine Bay house.
Remarkably, my original Ville Blog still exists. Does anything on the internet ever go away? It ran from November 05, 2006 to January 12, 2010 and it’s still just where I left it. If you’d like to have a look, the address is http://thevilleblog.blogspot.com.au/.
These days, because there are way too many YSH posts to browse through-over 1200-I’ve put some major themes together in The Vault. I hope this makes it easier to find exactly what you want.
A Sutra a Day: III-24 – Concentration as a Muscle
Is it possible to think your way into being strong or flexible or healthy or kind or rich? Lord knows, wouldn’t we would like to think our way to being independently wealthy, handsome and adored? Or any number of other wishes to be granted. We might want be immortal or a perfect weight or successful in our careers. In this chapter of Patanjali’s Sutra on the cultivation of exceptional faculties, III-24 says that when one has perfect concentration on an elephant, for instance, one can gain physical strength. T.K.V. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-23 – Strengthening a Quality
I’ve been with Daniel, my husband, for 20 years now. We met in a workshop called ‘Love, Intimacy and Sexuality’, became friends, and fell in love. These workshops, organised through the Human Awareness Institute, are led by Americans, and the one that I attended had a married couple as facilitators. I’d come through years of difficult romantic relationships and was ready to learn how to have a successful one. I admired the facilitators’ relationship and, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, put them up on a pedestal. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-22 – Final Passage
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Have you ever done a 5Rhythms Dance session? I did several of them when I attended the Burning Man festival a couple of years ago.
What is it? […]
A Sutra a Day: III-21 – Invisibility: A Power or a Weakness?
Source: thedailywh.at via Aaron on Pinterest
If you are a teacher, you may have had similar experiences to mine when I’ve tried to remember after a class I taught who had been in attendance. When I’ve engaged in conversations with students as they were paying at the end of a class, I’d tend to forget to mark them off the role. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-20 – Dropping Assumptions
For part of my very early childhood years, my home was a dangerous place. Without going into details, there were often violent scenes. I learned a survival strategy which in psychological terms is called ‘hypervigilence’, and it carried over into my adult years.
I was adept at scanning my environment for perceived threats, whether they were sights, sounds, people, behaviours, or smells, and I would do this even when there was little likelihood of danger. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-19 – What Does It Mean?
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I’ve had it in mind for years to write my life story. I suppose I lot of people have the idea of recording their memoirs. I actually did have a go at composing my story, but for the time being it remains just an inactive file in my computer.
I do have a first paragraph for you to read, though:
I don’t know how someone younger than 60 odd years can write about herself with any objectivity, and I’m not even saying that I can. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-18 – More Unpacking Patanjali
It’s so very interesting to me – the way what I read or see or hear is open to wide interpretation when compared to others’ understanding, even when we’ve been exposed to the same phenomena. I guess part of what yoga offers us is a system that exposes the filters we have over what we consider our reliable organs of perception.
This is to be expected when we consider the social conditioning and heredity that varies so much among the 7 billion people on the planet. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-17 – Clean Slate Coming
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Recently I’ve been through a painful situation involving close friends. It would seem that difficulties arose because of miscommunications, faulty memories, and judgments.
Although the unresolved situation has just resurfaced, it has been going on for decades, so long that it would take a private investigator working for months to unravel what was said and what was done.
I tried to avoid the bad feelings I had been experiencing over the years by stuffing them down, and just getting on with ‘the rest of my life’. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-16 – Not So Many Moons
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Reading this weekend’s SMH newspaper, I came across some pieces in the magazine section that related to longevity. Let me tell you, this subject becomes more and more interesting as I age.
Toward the end of this year, I will celebrate my 68th birthday. Like most sexagenarians, I have no idea how I accumulated that number of years. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-15 – Vegie Dreaming
I’m a city girl, born and bred. But, I always dreamed about being able to grow my own foods in the country…one day.
I’m also a sort of a know-nothing about how to do this growing produce thing. Fortunately, I’ve had some pretty switched on people around me, notably Peter Nixon and my housemate Heather.
Peter has been trying to teach me to be a patient gardener, starting in a logical sequence with the all-important rich soil. He recommended we make our own soil through the no-dig method, easy-peasy, he seemed to say. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-14 – Recommended Reading
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I’ve been going along with my blog theme A Sutra a Day now for five months. Picture me every night sitting down at my messy desk, thumbing through up to eight Patanjali Sutra texts by various translator/commentators.
After reading each interpretation, I think about what I’ve read and then overlay a map of my life to see if there are any points of intersection. Sometimes I’m lucky and, bingo, the fit is serendipitous. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-13 – Older and Better
I love the students who come to the Yoga Shed for classes. I feel they are open to my teaching them according to their ages and stages of life. It helps that we look out on a beautiful pastoral view and feel spacious in our Being because of it.
There’s no need to compete in the way I teach. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-12 – Everyone Has Something
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Yoga has been my stalwart companion for over 40 years. We’ve been through thick and thin together, and I have every intention of continuing the relationship as long as possible.
My overall good health I attribute to yoga practice. But, like most people, I haven’t had perfect well-being.
One of the big challenges I faced for 18 years was living with osteoarthritis. The disease was also my companion, and a teacher, too. Having had a bi-lateral hip replacements has freed me of pain, discomfort, and a restricted lifestyle. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-11 – Retreat to Evolve
A friend recently asked if it was a hard transition for me to move away from the city, stop full time work and live in semi-retirement.
How could it be hard; this is meant to be living The Dream, isn’t it? Peace and quiet, a beautiful natural setting, unstructured time….
However, for me to have gone from full-time employment and the cultural stimulation of Sydney to rural life and fewer income-generating opportunities has indeed involved some gears grinding.
I have no regrets, though, except for the geographic distance from friends. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-10 – Is One Branch Enough?
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I have been honest so far. Even though, I’m making the effort to present and understand the writing of the old sage, Patanjali, I’m dog paddling here, treading water, trying to stay afloat. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-9 – Alert, Aware and Kind
One of my first yoga teachers wanted his school to be called ‘Awareness Yoga’. Training peoples’ awareness to notice what they were up to, he reckoned, was what yoga was all about. He was a good teacher, but appeared to be moody and, to my mind, he wasn’t aware of how his angry moods impacted people. Publicly he was inspiring and wise, but privately he could be quite petty. I’m shocked myself at how often I go on automatic and say things that are thoughtless or my behaviour is self-serving. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-8 – Parry and Thrust
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It’s been a free-for-all in the Australian Parliament recently. Prime Minister Julia Gillard was reported in the newspapers today as excoriating the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott.
Goodness, excoriate! I think of the medical use of that word: damage or remove part of the surface of . […]
A Sutra a Day: III-7 – Breathing is the Bridge
A friend and colleague asked me today why I don’t teach pranayama – the yoga breathing – in my yoga classes. I should, I know I should. I was trained in a particular method of yoga that disallowed the practice of breath control until, as Patanjali advises, ‘perfection is attained in asana”. Oh goodness, what a high bar! Nevertheless, when I did yoga teacher training with my first Iyengar teacher, we students would do an hour of pranayama before each asana session. […]
A Sutra a Day: III-6 – A Stage of Yoga – Serving
One of the reasons why I wanted to create a small community to live in was because of the opportunities living together might generate for sharing and caring.
We three couples who have created our communal home on Mitchells Island affectionately call ourselves The Shedders** because one of the couples lived in the old shed on the property as our house was being built.
Old friends for many years, we decided about 9 years ago that we would share our lives as we went into senior years and old age – for the enjoyment of each other’s company and for […]
A Sutra a Day: III-5 – Does Age Bring Wisdom?
I have such a long way to go in my yoga practice. I’m advanced in age and if I subscribed to the traditional Indian model of ashrama — stages of life, I should have by now evolved into more of a recluse, renunciate, or ascetic. But, no, I’m still a teacher of physical yoga postures. I love this way of practicing for myself, and I enjoy passing it on to students. So, to be honest (Ch. […]