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.
Victim vs. Victor
One of the great philosophy books of all time has to be Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Not only is it a brilliant description of our psyches but it offers techniques for becoming free and even enlightened.
How do we become free? By stilling the movement of the mind. Or, as Patanjali put it in Sanskrit:
Yogah Citta-Vrtti-Nirodhah.
Like many, I had a difficult upbringing. I made a decision, perhaps when I was very young, to not succumb to being a victim. […]
Resistance
The weather forecast for our area tells me that it’ll be 9 degrees overnight, with wind gusts of 10 km/h and maybe some more showers. I find these sort of days and nights very unpleasant.
I “rug up” as much as any human being can, layers and layers of polytherms, muffler, beanie, socks, ugh boots, and more. But when we get those mean southwesterly winds blowing callously across the island, I just want to go to ground.
On some level, I know that the more I resist the onset of winter, the more stressful I make it for myself. […]
Bad Report Card
Most people under 40 years old would not have the word “periodontist” in their vocabulary. […]
Paid Forward
Back in Sydney, back at Simply Yoga tonight to be taken in a class by Jen Taylor. A class, as she described, taught with a restorative approach.
Such an amazing thing to be led through a class by someone whom I’ve taught for years and then mentored as a yoga teacher. In this evening’s session, I had an experience akin to being held lovingly in my own hands. […]
Yoga Practice Rave
To me there’s nothing more that I look forward to than doing yoga first thing in the morning. Well, after my cuppa. Why bother even changing out of p.j.’s?
Even transplanted as I’ve been to Adelaide these last few days, it’s been divine practising with, and teaching a little, my six women friends here.
It reminded me how invaluable it is to have the yoga habit firmly entrenched. […]
Listen Up
Something I learned from Sue in my women’s group today. She started her sharing this afternoon by thanking us for giving her our attentive listening and said: “Unconditional love is giving undivided attention.”
Isn’t that the definition of meditation?
In doing yoga we talk about listening to our bodies, not an easy practice, if done moment by moment. There’s so much learning to be had by witnessing. Our practice of asanas, Our friends. And ourselves.
A great practice is to listen to and remember the things you say to yourself. […]
Intimacy
One of the things that comes out of sharing with girlfriends is discovering what you think, for one thing, and then getting accurate feedback for another (like it or not).
This is what happens at our women’s reunion that we’re having this weekend in South Australia.
Each of us may talk for an hour or so and during this time stuff comes up that may have been lying below the surface for a while, or it surfaces upon probing.
The truly beautiful thing among we seven women here is the willingness for each of us to be vulnerable. […]
Women's Reunion
I don’t really like flying; actually I don’t much like traveling. I love the new places and the new experiences once I get there, but I’m a hundred percent behind teleportation. This is coming from someone who has done the Pacific Ocean crossing from Australia to the U.S. maybe 20 times.
From someone who served with Trans World Airlines for three years as a flight attendant, with working trips to places like Reykevik, Vladavostok, Ryadh.
This time it’s only a little hop to Adelaide for the Deep Creek Women’s annual reunion, the eleventh of such gatherings. […]
For Winter – Everybody Upside-Down
Some yogis love their inverted poses while others struggle with them or find them fear-inducing. Some wonder, “Why bother?”
I admit I’m biased. I’ve been doing headstand and shoulderstand for 35 years. But I’ve also never had whiplash, compressed cervical vertebrae, or even much neck stiffness. […]
East Meets More East
An amazing invitation came across my desk today enveloped in an email from the BKS Iyengar Association of Australia. A China-India Yoga Summit is being held in Guangzhou City June 16-19, 2011, which will feature “the greatest yoga master in the world”, Guruji himself.
Advertised as perhaps the last time that Mr. Iyengar, well into his nineties, will teach for the general public, the Master will be accompanied and assisted by a retinue of hand-picked teachers. […]
Powerless
Sitting at a blank blog screen tonight, wracking my brain for inspiration, I saw my computer and all things powered by electricity in our house shut down, flicker on, then off, and finally just off. So, how am I writing this post? On the iPad, tethered in some way I don’t understand, to Daniel’s iPhone. (And, while on the subject, what is a dongle?)
See, my problem is I don’t really care enough about electronic devices to learn to understand them. As Daniel says about his relationship to yoga, I’m just a consumer. […]
Sunday Sleep-in
I have an ingrained habit of doing yoga practice each morning, and I’m in the fortunate position of not needing an alarm to wake me. I just get out of bed, walk to the studio, and begin. I don’t ever take this privilege for granted.
This chilly Sunday morning, I chose to do what most people do, curl up under the doona, sleep in, get up, make a cup of tea, get back in bed, have a cuddle. […]
What does yoga have to do with digging a hole?
How hard can it be to dig a hole? Have you ever thought about where people would be without holes dug. Probably still living in caves.
It used to be you could just go ahead and wing it…digging your hole. Now you can do a Google Search and discover “How to Dig a Hole”. It takes 5 steps on wikiHow, as a matter of fact. The first important step is to locate your utility lines, and call your council if you don’t know where they are.*
Today I dug a hole in order to transplant a severely root-bound palm. […]
Stellar Summit
Today’s wake-up was at 5 am. Hey, we’re semi-retired, living in the country. Why would anyone wake up at that time if they didn’t have to? For an adventure, of course.
Way before sunrise, rugged up to the eyeballs, we headed out to the beach on Mitchells Island. Even as the car headed in that direction, we saw the objects of our expedition: the brilliant convergence of Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Mars in the northeastern sky.
You know how amazing Venus looks in the early morning. […]
iPad-masana: An Apple A Day
If you happen to have an iPad, or get to a chance to look at Yoga Suits Her on one, you might just like it. Because it looks fab. I take no credit. […]
The Art of Yoga Adjustments
A couple of years ago, I wrote an e-book with accompanied with an audio c.d. called The Art of Adjustment. It’s basically a manual for yoga teachers, trainees and keen students. I’m sorry to say the book has languished on the Live Yoga Life site where it is for sale, possibly because I retired from teaching in Sydney not long after it was launched. Well, launched is a rather grand word for what happened. Appeared might better describe its debut. […]
Refreshing Your Savasana
When I teach the yoga relaxation in winter’s chilly temperatures, I see students getting into their lying down positions, pulling socks and jumpers on, and wrapping themselves up in blankets as tight as mummies. Of course we want to keep warm but not at the risk of creating a tense and resistant position.
Here’s some guidelines for teachers to follow in giving their students the optimum set-up for a deep relaxation:
1. Use a folded blanket like a pillow to support the neck and head. Especially with lower backache or sciatica, use a bolster under the knees.
2. […]
Steering by Starlight
The idea of creating our Mitchells Island community of three couples, living in a beautiful home of our design, was hatched about 7-1/2 yrs. ago. The six of us were fairly accomplished at creating a vision and then fulfilling it. I think our project was successful, in some measure, because we harnessed the powerful synergistic energy of the group.
I taught vision-making as part of The Professional Yoga Teacher course at Nature Care College for 10 years. I still hear from trainees who created their 5 year plan and then manifested it. […]
Food for Thought
While in Sydney I came across some useful reading I wanted to share with anyone who is interested in healthy habits , and specifically around eating.
“The Seven Kinds of Hunger” is a chapter from the excellent book Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays, M.D.
In it the author describes why we feel like eating and suggests that if we can tune into the kind of hunger we are experiencing, we can approach eating in an appropriate, mindful way.
Here are the seven:
* Eye hunger – I had an experience of this type of hunger last night when we went […]
The Purpose of Yama and Niyama
When I first learned yoga and for many years, I knew nothing of the yama and niyama. I didn’t know that they are actually stepping stones in the practice of yoga.
With the popularity of hatha yoga these days, it’s common for students to do asanas hoping to make their bodies strong. However, hatha yoga is just one of the eight limbs of the tree, which includes yama and niyama.
The point I made in yesterday’s post is that progress is futile if one’s inner life isn’t evolving. […]