An article on the news today pointed to a problem that is troubling so many people in society these days – osteoarthritis.It’s not just my imagination. Statistics say that two million Australians currently have the disease. However, within 10 years that number is expected to double to four million.We think that osteoarthritis is just what happens as we get older. We call it wear and tear, but in actual fact, osteoarthritis is not inevitable with ageing. […]
Everywhere you look in the Manning Valley these days, you’ll see the signs of the most luscious growth of many seasons – the culmination of several years of good rains without overheating. The low rolling hills west of the Pacific Highway are full of luxuriant pastures with fat cows and horses. The rivers and streams are fully flowing and oyster farming has started up again. We bought our property on Mitchells Island during the drought. And then we watched our wetland dry out, our lawns growing brown, and most of the planting we did dying off. […]
Recently I’ve become enamoured of a social media site called Pinterest. It does two things for me: 1) connects me with other lovers of images, and also (2) with lots of interesting, striking images. When I look at the Pinterest section devoted to yoga images, I see a majority of perfect bodies doing perfect poses. The practitioners’ postures are truly works of art. […]
Thursday night I attend my community choir. It makes me happy to go along and sing with a whole group of people who enjoy joining together in harmonies.
The dedicated choir director, Telly, lets me lead some yoga stretches at the beginning of the 1.5 hr. session, so the group follows along as I demonstrate and instruct.
I think about what will prepare us best for singing, so we do stretches that open up the lungs, loosen the rib cage and release tension from shoulders. […]
Grief happens when facing the results of ageing. This is not news to anyone over 40 who finds out they will soon need to buy their first pair of reading glasses. Or when you have to visit your dentist and hear him refer you to a peridontist (gum doctor). […]
The first time I came across the term “negative fantasy” was in the workshops produced by the Human Awareness Institute. Over the last two days I have gone in and out of my own negative fantasies which had the effect of making me feel about as low as I have in a long time. Until I had a chance to talk about what was going on in my head, I was accepting the fantasies as being true pictures of reality – albeit highly emotionally charged ones. […]
I spent the last weekend with my 7 woman friends, aged late 40’s to mid-seventies. In this company, I participated in many of those familiar-by-now conversations about medical complaints, impending surgeries, and just plain loss of hearing, eyesight, and libido. (Does loss imply ever finding those items again?)
Did we sound like broken records? Absolutely not.
We’ve surprised even ourselves that ageing isn’t really such a scary thing. I can honestly say that each one of us has experienced more wisdom, wholeness, authenticity, and improved sense of humour with the arrival of age. […]
Tomorrow is a 2 year anniversary of my release from Hunters Hill Private Hospital where I did 12 days of rehabilitation after my double hip replacement surgery.
On my return home, my husband Daniel made a great video clip of my walking up the stairway without needing to use a stick. He put some backing music to it – Patsy Kline’s Walking After Midnight – and stuck it up on the Internet as a YouTube video.
I tell people now that if anyone is having qualms about the surgery, they needn’t. […]
Have you done workshops, been on retreats, or attended “intensives” where you received a real boost for a short time…then lost the focus or inspiration you received? Soon, it’s business as usual, and you’re hanging out for the next gee-up, but maybe it’s not going to happen again for another six or 12 months.
I had this concern about the Off the Mat, Into the World weekend I did earlier this month. We 26 participants were very enthusiastic and connected with each other at the end of just 2 days. […]
I was trying to remember when Viparita Karani, colloquially known as legs-up-the-wall, first burst onto the scene. […]
Symmetry in action, Urdhva Dhanurasana is a challenging pose for most yogis. If we could only get the backbend arc to be even from the top of the spine to the tip, then the experience would be pleasurable and gratifying. Anything less, we feel heavy, pinched and sometimes defeated. Like many adults, by the time I came to do yoga, it had been many years since I’d done backbends. The first ones I attempted in a yoga class made me feel exhilarated. My teacher was a hard task master. We students did 25 Urdhva Dhanurasanas, followed by 10 “easies”. […]
I can scarcely remember such beautiful weather for Christmas Day as we’ve had today.
I do remember 40 degree-plus Christmases, chilly and drizzly ones, and one year where we were without electricity through the day and night because of nearby bush fires.
We here have cause for celebration.
Happy campers in the grounds at Manning Point are enjoying perfect summer weather, and rain-free.
The Aussie economy is better than most, maybe better than all, never mind about the two-speeds.
It’s peaceful in our neck of the woods. […]
An avid reader of Yoga Suits Her posts has made this request:
I’d be interested in a series about the poses, particularly the better known ones. Not about how to do them and not about how to do them better or any details, but what they mean to you, what they seem to represent and how they relate to your life.
So, in the 12 days leading up to 2012, I’m going to look at the meaning, intention and implications of some poses we all do regularly and give them their due.
Trikonasana jumps out at me. […]
It’s said that the world has become like a small town in many ways. The web and mobile phone services connect us instantaneously with amazingly remote places. Inexpensive air travel has made big distances minuscule.
This process has accentuated the differences between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, developed and developing, as we see the disparities so much more clearly. […]
For inspiration, I have a copy of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra by Chip Hartranft in the stack of books by the side of my bed. We all need a slug of encouragement from the written word from time to time. That’s why svadhyaya -self-study – is one of the indispensable niyama.
There have been philosophers from every part of the globe and from all ages. The Greeks had Socrates and Aristotle…Germans had Nietzsche…Americans Emerson and Thoreau. […]
Part of what comes with being human is that we are born beautiful and innocent, connected to our divinity, and then we undergo years of forgetting this happy state.
Maybe this is because we live in a culture that says it’s conceited to think well of ourselves. […]
You’ve heard the expression, you’re not your emotions. It’s true. We are so much more than our thoughts, our bodies, our emotions.
But today I noticed my mind and emotions were like the mid-north coast weather with its unpredictable gusts of wind. I was unpleasantly buffeted about by them. […]
An experienced yoga teacher asked me this question yesterday:
I have been following your blog for a while now. It seems to me that you are always missing the spiritual side of yoga in your comments and insight, that is the main very goal of this path. Why?
I was happy to get such a great question. […]
The Divine Feminine Conference November 26 & 27 was a source of joy to me and, I would say, to many of the women in attendance.
The first presentation on the first day was a slow simmer even though Diane Riley was speaking passionately about her area of expertise – Tantra. […]
For many years in Sydney, I trained yoga teachers to teach. One of the trainees’ assignments would be to design a sequence for a particular problem, apply it to a student, and assess the results.
Daniel, my husband, was a good guinea pig for the trainees because he had periodic back pain. (Interestingly, after nearly 19 years of doing yoga, he seems to have transcended this particular condition.)
Here’s a “Daniel sequence” for groins and lower back that I came across in my archives. […]