Humour

Finding Your Yoga Funny Bone

Finding Your Yoga Funny Bone

The saying – “You can catch more flies with honey” – is true, and by extension so is, “You can catch more flies with humour”. That’s why we see as many humorous messages in emails and Facebook these days as we do inspiring ones.
People who do a great deal of public speaking know enough to have a funny anecdote or joke up their sleeves to warm up their audiences. It’s no less important for yoga teachers to be able to inject humour into their classes to help students feel at ease and create a warm environment. […]

Starting and Stopping and Starting All Over

 Do you feel like you have to start all over again when, from time to time, life gets in the way of your yoga practice? You know, those situations when…You go on a trip and there’s no room to put a mat down. (Maybe you completely forgot to pack your mat, like I did last week.You get a bad cold and imagine terrible things will happen in head-down-bum-up poses, i.e., downward-facing dog pose, headstand or shoulder stand.You pull a hamstring, tear a intercostal, or strain your sacroiliac joint.You have a late night. […]

N.Y.Times Yoga Talk About Sex

N.Y.Times Yoga Talk About Sex

Maybe it had to happen. Yoga has been on such a great roll. In recent weeks, though, the N.Y.Times has published a couple of articles, both by the same writer, that have stirred the opinions, angst, and ire of worldwide yogis.
The first yoga article by William Broad added promotional currency to his newly-ly published book, The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards. The piece was titled “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.” There was a storm of activity on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and on the New York newspaper’s on-line forum. […]

Choosing How You Do Elderhood

Choosing How You Do Elderhood

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. […]

The Language of Yoga Teaching

The Language of Yoga Teaching

 

In teaching a class today, one of the students got muddled between the right and left side of a pose. Years ago I worked out a little joke to correct this problem: I’d just say, “Try the other left side.”
Words are vital in communication, and especially so as a yoga teacher. […]

The More Things Change

The More Things Change

The New Year is a time when you set goals so you can achieve what you may have missed out on the previous year. For instance, maybe you weren’t successful enough in business, so this year you’ll aim for a bonanza; or, you weren’t available enough for your children, but this year you’ll definitely improve your relationships with them; or, you didn’t get those pesky 5 kg. […]

A New Broom

A New Broom

I live in a little community comprised of three couples. Two of them are in Sydney which makes our country home extra peaceful at the moment.
You’d think I’d be lounging about, reading a novel or the weekend papers. But no, something’s come over me and I’ve been cleaning and tidying. This is the kind of high gear we move into when we know company is coming.
We will have various groups of visitors staying a night or two as they wend their way up the Pacific Highway to Byron, Noosa, or the Woodford festival. […]

The Great Aussie Way

The Great Aussie Way

At the beginning of 1976, when I arrived in Australia for the first time, there was an annoying ritual well underway: shutting down the country for the month of January. […]

Social Media for Yoga

Social Media for Yoga

I’ve been in a big learning curve over the last few weeks. I thought I was doing pretty well, up until this point, to have more or less mastered almost-daily posts on “Yoga Suits Her”.
There’s no such thing as sitting back and watching the green beans grow down here on the farm. No sirree! The next thing I have to figure out is Twitter and Facebook.
Moreover I need to do new and different things with links, hashtags, @_, tiny-urls, contractions and more.
Why bother? I can hear some of you say.
Good question. […]

To Plan or Not to Plan

To Plan or Not to Plan

One of the age-old question about doing yoga practice is whether you should have a program that you strictly follow or should you just wing it and follow where your intuition leads you.
I was thinking about this very thing in my early morning practice. The advantage of following along a set sequence is that you don’t have to think too long and deeply about what will ensue. […]

Limping Along

Limping Along

Have you ever torn a hamstring or suffered an inflamed tendon? Then you would know the feeling of limping along, having to do just half-speed yoga poses.
I feel like that today after having had a little mishap with my computer keyboard. A portion of my morning coffee, so much anticipated after my yoga practice, spilled over the board. […]

Squirming

Squirming

I’m sitting here thinking about what to write, and it’s not coming easily, after having taken the night off yesterday. I excused myself because of attending an out-of-town wedding. But I’m not going to let myself wiggle out of this tonight because this is one of my disciplines.
See, that’s how I’ve trained myself to be. Pick myself up and put myself down on my yoga mat or on my Fit Ball in front of the computer, day after day, and stay there until the job is done.
Well, that’s not enough, of course. […]

Chapter One: Don't Know

Chapter One: Don't Know

Yoga teachers have a hard time conveying what this age-old, enormous wisdom system is.
One way to explain it is to pass on esoteric philosophical concepts as they appeared in ancient spiritual texts – difficult to understand and not the real experience of yoga; another way is to take those yogic ideas and water them down or recast them in contemporary terms – and perhaps much of importance gets lost along the way.
In any case, yoga practice can be a subjective experience that is difficult to explain in words. […]

Tall Poppies

Tall Poppies

 I will never be a tall anything. One hundred sixty centimetres short, I’m not going to beat around the bush: in a forest of generations of increasingly tall people, I am a shrub.
I actually used to think that I would be able to increase my height through yoga. At least at 66 yrs. old, I haven’t lost any height.
Okay, we’re just having a little fun here, at my expense. […]

Tummy Rumbles…

…also called “gastric ructions”, caused by peristalsis, are the bane of some yoga relaxations.
There’s something diverting about getting to the quiet time at the end of a yoga class when the teacher has soothed and cajoled the group into a semi-somnolent state, when suddenly the low- pitched rumbling from some quarter starts up. […]

Please Explain

I heard someone say years ago (maybe it was in a personal development course) that people are meaning-creating machines. If I say something to you, you are going to want to make it mean something, perhaps more, or less, or even different than I meant. In any situation I’m in, I’ll assign it a meaning, give it a flavour, sum it up as enjoyable or tragic or irksome.
So, today my husband sent me a link to an article called, “The Least 5 Romantic Keys to a Happy Relationship.” This arrived in my email with no preamble. […]

Driving Lesson

Do you remember when you learned to drive? I can remember it just like yesterday because I was so worried about crashing. The driving inspector kept telling me to behave like I was “master of my ship”, even though I felt like a a navvy. At 16 yrs old I got my license and a week later crashed my mother’s car.
Today I had my first go at driving our ride-on mower. Daniel and Rick had made mowing look so simple. […]

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