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Did you enjoy a gloriously sunny winter day today? I did. It called to me to get into the garden and weed and plant.
I’m a metropolitan girl from places like Chicago, New York and Sydney. Gardening is not my first language. What does that matter, though, when Nature calls?
There’s rocket, lettuce and dill in the dirt now. I’ve checked the weather report and it will be cold over the next few days but not frosty. […]
If you’re a yoga teacher, have your yoga classes been suffering the winter blahs. It’s common during the Australian winter that class sizes can decrease and even become minuscule.
In one of the sessions I teach, the numbers attending have dropped right off for a variety of reasons: school holidays, winter flues and colds, sprained ankles or broken arms, work conflicts – all the usual stuff.
I think I’m way beyond taking this lack of students personally. […]
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I had an opportunity to teach a group of boys a number of years ago who attended Sydney Grammar School. The boys’ music department teacher was a student of mine, and he felt that these boys who were music students would benefit from some sessions.
I prepared my lessons for a group of 14 boys, but only 11 of them came along for yoga. […]
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The practice of yoga can become addictive for some people, especially those personalities who have that little bit of a tendency to get obsessive about things, like me.
When I discovered Iyengar yoga in 1979, sometimes I would do more than one class a day. I would definitely be at the studio every day (except Sunday), and I even did a yoga teacher training course only five months after my first class. The course went for six months. […]
I don’t know what the exact trigger is for having to go on a diet – different for different people, I suppose.
Possible reasons for gaining weight are we’ve been on the holiday of a lifetime on a cruise ship where the food laid on was deliciously irresistible. Or how about, visiting distant family and suffering emotional setbacks that could only be soothed by comfort foods. […]
A yoga student in last week’s class said that she almost didn’t make it. She might have been vacillating for all the myriad reasons a mind can generate: too busy, too hard, too long since the last attendance, not feeling like it, winter blues, upset in the family, or just plain slack.
She didn’t tell me why it was a close call and I didn’t ask, but I was thinking about her today when I was cycling down to Manning Point. […]
Sometimes I feel left behind. Someone will ask me if I know so-and-so yoga teacher and more often than not these days I have to say ‘no’. It doesn’t help if I say, ‘Well, I know the old yoga teachers.”
Some of the newer kids on the block are actually quite famous and I should know their names. […]
When I have guests to stay at our home, I invite them to do practice with me first thing in the morning in the Yoga Shed. People who have had no prior experience with yoga have reported that they take it up after a few of these sessions, and I attribute that partly to the inspiration of the yoga room. I’ve seen even those who used to do yoga and, for whatever reason, have stopped, get a taste for it again after practising in the Yoga Shed.
A yoga studio can be a storehouse of good energy. […]
The calves have started popping out of Farmer Scott’s beef cows on the property next door to us. I haven’t actually seen any births but the numbers of these labrador-sized creatures are increasing each day. […]
To be accurate, I haven’t attained a-sutra-a-day over the last little while. I’ve been plying my trade in the Byron Bay Yoga Centre therapy intensive. And, it was a total privilege to teach such a shining group of trainees.
To be honest, I was pining for getting back in the company of Patanjali, that old master of wise brevity.
I’m here at the home of Paula and Tim in Coolangatta. I would describe them as bhakti yogis who follow a few spiritual disciplines. […]
I’m on the road, enjoying one of those strange phenomena called a “working holiday”. It probably relates in kind to being “semi-retired”. When I first moved to the country launching myself into retirement, I was not well. I was facing major surgery, after which I needed 3 solid months of recovery and rehabilitation from double hip replacements. My mind was still in working mode, though, so I translated the physiotherapy practice I was meant to do every day into yoga practice. […]
In 1979, the incomparable violinist, Isaac Stern, travelled to China to give concerts and master classes. The Academy Award-winning film – From Mao to Mozart – is based on Stern’s experience of performing and teaching in China.
For Stern the biggest disappointment of the his visit to China was that the musicians, while technically adept, played mechanically and without feeling. […]
The air this morning was clean, fresh and cool from last night’s gentle showers. A good time, I thought for practising pranayama.
I thought of another goal when I went out to the Yoga Shed to practice. I wanted to incorporate the poses that I will teach in one of the sessions of the Byron Yoga Therapy Course next week.
You’d know if you’ve ever been to my yoga classes that I get students to use props for almost every pose. […]
A strange thing happened this morning, a disturbing thing for me.
Yesterday we had a house guest who was travelling north to Queensland and wanted accommodation overnight. After her arrival, we shared a meal, chatted, and then I set her up in a comfy bed. I suggested breakfast and a beach walk the next morning before she had to continue her drive.
After my early morning yoga practice, I headed off to make breakfast for us and discovered a good-by letter from our guest on the kitchen bench top. […]
Two weeks ago I dived in and started wending my way through the dense thicket that is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. […]
I’m sometimes embarrassed to say that I do weights workouts a couple of times a week. I guess I perceive that, in the yoga world, the tools of the practice are meant to cater to the care and keeping of our body/minds on every level. We don’t necessarily need the gym.
I suppose if I did enough handstands, forearm balances, dog poses, and chaturangas, those poses would make my bones healthy and strong. But I don’t do them a lot. […]
A friend and colleague has said that, rather than practising yoga to achieve a perfect posture, we should be aiming to be nicer people.
As simplistic as that sounds, it’s not simple.
The loftiest goal that I have for myself is to live life in love, i.e., to be a loving person. The trouble with having a high aim is that it makes an annoying foil for all opposing qualities. […]
I admit to having temporarily abandoned my practice of asanas while I’ve been on a brief hiatus from my comfy yoga studio at Mitchell’s Island.
This current visit to Sydney is an opportunity for me to put into practice other limbs of the yoga tree, as in the Yama and Niyama. I’m thinking especially of the concept of non-greed (aparigraha). […]
One of the reasons students give sometimes for not practicing yoga at home is that they can’t remember the poses and/or the sequence that they fit in.
The original yogis – the ones who were reputed to dwell in forests and caves – were experimenters and not too worried about poses and sequences. Their interest was in the mind and consciousness, but modern yogis, we’re mainly, or at least that’s where we begin,
Memory can be a blessing and a curse. […]
I am many, many times blessed at this time in my life for having unbroken, deep sleep almost every night.
Maybe my time is coming as I hear of huge numbers of seniors not sleeping well, and the problem worsening as they age.
There’s a hormonal reason for having difficulty sleeping at night that relates to melatonin and growth hormones production decreasing with age.
Less melatonin has many older adults feel sleepy in the early evening and wake up in the early morning. […]