Creating a Sustainable At-Home Yoga Practice

When you’ve got a tight budget or busy life attending regular yoga classes can be challenging. Even package rates at studios put a dent in your wallet, and isn’t it ironic when struggling to  squeeze sessions into your busy schedule actually increases the stress you’re trying to reduce with your practice. Moving your yoga routine out of the studio and under your own roof alleviates these problems while opening new avenues for deepening your practice. 

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Sacred Embodiment Practices To Do With A Partner

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I am sharing with you some fun and effective ways to create more connection with yourself and with a partner through embodied practices of reverence for deeper intimacy. I’ll be giving ideas for how to use yoga, playful movement, eye gazing, massage, and dance to enliven your body, mind and spirit and open your heart to a partner. I've been a dancer, yoga therapists and massage therapist for many years and have seen how intentional connection exercises can help lovers, friends, family, and individuals to find their way to, or back to, connection.

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Using Your Yoga Practice to Help Your Depression

It's normal to feel down once in a while, but if you're sad most of the time and it affects your daily life, you may have depression. There are many different types of depression. Events in your life cause some, and chemical changes in your brain cause others. Seasonal Affective Disorder, or S.A.D., which is a period of major depression that most often happens during these winter months, when the days grow short and we get less and less sunlight.

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Navigating Your Golden Years: A Guide to Healthcare Advocacy for Older Adults

Navigating the healthcare landscape can often feel like an intricate maze, especially as we age and our medical needs become more complex. For older adults, who may be managing multiple health conditions or medications, active self-advocacy is no longer an option—it’s a requirement for maintaining optimal health. This guide zeroes in on six crucial strategies tailored to the unique healthcare challenges faced during your golden years.

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Restorative Yoga: What is it. Why it’s important. And, what’s getting In the way of doing it.

Poses which relax and restore the mind, body and spirit are an essential part of a yoga practice that provide nourishment to support the many systems of the body that keep us healthy and happy throughout the year. Collectively, these practices are known as Restorative Yoga.

There are several misconceptions and limiting beliefs surrounding this practice that can hinder people from engaging in it and receiving it’s benefits.

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Team-Building and Community-Making with Group Yoga

Team-building exercises, like partner and group yoga, teaches people how to trust each other and work together to achieve common objectives, whether it is in a corporate, home, or social space. What communities are you a part of, including work, school and social circles, where group/partner yoga could help support the community to build bonds and grow together?

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What Are You Really Hungry For?

Many of my clients what to lose weight and are struggling to love their bodies, especially if they have recently gained weight. They come to me for weight loss, and even though exercise, like yoga can help with weight loss, what I really have to offer is much more profound. Outlined in this article is my approach to food from a yogic perspective. I am not a personal trainer, nutritionist or dietitian. These ideas are about our relationship to food as an extension of our relationships with ourselves.

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Celebrating the Solstice with the Fire Element

As we enter the week of the summer solstice, when we receive the most daylight all year, we are called by nature to presence this moment on the planet as a time of intense heat, activity and growth. The season of summer relates to the element of fire in the indigenous medicine wheel of life. The warmth of the sun is not only helping us to grow food, but spurring activity. It is time when many of us are leveraging the good weather to come together more in community.

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Earth Element: Getting Grounded and Strong

The five gross elements are parts of our consciousness that flow through us in physical ways. For example, fire shows up as anger and heat in our bodies. Water as tears. Earth is experienced in our bodies as heaviness and strength. This article explores the many ways to feel and experience the Earth element in our lives and bodies, through the various models yoga has given us.

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The Divine Feminine: The Wisdom of Women in Yogic History

Have you ever noticed that the ancient yogis were all men? The Vedic Brahmans, Patanjali. Shri Aurobindo, and many more. Up until the last 100 years, female yoga teachers were not recognized in books, priesthoods, or much of anywhere. That doesn't mean they didn't exist. Their voices, their wisdom, their spiritual findings, were excluded from the standard teachings, but why? And, how did this begin to shift?

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Longing For More Space in Your Life? Tune Into the Space Element

We all need to feel spaciousness in our lives, but with the efficiency and production oriented culture we live in it can be hard to find moments of subtlety and emptiness. Akasha, the element of space can provide help with it’s inherent clear, soft and unbounded nature. In it’s lack of dimension and structure, freedom, playfulness and expansion are more present. The 5 elements, called Mahabhutas in sanskrit and pali languages, are the colors that the Grand Artist paints with. Out of all of the elements, space is the most voluminous, all-pervading and immeasurable.

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Mindful Mindsets for Sticking with Your Goals

Discipline does require self-control no matter what. How we formulate and relate to the concept of self-control is of great important. It can be helpful to understand what we are working with. According to various schools of eastern philosophy, samskaras are the subtle mental impressions left by all thoughts, intentions and actions that an individual has ever experienced.

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The Magic of Sankalpa: Intention Setting that Really Works

A Sankalpa is a way to put positive thinking and desires into action, which is separate from the action or achievement itself. It is based on our present moment experience, while goals are external and future-oriented. When you begin to understand what you are seeking from your practice and from your life as a whole, you will be able to direct energy and actions in order to get there.

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Therapeutic Yoga for Aging Gracefully

Aging and yoga should go hand in hand. Yoga can help seniors, older adults, and those of us recovering from injury or with limited mobility regain a sense of balance, strength, stability and flexibility.

Balance, strength, stability and flexibility are key in preventing falls, injuries and illness. Let’s discuss some best yoga asana practices for aging, as well as some societal myths that can prevent us from making good decisions for ourselves.

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The Water Element: The Key to Flowing Freely

As we continue our exploration through the elemental forces that make up our internal and external universe, we acknowledge that each element, though separate and unique, is a part of a whole. They are all connected and affect each other. The element of fire, in the form of our Sun, evaporates liquid water into vapor, which makes up part of the space and air elements. Liquid and solid water influence the earth element by shaping it over time, in the case of seas, rivers and glaciers.

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Sierra Wagner
Understanding the Air Element, Our Gateway to Freedom

The five elements – earth, water, fire, air, ether – are the manifestations of the vibrations of our own consciousness in their most physical form. When we understand them as a part of us, we can create greater harmony and balance. The elements are a gateway to experiencing more freedom and pleasure in life. This article explores the many ways to feel and experience the air element, and its connection to our mind, body and spirit.

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How to Open-Eye Meditate

Steady gazing, Trataka, is a concentration and purification exercise. Among the six Shat Karmas (yogic purification practices) Tratak is known as the simplest to do. It involves gazing at an object or point of focus without blinking, then closing your eyes and continuing to hold the visual of the object in your mind’s eye. Consistent and correct practice of trataka increases concentration power and purifies the mind from fluctuated thought patterns. It also has proven to improve eyesight and stimulates the brain in at least two studies.

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Is Your Spiritual Practice Fulfilling and Effective?

Is your spiritual practice effective at fulfilling your highest intentions? Though there are many different answers to this question, there are also some indicators of the progress one is making on a spiritual path. Consider the depth and expansion of your awareness of the divine. Are you aware of the perfect nature of existence on a moment-to-moment basis?

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Make Every Month Earth Month by Connection to Nature

Mother Earth invites us to let in more gratitude and reverence – spiritual qualities that we need more of in our lives. This leads to a deeper connection with all of life and the ability to see our environment not just as something ‘out there’, but as something we are part of and have a role to play in. As we become more and more aware of our sacred relationship to the earth, our spiritual work becomes that of earth’s recovery.

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