Practice is a Lifeline, not a Luxury

We believe this practice is for everyone and yet must also live within the reality of rising costs.

Practice was how I met everything

For most of my life, practice was how I met everything. I moved through single motherhood, loss, ambition, travel, devotion, exhaustion, beauty, and responsibility with breath, discipline, and faith in the teachings. I truly believed—because it had always been true—that if I practiced sincerely enough, I could meet whatever arose. Perimenopause taught me otherwise.

What good does it do to sit here?

Staying centered in times like these is not indulgent. It is an act of protest and sustainability. For the nervous system. For discernment. For community.

Sadhana

A Year of Community, Motion, Practice, and Gratitude

As I pause and look back, I’m honestly in awe—not of the numbers themselves, but of you, and what we’ve created together across time zones, borders, and breath.

Slowing down

Committing to a Home Practice

Beginning again. And again. And again. Let’s honor the year’s turning and ask ourselves, What am I longing for in my body, mind, spirit and life circumstances?

Thank You. I Love You.

Reflecting back over the seemingly endless months of isolation, loss, endings, dashed hopes, canceled plans, closed studios and lack of hugs, I see the teachings so clearly.

DEVOTION

Holiday time? I wonder if this year will be different. I wonder if we will set down the tradition of over-consumption and discern what we deeply value. I'll be giving attention and devotion this holiday season.

Discipline Disrupts Distraction

The practice doesn’t make it all better, and I can’t tick it off my list as finished or complete.However, somewhere in there, the practice helps me remember.

SLOWING DOWN

For four weeks, we’ll drop into body, mind, spirit to find the spaces between effort and surrender. By making space to slow down and find stillness, we allow our system to release into its great integrative power.

NOURISH

So, let’s do this. Nourish Slow Flow and Restorative virtual course. ⁣⁣I’ll be holding space for you to give yourself the gift of healing, slowing down, creating time for silence, for doing “nothing,” for propping your body up and placing it in positions that release the tension we’ve been carrying as a collective and as individuals. ⁣

EXHALE

We must know the shadow to know the light. If we’ve been steeped in the dark gloom, the moment we catch a glimpse of light, our entire system reaches for it.

Undoing

What do I need to set down to become free? Without realizing it, we carry many heavy burdens from our family line, life experiences, and the pressures of living in this current time. These experiences imprint deeply on our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies. The practices of yoga can help us both see these burdens and begin to release them.⁣

FIRE

Here we go again...burning. The 370 fires burning across California are a manifestation of an entrenched global crisis. Human attention span has been shortened to match the news cycle.

The Pursuit of Sensation

From morning until night, we are drawn into the drama loop that spins through our own mind, our home, media, politics—you name it.

Let What Goes Go...

To everyone who crossed the threshold into the sanctuary of Yoga Tree Castro: I am humbled and grateful for each breath you took there, every intention you set at the door and on your mat, each drop of sweat you gave back to that place...

JOY

There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed.

I am Here

Helpless. That’s the raw truth of it. At moments I feel helpless. All of my familiar ways of being, moving through the world, and supporting a community (both local and global) have shifted dramatically.

EMERGE

We will EMERGE from this. The doors will open and we will step through them into the light, and into a new and different reality. These tracks are meant to accompany us as we EMERGE into the community and the world with a renewed sense of self, appreciation of our global family, and inner vitality.

An Exploration of Sadhana

What extraordinary times! Each one of us must sit with the reality of a radically shifted world. Any sense of control we thought we had has fallen away.

HOPE

How can I find hope in the midst of despair? It’s nuts out there! Read anything, watch anything, talk to anyone, engage in social or environmental justice work, politics, economy, health, walk through the city, the burnt forest, or the plastic filled beaches…Amidst all of this, where does one find encouragement and hope?

Mantras of Remembering

In the absence of your voices, I’ve been turning inward to listen for you amidst all the other noise in there. I’ve been sitting with the echoes of all the songs we’ve sung together over the years; with the strength, longing, and joy you’ve brought forth through your voices.

Earth Day

We see the natural world breathing a sigh of relief from the near-incessant human encroachment. Our footprint upon this planet has been nothing short of catastrophic as we’ve erased billions of years of evolution in biodiversity and harmony in exchange for our momentary conveniences.

Social Spaciousness

Thank the shining stars for YOU! Community is one of the biggest gifts we have in times of crisis. As we face this global challenge—the broad panic, the shifts to our lives as we know them, our individual confrontations with the unknown—it’s important to remember that we also have a global community…one as big as the challenge itself.

Chanting l Yoga of the Heart

Fear. Anxiety. Anticipation. Longing. Love. Frustration. Hope. Whatever you’re holding, carrying, or feeling, I’m pleading for you to bring it all. This is a gathering where you don’t have to clean yourself up to arrive.

Power of Pain

I love you so much it hurts.

Asana

A sacred temple must be maintained. If it isn’t, it’s no longer sacred, since it’s precisely the acts of attention and care that make a space so. If left to sit unattended, the inevitable decay and disrepair take over. Order returns to chaos, the great rule of life. And as with temples, so with bodies.

What's in an intention

Intention, simply, is a gathering of energy and turning of attention. It’s based in the present moment but it has one eye gazing toward the future. Intentions hold dreams, hopes, and in many cases, the expectations we hold of ourselves and of this life that is unfolding through us.

Ending Well

The end of anything marks the beginning of something else. To honor these moments (arbitrary as they may be) and take the time to end well sets up the stage for how we will begin… or how we will begin again.

Healing Family Wounds

Unwrapping your gifts: Healing family wounds

Enoughness

I need more time, more money, more practice, more quiet, more travel, more…I don’t give enough to my kids, to my work, to my community, to the planet, to…

Stillness

Raise your hand if you’re in training to win the busy Olympics. My arm is firmly up in the air; how about yours? Busy is the new competitive sport and the newest emotion in our repertoire—right alongside anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise.

Begin Again

All my intentions, all my best-laid plans... All my commitments get tested through time. Time is the great equalizer that invites me to begin again and again.

Check Your Ego At The Door

dr̥g-darśana-śaktyor-ekātmata-iva-asmitāFalse-identification is confusing the nature of the seer or Self with the nature of the instrument of perception. In other words, false identification happens when we mistake the mind, body, or senses for the true Self. - Yoga Sutra II.6

Laughter

It truly is medicine “Laugh loudly. Laugh often and most importantly, laugh at yourself.” ~ Chelsea Handler

The River of Practice

Each drop of water makes the river what it is. I often think of my life as a river. In that river, each practice on and off my mat—each asana, each seated meditation, each recitation of a mantra, each conscious encounter with another—is a drop. This metaphor connects me to the greater purpose whenever it feels utterly silly or tremendously uninteresting to wake up early, or to pause in the midst of a very hectic day, and “do” the practice. After all, a river with one less drop in it, what difference would it make? Well, it’s ultimately a less potent body of water.

Meditation: Space for Stillness

Don’t just do something, sit there. After a thirty-plus-year relationship with sitting, I’ve let go of all extravagant expectations that my whole life will be “solved” and I’ll become permanently enlightened—steeped in divine bliss and released from the gale-like winds of my mind—through daily practice. In that sense, I’ve found freedom: The freedom of realizing that the “solution" isn’t a solution. It’s a day-by-day drop in the bucket of tending to the vacillating thoughts—and, therefore, tending to my being.

Earth Day is Every Day

What is it worth to us, as humans, to consume resources without regard for the reciprocal relationship we have with our environment? I mean the outer ecosystem that sustains life on this planet; but I also mean our own inner ecosystems.

THIS EARTH

This ground supports us. This soil from which we get our sustenance, our water, our very life-force… our very lives.I don’t need to give you the statistics; you’ve heard scientists shouting into the void of capitalism, convenience, and complacency for decades. Plastics, fossil fuels, the food and meat industries, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, population growth, online shopping phenomena, throw-away clothing cultures—in short, human consumption.

The Grace of Remembering

Forget. Remember. Forget again. Remember again. Tell yourself not to forget next time. Forget again… and oh, then remember.

TAPAS

Sustaining the flame of practice years and then the decades roll by; and to sustain a vigor and passion for the humbling practices of yoga… well, it’s not easy. None of the teachings of yoga say it will be.

DIGESTION

What are nutrients and what is waste? This has been on my mind since spending a couple of weeks at an ayurvedic center in India where most of the conversation is about digestion. Every experience or item we take into our bodies can be broken down into nutrients or waste. In an optimal state, we digest our experiences like we digest our food: keeping and using what serves, nourishes, energizes, and repairs us; letting go of all that doesn’t—all that would do our bodies harm if we held onto it.

Sustainability 

Discomfort. We all experience it. It is a recognition that what is happening is not in accordance with our beliefs about the way things should be. Now, what to do at this moment when that lurking sense of discomfort arises?

Moving toward Silence

Lift the veil that obscures the heart and there you will find what you are looking for ~ Kabir

From Ashes

Fires are burning everywhere, literally and figuratively. Lives as we have been living them, assuming they will be the same the next day, are turned upside down, flipped around, and in some cases decimated.

CHOICES

While learning “to speak up” is a lifelong journey, the time to speak up at the polls is now. What is it to have a voice? To use it to speak in alignment with love and clarity and power. And, what is the relationship between the yoga practice and voting? The underlying teaching, that we are all interconnected, interdependent, from One and returning to One, well, this is the relationship.

Prana Vayus

I walk through my days relating to the world through my physical body (sthula sarira); experiencing life through my senses and all of the ways they connect me to the outer world. Often I get stuck there—in this purely gross, physical, tangible sense of “self,” formed by my relationship with the world around me.

UNDOING  

The lists are never-ending. The “to do’s” and “ought to do’s” pile up. The pressure to produce, complete, prepare, create, and [insert your own verb here] is relentless. Do more yoga. Do more parenting. Do more service. Do more self-care. Do more housework. Do more…

Fifty 

Half a dollar. Rapper. Half a hundred. Shades of gray. Number of states in the United States. Natural number following 49 and preceding 51. Nearly my age. I’m moving toward the great celebration of being in this body for fifty—count ‘em, fifty—years. We, humans, like to assign meaning to things; and while I find myself fighting against that impulse, well, apparently I’m still human… so here I go.

OM NAMAH SHIVAYA

The spaces in between. The creation balanced with destruction. To have is to let go.

Bhakti | Devotion

Our beating, pulsing, live-giving, life-sustaining hearts. The remarkable vitality they push through our entire beings—moment after moment, steadily, tenaciously. And yet, how infrequently we actually pause and feel our heartbeat.

Sustainability

What in my life feels empty? What am I trying to fill it with? Will that void ever be filled by my consumption?

Yoga is a lifelong practice

To be seen. To arrive again and again: heart bared, emotional, somatic wounds revealed, a rich and tender vulnerability.

COMMITMENT

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it! That’s it. Begin. Begin. And, then, begin again. It’s about the process of beginning again and again along this path. Gathering up our attention with intention and getting going… each new day. We don’t know what will greet us, sun or rain, health or sickness, love or loss, but, we begin again and again.

BEGINNING  AGAIN 

… with INTENTION, the engine behind my actions.

Giving

Okay, let’s make our list. Look around, what do we need? What do our loved ones need?

INTUITION

A deep trust in our innate wisdom. What is intuition?

Fierce | Compassion

I will not step aside. I'm not going to whither in the face of youth. I will not shrink back in the world of “likes” equals value and newer is better.

Stillness

This world and its drama cycles seem to be forever in motion. Never ceasing. This motion requires a balance point: STILLNESS.

Integration

In this time on our planet, in our country, our states, our cities, our very own communities, it's more vital than ever to bring attention toward the powerful practices of integration.

What are you ALIGNING with?

Along the journey, we hear a lot of do’s and don’ts, some musts, and a few nevers. Often, depending on the tradition you’re studying or teaching, these “rules” may completely oppose what’s being taught just down the hall.

Drama Chaser

Recently an average “philosophy” teacher in the yoga community posted something that was deeply offensive to women and well, to anyone who might be interested in truth and historical facts. It received thousands of comments, circulated endlessly through many communities and was posted, reposted, and posted again—often by those who were most (understandably) upset by it.

This is not a drill.

This is not a drill. We’ve been given this body and breath for this moment only. This is the human guarantee: we have no idea what is next.

Consume. Consumer. Consuming. Consumed.

We have been born into a time when getting things has become our God. Filling our bags, homes, cars, kids, mind with more, more, more is the norm. We are the outcasts if we choose less, take less. And we’re left to find a way to explain to our children that even though our country is breeding more consumption than any place on earth, teaching developing countries that the bigger and fuller the “cart” the happier one is, our family is choosing to buy less.

Making Friends with Fear

The power of fear to rule our physiology is fascinating; at times infuriating. Even when we are able to tap into the reality that all is well, our mind’s power over our mental and physiological systems can cause an internal scream simply by imagining a sad, scary, upsetting, threatening situation.

Sadhana: Daily Practice

Sadhana is the foundation of living yoga, the well from which we draw as students and teachers on the path. Whether you are a yoga teacher or a dedicated lifelong practitioner, cultivating and sustaining the habit of daily practice is an integral part of moving from “doing” yoga to being yoga, allowing it to permeate your life, out of the studio, off the mat, in all aspects of your daily living.

It's not about me

It's not about me. This has been my mantra for decades. ⁣We personalize everything, making it about the I/Me/My, as if the world spins around the Self. It’s natural, for sure...we all experience life through this Me. ⁣

Beginning Again. and Again. and Again.

Let’s honor the year’s turning and ask ourselves, What am I longing for in my body, mind, spirit and life circumstances?