The seasonal shift from winter to spring often brings a sense of renewal to our spirits. As we begin to shed our winter clothing, we may also start to clear away things that managed to build up in the hibernation of the winter season and look to spring for a fresh and liberating start.

A popular habit that reflects this transition is “Spring Cleaning,” the practice of thoroughly cleaning one’s home in the springtime. Many people – especially yogis – might be interested in taking this cleaning and clearing out process inward. There are countless ways to approach detoxifying the body, but when it comes to your asana practice, your best bet are twisting postures.

B.K.S. Iyengar famously describes twists as a “squeeze and soak” action. The squeeze part of the action refers to the twist itself because twisting postures create a wringing (or compression) effect on the abdominal organs. This compression pushes blood out of the abdominal organs and creates a flushing effect that helps to eliminate toxins.

The soaking part of the action refers to what happens as you bring your body out of the twist. As the compression is released, fresh blood floods back into the abdominal organs bringing with it oxygen and nutrients. In essence, with the squeeze, you are clearing out and creating space, and with the soak, you are intentionally refilling the space.

A powerful way to work more deeply with twists is to use them as a tool to refine your intentions. As you move mindfully into your twist, ask yourself questions such as: What do I want to clear out of my life? What do I want to let go of? What about the way I am living my life right now is not serving me? As you unwind, shift your focus to mirror the soaking phase of the twist and explore questions such as: What am I creating space for? What do I want more of in my life?

Whether you find yourself focusing on more cleaning your kitchen, detoxifying through twisting asanas or clearing away things that aren’t serving you, remember to approach your pursuit with a balance of sthira and sukha (translated simply as effort and ease). Allow your body to twist, guide your body to twist, but don’t force your body to twist. If you would like more guidance on how to twist safety and smoothly, please come to class and ask!

Hope to see you on the mat.

Photo Credit: Chris Yakimov

Not too long ago a picture of a little cat lying on its back was regularly showing up in my Facebook news feed. The text at the top of this image read:

I may look like I’m doing nothing but on a cellular level I’m very busy.

Not only cute and comical, but true. The practice of Restorative Yoga, which can also be described as a practice of active relaxation, is based on an awareness of what happens (on a cellular level) when we allow the body to rest, when we lay on our backs and do nothing – just like the little cat.

I want to specifically address using Restorative Yoga to address injury in the body. If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent hours (days, weeks or even months) of your life trying to “solve” your injuries. Perhaps you too have bounced from practitioner to practitioner trying one approach after another in search of something that will help you find your way to feeling healed. I don’t want to devalue to the wisdom and insight we can gain from practitioners of all different modalities, but I believe that in this outward seeking of healing we may lose sight of our greatest source of healing.

Having an injury can be very stressful. An injury might prevent you from staying active (which helps to combat stress), it might impact your ability to work (creating financial stress), and it might make day-to-day tasks more challenging and more tiring. Seeing someone for your injury can also be a large source of financial stress – especially if things don’t improve with the first practitioner you see. A number of things happen in the body when it is under stress, and one of those things is that the body directs energy away from systems that are not an immediate priority, including digestion, elimination, repair, and reproduction. Simply put, the stress of an injury can prevent our body from repairing that injury.

In contrast, the soothing and quieting poses of Restorative Yoga help our own internal healing processes to work. The body has an incredible ability to heal itself and Restorative Yoga offers us the possibility of connecting to this source of healing. By resting deeply in the poses, we can begin to release ourselves from the destructive and limiting forces of chronic stress.

Restorative Yoga often involves a paradigm shift from “doing, fixing and solving” to “being and allowing,” and if you are habitually an active problem solver, Restorative Yoga can require a leap of faith. I am incredibly grateful that I took this leap because among other things, Restorative Yoga has empowered me to believe deeply in my body’s ability to heal itself and it has taught me to value taking time to rest so that my body is able to direct its energy in this way.

If you would like to explore this approach to healing, I teach Restorative Yoga on Sunday evenings at South Granville YYoga. I would love to see you there.

Photo Credit: Chris Yakimov

I teach a workshop on developing a daily yoga practice, and one of the key focuses of this workshop is learning to understand why yogic philosophy suggests a daily practice. To gain this understanding, we delve into the concept of tapas, which Patanjali wrote about in the Yoga Sutras around 200 CE.

In the midst of exploring this concept, I like to remind everyone (myself included) thattapas, a practice that can be described as consistency in striving towards your goals, was not included in the Yoga Sutras because it is something that most people find easy to do.

This practice of consistently striving towards our goals, learning to live with our most compelling priorities in mind, and investing our energy wisely is one of the most challenging things we can learn to do. A practice of consistency is demanding on a good day, but when life gets overwhelming, the practice gets even harder. And when we forget that consistency is something we’re learning, and we turn it into something we expect of ourselves, we make it infinitely more challenging.

When we berate ourselves for our failure to practice consistently, we lose track of a fundamental aspect of the practice of yoga. A consistent practice requires ahimsa (non-violence or non-harming); it requires a compassionate understanding of the challenges of being a human.

In the book Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff offers three elements of self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. With the element of common humanity, she explains that “self-compassion involves recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience – something that we all go through.” As you make new commitments in your life or re-commit to goals that have fallen away, first and foremost hold a commitment to being compassionate with yourself through the learning process.

Remember that maintaining consistency in striving towards your goals is a core component of the yoga practice (which has been around for thousands of years) because it is something that everyone finds challenging. Remember that the challenges you face are part of a shared human experience – everyone suffers and feel inadequate, and remember that one of the most powerful ways to overcome those feelings is to share them with someone who feels exactly the same way – in other words, almost anyone.

By holding compassion as our first commitment, we create the space to better understand the challenges that arise for us in a practice of consistency. We move into a place where we can compassionately guide our lives in a way that honours our strengths and weaknesses. And with self-compassion, we learn to be more empathetic and understanding of the people around us and deepen the extend to which we can support them in committing to compassion.

Photo Credit: Chris Yakimov

Post originally written for YYoga blog - http://yyoga.ca/blog/commit-to-compassion

Post originally written for YYoga blog - http://www.yyoga.ca/blog/love-as-a-life-practice/

Falling in love, finding your true love, meeting your soul mate. In many ways, our culture’s idea of romantic love aligns with a fated, pleasure soaked experience of enviable bliss. Romantic movies consistently reaffirm this image with stories of “meant to be” couples finally overcoming the obstacles that were keeping them apart.

And, then, just as their relationship starts, the movie ends.

I always thought I knew that love wasn’t like it was in the movies. I knew that relationships took work. But I have come to realize that I didn’t know what I thought I knew. I was holding beliefs about romantic love that were more reflective of the movies than I thought.

I thought love was certain. I thought it was hard work, but the kind of hard that doesn’t feel too hard. I thought that when you met the person you would commit to spending your life with that there would be no doubts. I thought deep love was about doing crazy and impulsive things and feeling big, powerful, earthshaking feelings.

The yogic practice of tapas can be defined as learning to live with our most compelling priorities in mind. As I have learned to hold my yoga practice as a constant priority, my understanding of love has slowly shifted alongside. I have come to see love as a practice that requires the same disciplined approach.

In meditation practice, we develop our ability to bring our awareness back to a point of focus. We can also use this skill in the practice of love by consistently committing to bring our attention back to how to best love and respect our partner or friend. The focus of the relationship shifts from, “How I am I feeling about this person?” to “How am I treating this person?” The experience of love shifts from an internal feeling to an external offering. Love becomes a choice, an action, and a way of life. Love becomes less what you feel or don’t feel and more about what you do.

I now think that love is less about certainty and more about commitment, that it can feel unbearably hard, and that this difficultly can fuel doubt. I see more love in the daily commitment to support another person in the messiness of life than in grandiose gestures, and I believe the greatest acts of love are not fueled by the feeling of love but rather a commitment to act with love even in the absence of feeling it.

Love is a choice we face each and every day. To act from a place of love in the face of emotions like fear, anger or jealousy requires a deep commitment to holding love as a priority – but like anything else, choosing love gets easier with practice.

Photo Credit: David R MacKenzie

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali presents the practice of Svadhyaya, or self-study, as a primary component of the yoga practice. This practice of deepening self-awareness can be a valuable tool in the process of setting – and keeping – New Year’s Resolutions.

Here is one framework for setting New Year’s Resolutions with awareness and intention:

Get Honest

Write down every resolution that crosses your mind. Ideas you don’t write down may linger in the back of your mind and eventually steal your focus.

Get Realistic

From your list, pick one resolution that most aligns with the direction you want to move in the New Year. Change is hard to make, and the more changes you try to make, the less likely you are to follow through with any of them.

Get Self-Reflective

Remember the 5 W’s (and 1 H) from high school English? Use them to generate questions that will help cultivate awareness around your patterns, habits and current situation, and then determine the steps you need to take to implement this shift in your life.

Questions you might ask yourself include:

Who…

Who will be your support in making this change?

Who might make this resolution more challenging?

What…

What intentions does this resolution reflect?

What will be your obstacles?

Where…

Where do you see yourself after making this resolution?

Where will you turn for support?

When…

When will you make time for this commitment?

When will you reassess your progress with this resolution?

Why…

Why are you making this change?

Why haven’t you done this in the past?

How…

How will you stay accountable?

How do you define success with this resolution?

Get Realistic – Again

After working through the 5 W’s (and 1 H), does your chosen resolution feel realistic or do you need to explore other possibilities?

Sometimes meaningful change “just happens,” but often it requires effort and a change in approach. By bringing more self awareness into the pursuit of change, I believe we can profoundly and positively affect our ability to make meaningful changes happen in our lives.

Post originally written for YYoga blog - http://www.yyoga.ca/blog/meditation-training-your-puppy-mind/

I was thirteen years old when I discovered that my synchronized swimming coach actively practiced meditation. I remember feeling awkward when I found out. My limited exposure to meditation at the time had left me believing that it was something only strange people did. I resisted the urge to jokingly touch my pointer finger and thumb together (in chin mudra) but I didn’t understand why this “normal” person was doing something so strange.

In the days to follow, my respect for my coach led me to start considering that there might be something to this meditation thing – and thus began my first explorations of a meditation practice. I remember sitting at home on my couch trying to quiet my mind completely, but it didn’t take long for me to determine that I could not meditate. My mind wasn’t even close to quiet. I was lucky if I went five seconds without a thought!

Many years later, I have learned that I was more than capable of meditating at that time. Meditation is not about stopping thoughts or completely clearing the mind, nor is it a strange esoteric exercise. Rather, meditation is a practice of noticing when your thoughts wander, and committing to bringing them back to your focus. The focus of a meditation practice could be your breath or your body, a posture, a mantra, or a form of music or art. Whatever your focus of choice, having thoughts does not mean you can’t meditate – or that you are bad at meditation. Thoughts simply present the opportunity to continue to practice.

I find it helpful to imagine that the mind is like a little puppy. It is excitable and distractible and eager to be a part of everything. The mind solves problems. It analyzes, assesses and judges. It remembers and reminds. But sometimes it also broods, fixates and catastrophizes. It means well, but sometimes it pees on the carpet.

When we practice meditation, we are training our mind just like we would train a puppy. We learn to recognize that many of our thoughts don’t serve us and we train and empower ourselves to move away from those thoughts. While scientific studies continue to provide an increasing amount of evidence for the benefits of a meditation practice (including improved memory and concentration, stress-reduction, relief from chronic pain, relaxation, and an increase in qualities such as love and empathy), one of the greatest benefits I have experienced through meditation is a freedom from thought. I’ve learned to recognize how and when my thoughts are perpetuating negative feelings, and that I have the choice – and the ability – to move away from those thoughts. I still feel those challenging emotions, but I am less likely to unintentionally magnify them. Simply put, I am less likely to make things harder on myself.

Practicing meditation has been a source of ease in my life, and with that experience, it has shifted from something I once thought was strange to something I consider to be incredibly practical and empowering.

Photo credit: Chris Yakimov, www.doucy.net

Post originally written for YYoga blog - http://yyoga.ca/blog/committing-to-freedom/

My early encounters with the practice of yoga seemed to pour ease into my body, mind and heart. As I fell in love with the practice, an important lesson I was lucky to be taught is that yoga doesn’t “fix” our lives. Yoga doesn’t remove adversity and hardship from our path.

No matter how much yoga you or I do, we are human, and we will still feel loss, grief, heartache, anxiety, depression, fear, shame, anger and loneliness. And some days we will feel these emotions intensely enough that we may start to lose faith in the ways that our practice supports our lives. Maybe we start to consider that yoga isn’t working for us anymore. But these days of doubt are the days we need our practice the most.

In the classical Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali offers five observances to bring more ease and joy into our lives. Tapas, the third of these observances, is often translated as fierce discipline, but teacher Judith Lasater shares an interpretation that resonates more with me. She translates tapas as “consistency in striving toward your goals: getting on the yoga mat every day, sitting on the meditation cushion every day—or forgiving your mate or your child for the 10,000th time.”

I used to fear that routines and commitment would make me feel trapped and tied down. I didn’t want to structure my life because I wanted the freedom to creatively shape each moment as I lived it. But as my practice shifted to incorporate the consistency of tapas, so too did my sense of what it means to feel free.

I used to think freedom meant having the flexibility to do anything I wanted to do and, as a result, not knowing what the days and weeks in front of me were going to hold. Through practicing tapas, I discovered that freedom may not mean having all the choice in the world. Instead, it might mean not having to bear the burden of all those choices.

Am I going to practice or meditate today? Or go to the gym? What am I going to eat for dinner? Would this intriguing stranger make a better partner than my current one?

The mind becomes quieter with the decision already made. I have a daily practice that is sustainable through sickness and health, and I never have to spend an ounce of energy debating “Am I going to do my practice today?”

Starting to practice yoga changed my life. Adding the consistency of tapas brought an unexpected dose of ease. It taught me to appreciate the freedom that commitment can bring.

If you are interested in reading it, please follow this link: 5 Things I’ve Learned from Restorative Yoga