Your Shining Vulnerability
Last month I attended a wonderful seven day iRest Yoga Nidra retreat in Melbourne with Anne Douglas and Fuyuko Toyota. They are such wonderful teachers indeed – a beautiful experience. About half way through there was rich discussion on being vulnerable …
The Ayur Mantra
On a recent Yoga intensive with Donna Farhi, she taught us a beautiful chant, the Ayur Mantra. This is a mantra for health and nourishment. It can also be practiced with the ancient art of nyasa, a type of mudra practice, where the placing of the mantra on or around the body is said to be beneficial to the nourishment and protection of the psyche.
Each line from The Ayur Mantra maybe accompanied by a Mudra. Donna recently posted this video on YouTube – a great chant to learn …
PRESS RELEASE: Introducing Our New Yoga Teacher Training
Four highly experienced yoga teachers have joined together to create the Centre for Contemporary Yoga Studies, based in Remuera. With over 80 years of yoga practice and teaching experience between them, Dyana, Karla, Neal and Vincent co-founded the centre with one key...
Donna Farhi on Yoga Nidra
From our Yoga teacher, Donna Farhi …”Recently I taught a weekend workshop on the practice of Yoga Nidra in Hobart, Tasmania. After reading the evaluations from the fifty people who attended, I was struck by how many of the participants commented on their...
The Pilgrimage To My Self
This morning a poem arrived …
In my childhood somebody suggested,
“Just be yourself.”
What a wonderful notion!
But what did it mean?
What Moves You? A cute little video
I recently came across this cute little video … it beautifully touches on what may be our original motivations for moving out into the world. The beginnings of our movement intelligence may be traced back to our time spent in the womb and our first years post...I breathe In
This wonderful poem by Anne Powell was recently shown to me by a lovely Yoga student. Feels good to share it. Enjoy! I breathe inI am landI breath outI am listening I breathe inI am riverI breath outI am flowing I breathe inI am kauriI breath outI am strong I breathe...
The Eight Essentials of Restorative Yoga
A few years ago I enrolled on my second Yoga Teacher Training course for a year at the Yoga Academy Auckland – I was on a mission to learn more about this practice and to equip myself with as much knowledge as I could. If I was going to teach Yoga, then I wanted...
A Year of Yoga
Last year I taught a lot of Yoga! So much so that by November I was rather tired, exhausted even. I found that I was way out of balance, working late to keep up with the workload, waking up early when our daughter Tula wakes up. The sleep deprivation was certainly not helping re-gain my vitality.
I felt that my regular classes on Waiheke were suffering somewhat from my tiredness.
I turned up to each class of course but often with only a vague idea of what I would teach. Part of this was actually useful and interesting … how do I teach when I’m under this amount of pressure? Can I improvise class after class?
It was in fact engaging simply to turn up to class and meet whoever walked through the classroom door, and create on-the-fly classes and sequences geared right to these students exactly as they were in that moment.
Moving Towards Our True Nature
I have been studying the the iRest approach to Yoga Nidra recently and in the teaching manual, founder and teacher Richard Miller talks about the qualities of our true nature:
Loving, Kindness, Presence, Unconditional, Peaceful, Friendliness, Unattached, Happy, Joyfulness, Faith, Trusting, Transparency, Mindfulness, Responsive, Purity, Truthfulness, Contentment, Luminous, Powerful, Knowing, Full, Empty, Tender, Spontaneous, Authentic, Creative, Intimate, Complete, Aware (and more).