In November 2020, in preparation for her January 2021 workshop in Auckland, Donna Farhi and I talked about resilience. We share the highlights of this interview below in a few shorter extracts.
What is resilience?
Resilience, self-love and care
Resilience and vulnerability
Resilience tools
We hope you enjoy listening to and practicing this iRest Meditation on Kindness.
For many years, simple yet meaningful Kindness has been completely central to my Yoga practice and my life. It has been at the very heart of my practice, guiding me in my Yoga practice and teaching, and in how I live with my family and friends and community.
Kindness has so many facets – generosity, love, friendship, healthy boundaries and much more. It is the great connector. It is what will help us survive and what will help us thrive … and ultimately, it is who we are.
From August to October, over eight 3-hour sessions, every Wednesday evening, including a day retreat, I attended a course on Mindful Self-Compassion, led by Mara Elwood.
This is a review of the course. And let me say right up front that I absolutely loved the course – all the material and the skilled, compassionate facilitation from Mara too.
Surfing the web for inspiration? Here are our favourite online websites, resources and teachings and we hope you may enjoy them too…
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 …
This morning a poem arrived …
In my childhood somebody suggested,
“Just be yourself.”
What a wonderful notion!
But what did it mean?
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.
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).
