Categories
Healthy Living

I don’t get bored.

– Haruki Murakami

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Missing my super early morning ritual of quiet reflection to prepare for a class, affects the class outcome – obviously. Teachers take sabbaticals because unless the class is continually progressive, it can get boring – less so for the students as they are embodying the experience, the sensation – but not the teachers -and so they themselves need to refresh. After a blank period and getting over the holiday vacation haze, I felt I was on auto-pilot – and one student reminded me how much she liked what I “used to do”. It’s true I had not incorporated more of what I know and stuck with what’s simply comfortable. Maybe I got a little complacent…

It will be different next week – why? Because I have now set an intention. Pressed the “refresh” button for the new year:) Students hold the mirror. Not the studio walls (and this place, there’s no escaping it with 3 out of 4 sides covered …:). Thank you for reminding me what it is about my class that keeps you coming, N – that expectation. I had forgotten it momentarily. I will share more and hold back less. It’s just a practice. We are not trying to prove anything.

practice is about repetition – repeating over and over – I don’t get bored either. New ideas and discoveries. New Year … renewed resolve … repetition is not boring. unimaginative mind is.

zennishstonesFinding that “balance”…while we are at it.

Categories
Beautiful People Healthy Food

Michio Kushi

Quoting Michio Kushi:

“Yoga breathing control is practiced to influence our thinking. The lungs correspond to our fore brain and can influence our consciousness.”


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“As you know macrobiotics has helped thousands of sick people; but this is kindergarten. The purpose of macrobiotics is to become free to change all of this world into what we want – unhappiness to happiness, sickness to health, war to peace, misery to love. When you attain this freedom you become the children of the Kingdom of Heaven.”


New York Times coverage on the passing of Michio Kushi is linked – Click Here.
Please rest in peace… Hope to be learning from some of your students.

We all have to die physically some day of something & since I am putting away Haruki Murakami books into storage, this Murakami quote seems appropriate:

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”

Sad, yes, but he lives on & I love the way he is remembered – His words quoted from his memorial page is so touching. Click here.

Categories
Yoga

Richard Rosen & “shava”:)

Richard Rosen on his humble and humorous beginning…

I taught the first class on Monday, March 15, 1987. I had two students, which was double the number I had for the second class. Since then by my rough estimate I’ve taught over 6500 public classes at PYS.

When we started the school back in 1987, none of us really thought we could make a living teaching yoga. But we agreed that we would do everything we could to make yoga enjoyable and accessible to as many people as possible.

We’ve always prided ourselves on being a little bit different than other yoga schools,… over the years we’ve hosted classes for disabled students, cancer survivors, people with Parkinson’s, seniors, toddlers, and teens, for people with back problems. We’ve supported low fee community classes, a training program for disabled students to become teachers themselves, and of course our own teacher training program has launched the careers of any number of current teachers here and around the country.

Richard Rosen on his favorite pose:

“Many years ago when I first began yoga practice in the early 1980s, my least favorite yoga pose was shavasana, usually interpreted as the Corpse Pose. I couldn’t see the point of lying around and doing nothing, it seemed a huge waste of time. But I think now the real reason I objected to it ​was that it made me feel very nervous, vulnerable, after a vigorous asana practice my inner life was too exposed and I wasn’t ready to look at it that closely. But now, that’s all changed and shava is by far my favorite pose. Shava is a retreat and a refuge, an essential daily “time out,” when I give myself the permission to “do nothing,” figuratively and literally, which is of course the ultimate yoga practice.”

Lump in the throat – Just sheer respect.