Perspective

Now is the time for yoga!

Now is the time for relief, healing, fun & variety! This practice is about learning to or remembering that we always have the option to change our perspective. We can’t always change our circumstances, or the people around us :) . . . . but we can change ourselves and our perspective.

Sometimes a new perspective just requires a shift of “the way” we go about the things we do. If you turn a little in a room and look around, every light and shadow changes. The tiniest shift in our perspective can change what we’re able to see, what we’re able to infer and what we’re able to offer.

In the yoga practice, we did a variety of poses, including inversions. Down dog and forward fold are inversions plus we had some free time to explore an inversion of our choice. Anytime we go upside down it shifts our perspective. It changes us and gives us new information.

We tried to extract more subtlety and notice more details while we practiced. This can help off the mat, too, while we shelter in place. Just changing rooms, noticing nature, and other shifts in your day can give much needed variety when our activities are limited. Take shelter in your practice, call in good vibrations, and allow your breath to support you.

Our practice had us pivoting and mixing up the order of some sequences to bring in that relief, that healing, that lightheartedness. Thank you so much for joining Mikayla and me on this journey. See you live on Tuesday.

The light in me sees the light in you, Lynn

One Belief

I am dancer pose. A bit wobbly, strong, vulnerable, joyful. Today I sit, I learn, I buy magazines. The dogwood and blossom trees look like fresh snow sprinkled on our healing earth.

Mother Earth said stop. We are standing still. We are listening to the news, to each other, too our hearts. We are bonded on a worldwide scale. Everyone equal. Yet, we can still feel magic, mystery, hope. Our belly rumbles with laugher. Our eyes wet with tears. Babies are born. Grandparents are born.

We eat new foods. We walk in the middle of the street. We go without. We play drinking games with our college kids :)

We use very little toilet paper. We sleep in. We’re tired; we each carry a heavy weight. But we can put that weight down. Put that weight down. Ahh, that’s nice. Set it in the corner or the closet. Step over here. Lift your arms overhead and see the blue sky peeking out from the clouds.

We FaceTime. We Zoom. We listen to online lectures and take live streaming yoga classes …. hopefully mine :)

All our movement, all our stillness collected into one big bow to the medical workers, the grocery store clerks, the UPS drivers and all those restaurants delivering our food.

One big bow.

Last week we picked one belief about ourselves, and started that sentence with “I am _____”. Whether it was something you’d ever said about yourself or not, we each picked a word to inspire or support ourselves in someway. What we say to ourselves starts to become our reality. I picked the work “free” and Mikayla, my daughter and assistant that you see in the live streaming classes, picked the work “calm”.

With so much breath, we created a place of hope, inspiration and possibility. And with side crow as our apex pose, we needed it! In addition to the mantra, I invited students to picture inside their chest a bright, strong, glowing flame. And to feel that this flame of bravery or freedom or calm (interject your word) is stronger than any fear you may have. So we combined belief and playfulness and discipline into the yoga accompanied by our mantra and our flame!

We gave our hips some extra love and attention today, added some core throughout, and had time at the end to unmute and say Hi. From my heart to your heart, Lynn

My Book List (reposting)

I’m reposting my book list. Thought you might be craving some reading material during Shelter-in-Place. Miss you guys! Still visualizing that great day when we’re together in the yoga room again.

Yoga Books I recommend

1.  "Hatha Yoga Illustrated" by Martin Kirk and Brooke Boon

This is my favorite yoga book & the first one I recommend to students. The authors are trained in Anusara, which is the method I was trained in. It has great pics and explanations of mental and physical benefits, contraindications, modifications, etc.

The rest of these books are a smattering that I have enjoyed over the years. Recently in my blog I reviewed a book I loved called, “How Yoga Works” by Geshe Michael Roach. I also highly recommend that book.

2.  "An Ordinary Life Transformed" by Rev. Stephanie Rutt

3. "The Gift", poems by Hafiz     Translations by Daniel Ladinsky

4.  "Yoga for Anxiety"  by Mary & Rick Nurrie Stearms

5.  "Light on Life",  "Light on Yoga" and "The Tree of Yoga"  by B.K.S. Iyengar

6.  "Autobiography of a Yogi"  by Paramhansa Yogananda

7.  "Easter Body, Western Mind"  by Anodea Judith

8.  "Ayurveda:  A Life of Balance"  by Maya Tiwari

9.  "Yoga as Medicine"  by Timothy McCall, M.D.

 10.  "Yoga Beyond Belief"  by Ganga White

11.  "Myths of the Asanas"  by Alanna Kaivalya & Arjuna van der Kooij

12.  "Yoga from the Inside Out" & "My Body is a Temple" by Christina Sell  

13.  "Nourishing the Teacher"  by Danny Arguetty

14.  "A Year of Living your Yoga" by Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D., P.T.

15.  "The Four Desires" by Rod Stryker

16.  "Meditation for the Love of it"  & "Awakening Shakti" by Sally Kempton

17.  "The Art of Attention" by Elena Brower & Erica Jago  

18.  "Plus One:  Finding God on the Yoga Mat"  by Cori Martinez

19.  "Tantra Illuminated" by Christopher D. Wallis

20.  "Health, Healing, and Beyond"  by T.K.V. Desikachar

Soft heart, Strong body

If we can shed the outer tension and tightness we hold, we are in a better place to hear and attend to our inner needs. Then maybe we can be a little more compassionate to ourselves during this trying time.

Through yoga, we create a strong & clear vessel for an increasingly softer and more open-hearted interior experience We live and move with “a heart attuned”. Breath by breath, layer by layer, the poses present a unique opportunity to release tension from the body and mind. And that ease can show up in how you treat yourself. Then there is space for other things.

I encouraged students to give themselves permission to be creative, to create the practice they needed. We kept coming back to feeling our entire perimeter alive and strong and clear, so we could stand strong and listen softly. Allowing every posture to be an offering to the body, to healing.

The process is to create a feeling of strength and stability in your vessel and get to the place where you can just listen to yourself breathe. Let the breath help you. Let your heart goes out to yourself and find yourself kinder and more forgiving toward yourself.

Unroll your mat (or just set up in your family room or office). We must be creative during Shelter in Place :) Warm up with cat-cow, dog-plank, half salutations. Feel your long spine. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel where the breath strikes the inner body. Connect to that thing that feeds you, that inspires you. You are on your way.

From my heart to your heart, Lynn

Self-Love

My doggie, Spirit, and I say hi :)

Hello out there. Sending hugs your way. Really miss each of you and sharing class together! Last week I taught a Zoom live streaming class at Studio Rincon. I’ll teach another one this upcoming Tuesday (March 24). See their site if you’d like to sign up: www.studiorincon.com They send you a code 15 minutes before the class.

Thinking of you guys. Hope you are finding ways to take care of yourselves and stay sane :) My class this week was themed: “self-love”. I hope some of the ideas are helpful. Reach out to say hi if you’d like. My email: lynn@marrin.com

It’s an act of self-love to honor the time and effort it takes to get on the mat and connect more deeply with yourself. It’s easy to get frustrated with what’s not going well. Whether it’s injuries or the state of the world right now. I sympathize. I’m struggling with the isolation and low grade anxiety. Some days have been better than others. I keep learning what helps, but somedays I’ve had real trouble concentrating and relaxing. Anything that provides variety has helped me. So I toggle between reading, yoga, listening to music, watching a show with interaction like Oprah’s bookclub on Apple TV+, and even just changing rooms. Plus getting outside for a little gardening or a walk or run can really help. I find the fresh air, the sun, the general sounds of nature to clear my head.

Back to the theme :) So lets try to keep coming back to what IS going right ….. the goodness, the love, the brightness, the yoga, the online communities and having hope, and feeding off of that! Winston Churchill said, “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

As we practiced, we tried to drop the mind into the quiet, open spaces in the body. We tried to feel that we were being guided by our body’s feedback and by our breath. It was a well rounded practice. We did twists to massage the organs so they work more efficiently. We rose into half moon pose and extended energy out in all directions, then we contained that energy back in, pulling all that goodness back in. Anahata opened our heart and chest to take in more goodness. We laughed our way through 3 rounds of chair to boat as we strengthened our core and quads. In our final seat, with hands over our heart, we honored this pocket of time that each of us carved out for ourselves, for replenishing so we stay healthy and strong, sound in body and mind. Namaste, Lynn