Yoga Inside Out, Sarah D. Meredith, RYT

Information may not be reliable

MAT CLASS Thursday Nov. 18th @6-7PM
CHAIR CLASSES Thursday Nov.4th @1-2 PM & Wednesday Nov.17th @5-6PM

UPCOMING: Arthritis Foundation Tai Chi for Arthritis Program
January 6, 2010, Interfaith Medical Center - Details to come!
Registration Required, 8 weeks, 1-hour sessions

Back Road Farmhouse Yoga Spring & Summer Weekends in Gilboa, NY
Check Back for Details & Email Sarah with Questions

Explore your full range of motion and stillness and find true freedom.

Recent Topics Include:
•At the Beginning - Give it a Minute •No Posturing-Just Experiences •Ease Up •Mass is just form of energy •Ego & Body: Less Ego, More Breath •Taking Each Chord & Playing the Possibilities •Bring Body & Mind to Class & Find Your Practice •Looking for Answers •Walking Is Walking •Intentions & Actions •Bones •Just Noticing, Just Being, Just Doing •Wake It Up •It's Not Broken, It's Just Asking for Attention •Choosing Awareness & Finding Ease •Props & Then Some •One thing leads to another - Yamas & Niyamas •No measuring stick for a vital life •Passing through Warrior •Meditating & the Arc of Emotion •Yoga using the Body • Attachment to What Is? or Not? • Time to Absorb • Setting Fear Aside * Tapas-the Niyama of Heat, Cleansing & Discipline * As the Sea to the Shore Love Is * We Are Not All Monks • Boiling the Water • Investigate the Structure that is You * Breathing In a Large Body * Yoga & Weathering the Storms of Suffering * Connecting in the Dark * On the Mat As It Is In Life * Going Deep - the Exploration * Standing the World on Its Head – Mine * Limitations = Stories We Tell Ourselves * Accepting Not Knowing * Words, Meanings & Silence - Pause Mode/Talk Mode * Everything Co-Arising In This Moment * Paying Attention to Suffering

Yoga is an essential inquiry that brings you into the present moment, allowing you to focus your attention and cultivate awareness. Amazingly this path leads to infinite transformations. I enjoy offering yoga as a way of enabling people to experience themselves as they are with compassion, and encouraging their journey towards radical self acceptance (the core of Kripalu yoga). Using asana, alignment principles, meditation, pranayama, vinyasa flow, exploration of various texts (including poetry, sutras, etc.), props, mats, chair yoga techniques, mudra and chants, I offer yoga that allows freedom from mental chatter and physical pain. My yoga sessions encourage healing and reduced stress, thus opening possibilities for a deep sense of wellbeing, engagement and fulfillment. I believe this is available to each person who has the courage to practice yoga, at any age or at any point in one’s life history. It is a privilege for me to teach yoga, making this experience accessible.

WORKSHOP: DEVELOP & DEEPEN HOME PRACTICE
Dec. 19, 3-5pm, $20, details & RSVP: contact@shambhalayogadance.com

It is no surprise that sitting on a yoga mat can be much more than a physical experience. Discovering that your neck is stiff, or that one hip is crankier than the other is one way of getting to know yourself with more honesty and attention than usual, but something else happens too. The stillness we allow on the mat in order to pay attention to that hip is often uncomfortable in and of itself. In that space, with attention focused on breathing, we begin to see ourselves in vast and discrete ways simultaneously. All the efforting to adjust the hips, the stream of judgments about the tensions in the breath, the constant remembering to release the seemingly continuous tightening of the neck muscles and the realization that attention has wandered yet again to the person next to us... provides an unfiltered experience of our own being.
So much energy goes into making ourselves over, wishing we were different than we are, covering, editing or erasing parts of ourselves we don't like or can't figure out. This way of operating creates layers and patterns, puts some of our most authentic qualities and understandings out of reach, and makes it hard to connect deeply and honestly to other people. So often even in intimate relationships there is a sense of not being known, or of disbelief when it comes to accepting appreciation or love. If we can not see and accept ourselves, we cannot believe anyone else can know or love that self either. Often our self acceptance is with reservations and exclusionary clauses that we have come to consider part of the self.
There is something uncanny, magical and simple about training our attention on the breath. When we soften our physical effort around the breath, we set aside some of the basic resistance to being who we are. Not concerned with what our faces are doing, letting go of preconceived ideas of what that hip can or cannot do, we can approach our own inhaling and exhaling with curiosity. We develop more acute observational skills as we discover things about its texture or length, seeing the variety of efforts we make to control or direct it, and accepting quite basically that it is just what it is and that the breath, as itself, can be trusted. Trusting the breath is a profound step towards accepting oneself and finding a safe space, in some ways a very sacred space, in which to explore just being.
We find that there is no need to judge our breathing. Letting that idea permeate us for even a moment makes space to let go of judging ourselves generally. Curiosity about the breath leads to a genuine awakening of curiosity about the self: exactly how is this rib cage situated around the inhale, moving on the exhale, releasing and empowering a sense of being. Centering attention, maintaining focus without judging, directly nurtures a sense of well-being. It is remarkable to discover that we, along with every other living being, are breathing and being in each moment. We make space for ourselves on the mat and this space goes with us off the mat. If we open to finding ourselves as we are - breathing, being, curious and whole - we have the ultimate freedom to accept ourselves (and others) as worthy of happiness in all its forms. Without judgment and with awareness, we no longer need to manipulate ourselves into being worthy, we find that we are naturally worthy of being.

This 2-hour participatory workshop will reveal and explore that which you already know about your own practice, provide several structural frameworks to help guide and steer your practice, and introduce encouraging strategies that will support your on-going commitment. Participants will experience their inner teacher with a short self-guided practice, learn about asana sequencing, and with materials for reference, take home an active yoga inquiry.

The teacher lives within you, the support of the breath is already there, and allowing yourself to listen, explore and be aware is truly possible even in the busiest of schedules. This workshop will help develop a home practice, deepen every class you take, and help bring a cultivated awareness more fully into your daily life. Resource materials & reading list are provided.

Space is limited, so RSVP to reserve your seat. Contact@shambhalayogadance.com Fee: $20 with reservation; $25 drop-in if space permits. Mats, blocks, blankets are available, but feel free to bring your own. There will be some active yoga practice.

3-5pm, Sunday, December 19, 2010, Shambhala Yoga & Dance Center, 348 St. Mark's Avenue (@Washington Street), Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (shambhalayogadance.com for directions and more information about the full schedule of classes available)

Yoga practice is for every body, mind and heart, as long as there is breath.

We are not all monks...
Can a person who has children, a job or two, health issues, an erratic schedule, or any other kind of routine actually develop a regular practice or even begin to include a truly deep inquiry into their life without feeling always there is not enough time and they never know enough? How does yoga fit into a regular life?

The basic principles underlying yoga are the Eight Limbs spelled out in Patanjali's Sutras, but even if you have never seen that, or heard of that before, they will help you integrate yoga into your life. They are simple, like doing no harm, or releasing judgmental mind and attachment through not grasping at that which is not yours. Perhaps when you see things as they truly are you will understand that your practice accepts you just as you are too.

Here's what I mean. You can only get to yoga class once a week. Is that a yoga practice? Yes. You carve out fifteen minutes a day to do some stretching you remember from class, and before you go to bed you spend five minutes in quiet sitting, to still yourself and refresh yourself for the night. Is that a yoga practice? Yes. Maybe you try to get to class two or three times a week and then don't go for a month and half. Is that a yoga practice? Well, you tell me. Do you bring your awareness to your breath while you wait for the subway in the morning? Do you center your weight over your feet and release your spine to rise, relaxing your shoulders, your jaw, your eyeballs while you wait for the elevator? Do you look at your neighbor and their children with open minded compassion as they try to resolve conflicts, without thinking judgmentally about them? Then yes, that is a yoga practice.

Yoga is not a mat-based activity. The yoga mat and the asana practices are one part, one way in. The practice offers insights and ways of being present that have no boundaries about bodies and mats, about inversions or even pranayama (breathing practices). All of that helps cultivate your awareness so that you can have a yoga practice throughout your days and hours, with or without a yoga mat handy. Does that mean that you can quit setting aside time for classes and asana, for meditation and a direct focus on the inquiry? No, I don't think so. But it helps deepen your understanding of the practice if you can let it slip off the mat and still recognize it.