BALANCE ON AND OFF THE MAT – Today’s class is a a culmination of our eagle flow, balancing poses, and a meditation on how to honor our values.
“You are wrapped in endless, boundless, grace — there is more to you than yesterday.” -morgan harper nichols
STABILITY & FLUIDITY: A standing balancing flow with guided meditation, warrior 3, half moon, and tree pose.
PLAYFUL BALANCE: Today we play with half moon prep in many variations. We start with a standing balancing flow pause for a guided meditation, and end with another flow — all to help find balance in body, mind, and heart.
FIRMNESS & FLUIDITY: A full body balancing flow including core strengthening planks, mountain pose, and tree pose.
Finding balance on and off the mat – today we learn to listen to our values and explore mountain pose and tree post within a psoas stretch flow.
“How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled…”
—MARY OLIVER
Today we round out our theme of embrace for the month. Using blocks for support, we experience familiar poses in new ways while trying to soften the harder edges of the places we tend to hold our lives so tightly. Take the recorded class for free at morningdharma.com
“You can learn more in an hour of silence than you can in a year from books.”—MATTHEW KELLY
As an avid reader and lover of learning new things, this quote gave definitely gave me pause — it’s a perfect reminder to come back to ourselves in a place of stillness and quiet to listen for whatever wisdom may emerge. Today’s practice includes a leg-focused flow using blocks to explore basic poses in a new way and two opportunities to sit in stillness.
It is often described that our sympathetic nerve responses of fight, flight, or freeze can be attributed to our ancestors needs to quickly determine whether or not there is a threa – to save themselves from being eaten by a tiger. Today, most of us are not worried about tigers but our sympathetic nervous system still responds to daily stresses as though the threat is real. Our brains can not tell the difference between perceived threat and a real threat. Using the mantra “there is no tiger” can often be helpful to remind our body that a stressful work or family situation may be uncomfortable but it is not as dire as having to flee or fight a tiger. In today’s practice, we embrace BEING the tiger with a tiger series of poses and a contemplative meditation.
“You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.” — Rumi
While it’s important to remember the interconnectedness of all beings, sometimes feeling the ‘entire ocean’ can be a bit much. Today we learn to use body awareness to drop into the space of right now, a place where we can feel safe and nurtured, a place away from fear, sadness, shame, anxiety…we also move through poses to release tension in our hips and backs – two places where we often tend to hold our emotions.
The art of happiness is also the art of knowing how to suffer well.
The suffering of each of us affects us all. When we are able to come into mindfulness, we can ease into that suffering without being overwhelmed. We can embrace it in the present moment and then begin to transform it. Today’s we continue from Tuesday’s class with a meditation practice transforming dark into light and a warrior flow that culminates in warrior 3 and half moon.