Holiday Forrest Yoga & Yin Yoga Retreat in Paradise, Costa Rica!

I’m thrilled to be leading another retreat at Anamaya Resort in beautiful Montezuma, Costa Rica from Dec. 19-26, 2015. How special to be teaching over Christmas week! I am honored to be spending my holidays with the beautiful people and guests of Anamaya and invite you to join us for week of magic, play, rejuvenation, growth, community, kindness, friendship, and fun! What a better way to end your year than in the paradise setting of Anamaya.

This week I will be teaching my two passions, Forrest Yoga and Yin Yoga! We’ll have energizing, strength-building, and healing Forrest Yoga-inspired Vinyasa classes in the morning, and meditative, healing, grounding Yin Yoga practices at night. There will be meditation offered both morning and evening and a workshop on “Unlocking the Gates,” a revitalizing and prana-moving Forrest Yoga workshop to open the hips, quads, and groins. Ooooh!

Anamaya Resort is a top notch destination featuring incredible views of the Pacific Ocean and Costa Rican cloud forest canopy. Located just above the canopy, the location of Anamaya offers unparalleled views of the coastline, flora, fauna, and our resident animal friends, the howler monkeys, iguanas, birds of prey, and many other incredible species, all right there in front of your eyes. There is an ozonated pool (no chlorine here!), an infrared sauna, hammocks and chaises for napping, and 3 meals daily of the cleanest, freshest, most high-vibe organic food you’ve ever had. I always leave Anamaya inspired to revamp my own meal plan! Anamaya also has a world-class spa for facials, massage, and other mind-body wellness treatments. And the grounds of Anamaya are an epiphany of how we can live in balance with our natural surroundings.

Packages start at $1500 all inclusive for an incredible week in one of the most magical locations on planet earth. Please message me with any questions about this incredible yoga retreat in Costa Rica during the holidays.

http://www.anamayaresort.com/holiday-yoga-retreat/

Forrest Yoga Suns & Sun “B Series”

Here’s a little video I shot the other day at Yoga in the Heights, Jersey City, NJ before teaching. I teach Forrest Yoga at Yoga in the Heights Mondays & Wednesdays at 7:45pm and Saturdays at 9:15am.

Connect To Your Core: Core Anatomy, Integration, and Application

In Forrest Yoga, we do core work. If you’ve never encountered this in a yoga class before, your first thought might be WHY? A strong core is incredibly important. In our modern day, “weakness” comes not just from lack of tone, but also from too much tone, or tightness. Sitting at a desk all day confers both lack of tone in some parts (lower back, pelvic floor) and too much tone in others (psoas, rhomboids). In Forrest Yoga, core work builds tone and connection where it is lacking, and releases tension where hyper-tonicity is adding to weakness and disconnect.

Our core muscles protect the bones and organs of our trunk, hold our organs in our abdominal cavity, and connect our trunk to our legs. A healthy toned core, one that is neither flaccid nor rigid, provides the best support for our vital organs, and in particular our guts. It’s a new way of thinking that “toned core” means “healthy guts” more than “six-pack abs,” but this is what Forrest Yoga does: takes you far deeper into understanding your body, and also helps dismantle a lot of popular, but erroneous, ideas.

In this two-hour workshop, we’ll review the basic anatomy of the core, in particular the muscles most commonly used in our basic core moves. I’ll explain what the muscles do, then you’ll experience that (integrate the information) by doing the poses yourself. For regular practitioners, you’ll get a new level of detail in understanding your core work poses. For new folks to Forrest Yoga, you’ll get a crash course in knowing how this part of your body works. Doing the poses following the anatomy part of the workshop should help everyone feel more educated and aware about this part of our body that for many of us, is an area we’d rather not think about, or don’t really understand well.

Once we’ve talked about and experienced our core muscles, we’ll put it all together into a back-bending class (yup, you use you core in that too and the more intelligent you are about the application of your core muscles in back-bending, the more pleasure and the more results you’ll receive from your back-bending practice). You’ll feel the support of your core from, as Ana Forrest likes to say “crotch to crown” and that’s pretty exciting. My experience of core work is that it makes me feel really connected, really powerful, sexier, and more alive.

I hope you will join us on Friday, May 15th from 7-9pm at Yoga in the Heights, 317 Central Ave., in Jersey City, NJ. www.jcheightsyoga.com

Beauty Report: Paramahansa Yogananda Awake Documentary Awakens Me

Paramahansa Yogananda

Last week I went to see AWAKE: The Life of Yogananda, a documentary about the life of Paramahansa Yogananda. Yogananda gave the world Autobiography of a Yogi and dozens of other books, the Self-Realization Fellowship, kriya yoga meditation, and a wealth of teachings on how to live a divine life.

I’d been feeling very disconnected the last few months, over-worked, over-burdened, and tired. I felt my spiritual practice had plateaued. Watching Awake I was reminded of my love for God and how Yogananda, and millions of others, have made the choice to serve God the central theme or purpose of their lives. The fullness of my heart in the closing credits brought tears to my eyes. These were not tears of sadness, but of a longing for God, for the feeling of being one with the Divine, with the energy of creation, with the supreme intelligence that knits together our universe and beyond.

I finished reading Ana Forrest’s Fierce Medicine for the second time for my Forrest Yoga Mentorship homework, and between that book and seeing Awake, I have begun speaking to God as I know him/her/it once again. But, as I approached it this time around, I had to re-think what exactly I do believe. I wondered why my faith wavered so much, why I couldn’t really zero in on a way to STAY connected to God. I knew that part of it was due to my mind and my heart being on opposing sides of the debate.

I have a conflict. My cynical and habitual thinking mind questions the concept of divinity or a positive, loving force in the universe. In my darkest moments, I feel adrift, a boat on a chaotic sea that is totally random in its movements and machinations. Thriving in this random universe is a combination of luck and wits and it is exhausting. But seeing Awake reminded me of how I FEEL, which is knowing I have touched the vastness and beauty of God as manifest in our physical world, in periods of meditation, the practice of yoga, sex, love, being in nature, or playing music.

With this reminder that I do love God and know God, and that I know this through a feeling sense, I was able to return, with faith, to speaking to God, which Yogananda oft repeated to his devotees: in meditation, they should repeat over and over again “reveal thyself!” and to the true disciple, God will. Then I had to find a way to speak to God that felt authentic to me. Drawing from Ana Forrest’s work, I found the way I could commune. Oh Great Spirit That Moves in All Things…

And so began a ritual of prayer, a ritual that I have abandoned in the last strange year of my life, and one that has never really stuck with me as much as I liked the idea of it. The last year has seen me leave 20+ years of corporate life for life as a self-employed yoga teacher; return to an abandoned relationship and the healing and growth therein; review who I am and what I truly need and what I’m here for. In prayer, I ask the Great Spirit to give me the strength to persevere and not fall to the pressures of city living, money, confusion, fatigue, and day-to-day relationship struggles, to infuse me with patience and gratitude, and to have the strength to see the good in my life and to keep going.

It was a Beauty Moment that I took myself to see this documentary. I haven’t really been attending to my needs well, to romancing my spirit, as Ana would say. The last year has been all about working and making sure the bills are paid, about deep inner work in terms of my training as a yoga teacher and within my primary partnership. It has been a more difficult year emotionally than I’ve had in a long time. It was Beauty that I took myself to see this and got a small bit of an answer that I am seeking. A-ho!

Beauty Report: The beach and being in the present moment

My partner and I went to the beach on Monday. Being at the beach erases all troubles and allows us to be our most natural selves. When we’re at the beach, everything is ok. The sound of the waves caressing the shore lulls me to sleep. We soak in the rays of the sun, build sandcastles, watch seagulls. In this moment, life is perfect and beautiful. As we live only in the present moment, let me rephrase that to say…life is perfect and beautiful.

There is nothing like being in nature to reconnect us to Beauty. Nature soothes. Without distractions of phones, computers, traffic, noises, advertisements, or schedules, we can simply experience ourselves as human animal, primal, perfectly made for basking in the sun and playing in the waves. This is healing.

Beauty Reports are something we do in Forrest Yoga to acknowledge the overwhelming beauty of our lives, and to help us reconnect to our spirits, the things that feed us. A-ho.

 

Forrest Yoga Classes in New Jersey

I recently completed the 200-hour Forrest Yoga Foundations Teacher Training at Fresh Yoga in New Haven, CT with master teacher Ana Forrest. It was a life-changing experience.

Some of the many gifts I received from this training are:

• I got my personal yoga practice back. It’s not unusual to hear yoga teachers bemoaning the loss of their own personal practice. As of today, I have practiced yoga 31 days in a row. And I have no intention of turning back. One of the personal ethics I created for myself during the training was to practice a minimum of 6x/week for at least 30 minutes per day. So far, this ethic is guiding me into health, a sense of wholeness, and a sense of trust in myself that I have not felt for a very long time. My strength is growing by the day.
• My connection to breath has deepened exponentially. I have always felt a strong connection to breath and had a good intuitive understanding of how to teach breath. But since this training, my application of breath is becoming so much more skillful. I am better able to share this understanding with my students, and teach them in a practical way HOW TO USE BREATH FOR HEALING. This will revolutionize your yoga practice and your life.
• I realized through this training how I had a plethora of habits that were holding me down and dimming my light, as well as showing up as obstacles to moving forward in life with clarity and conviction. Social drinking and partying (I have been a DJ in the nightlife scene for 10+ years), mindless eating, even social media use suddenly revealed themselves as ways that I would distract myself from what was essential in my life at the moment and choose a behavior that took me away, that numbed me out. Getting clear about the myriad ways I was squandering my life energy made me see that all those things we take for granted as being normal, “let loose” or “have fun” type behaviors are actually hooks that drain our vitality. I have since reformed how and what I eat, and my tendency to casually use “party favors” (drugs & alcohol) in favor of clarity around how these actions keep me from feeling what I need to feel. The pull towards addiction or compulsion is insidious, and our modern culture accepts and even encourages our slavery to various forms of addiction, from shopping to gambling to online porn to recreational drugs to exercise. Getting clear about my tendency to fall into these traps and speak about it to anyone who will listen has been liberating.
• I have learned how to connect to my spirit by breathing well, finding beauty in the everyday, and speaking my truth from my heart. These concepts sound nice on paper, but applying them is ironically not as easy as it sounds. When our thoughts are poisoned by a steady stream of negative inner dialogue, our spirit is often in hiding or maybe even not in residence. If our spirit is our essential, truest self, the best version of ourselves, why would that best version of yourself hang out for the punishment most of us put it though on a daily basis? In Forrest Yoga, we learned to see ourselves as ENOUGH. I am enough. This is a radical concept because our culture is always telling us we are NOT enough, that we need one more degree, more money, less cellulite, more hair, more boobs, etc. to be worthy. This is the furthest thing from the truth because who we are is ONLY and EVER from our spirit, never from what we do, what we earn, what we learn or accomplish along the way. It is WHO WE ARE at the essential, spiritual level. Developing tools to help us connect with this essence of who we are is one of the most powerful and healing aspects of Forrest Yoga.

These four paragraphs above sum up the four pillars of Forrest Yoga: Breath, Strength, Integrity, and Embodying Spirit.

Forrest Yoga is a healing, therapeutic approach to yoga. It heals at the physical, emotional, and energetic level. I am so grateful that my spirit guided me to Forrest Yoga nearly four years ago. Before I was even ready to begin the healing I’m experiencing now, my spirit guided me in this direction. Healing is a process. We must have patience and put in the time to reap the rewards. The rewards are nothing less than a transformed life, freedom from addictive and compulsive behaviors, clarity about life and what we most want and need, letting go of our rackets (ritualized and rationalized behaviors designed to keep us from being present to what is actually happening in the moment) and life-zapping mental habits.

I am offering Forrest Yoga privately in Jersey City, NJ and New York City. If you are interested in private instruction in Forrest Yoga, or an inter-disciplinary approach utilizing the other styles of yoga that I teach, along with thai massage and shamanic reiki, please contact me.

 

Ana Forrest on Stalking Fear and Triggers

With thanks to Barbara Passy’s Vimeo account for the original videos

Ana Forrest: Fierce Medicine Reading and Workshop at Wind Horse, 2012 from barbara passy on Vimeo.

Ana Forrest : Fierce Medicine Reading at Wind Horse, 2012- Stalk Fear and Understand Triggers from barbara passy on Vimeo.

Reports from Wind Horse, the first Forrest Yoga conference

Forrest Yoga is about doing stuff like this. Although extremely challenging, it’s not about the pose. The pose is just the vehicle to help you access the stuff.

I wasn’t able to attend this year. Hopefully next year. From everything I’ve seen and read, Wind Horse 2012 looked amazing, and what else could you expect from a gathering of Forrest yogis?

I’ve already expressed my love and admiration for Forrest Yoga in these pages, and my dream to one day certify as a Forrest Yoga teacher. I do study with some amazing Forrest Yoga teachers, including Erica Mather in NYC and Heidi Sormaz whenever I get to New Haven, CT. Here’s some collected blog posts, photos, and other ephemera from 2012’s inaugural (and surely not the last) Forrest Yoga conference.

Top 10 Ana-isms from Wind Horse: One thing I love about the Forrest teachers I’ve studied with so far? Their in-your-face honesty. Emotional and spiritual nakedness even. Ana Forrest  is the grand-mommy bad-ass of them all.

Ana Forrest Fierce Medicine Reading and Workshop at Wind Horse, 2012 (video): Fierce Medicine is an amazing book. Please read it.

New song introduced at Wind Horse 2012 (video): Forrest Yogis sing songs at the beginning of practice. These songs are usually from the Native American medicine traditions. Forrest Yoga has a shamanic/medicine (wo)man thread coursing through it, no doubt inspired by Ana’s earliest experiences working with animals and nature, experiences she chronicles in Fierce Medicine. The songs sung by Forrest Yogis are cherished by the tribe and lend consistency to gatherings that brings yogis together from all parts of the world.

Workshop recaps: A little more detail on some of the workshops offered at Wind Horse 2012, via Forrest Yoga teacher Megan Keane’s blog. Another workshop recap via Grateful Yogi. Monday morning at Wind Horse, via Megan Keane again. Another one from Grateful Yogi.

Some photos, general recaps, and random stuff I found online:

• Great photos via Root Yoga Center, Colorado
• Forrest Yoga Guardian Cheryl Deer Speaks about Wind Horse Conference
• Wind Horse:  Where My Two Worlds Merge
• A Person Journey Through Stalking Fear, by Ana Forrest: parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
• Facebook page for Wind Horse

I’m sure there’s lots more I’ve missed or things that will come online after this post goes live. Please leave any updates in the comments. Thanks, and a-ho!

Gravity Surfing With Ana Forrest – Video Interview

I forget exactly how I found Forrest Yoga. It was a series of events, one leading step by step to the next. I remember seeing Forrest Yoga classes on the schedule at Om Factory several years ago and reading about the intense core work and transformational nature of the practice. Several years later, a review of Fierce Medicine in Yoga Journal caught my eye, enough that I downloaded the book to the Kindle on my phone. As I started reading the book, I was amazed to resonate completely with Ana Forrest’s story.  Synchronicity always lets me know I’m on the right path, so when an opportunity to do a three-day Forrest Yoga Continuing Education module at Fresh Yoga in New Haven, CT came up, I jumped at the chance. I studied with two amazing teachers and Forrest Yoga Guardians, Heidi Sormaz and Catherine Allen, as well as with a whole tribe of Forrest yogis, and that’s when I understood what this powerful system is all about.

I’m normally not one for “branded” yoga, but Forrest is different. Ana Forrest is so clearly dedicated to healing and transformation that her words, ideas, techniques, and sequences transcend brand, for they are truly, remarkably effective. In three days, my yoga practice and I were transformed. I came away loving the challenging, sweaty, introspective practice. Forrest Yoga is for people who love to be challenged, and who have a lot of “stuff” that needs to be cleared away. Trauma, pain, injury, illness, recovery from abuse or alcohol or drug dependence, you  name it, Forrest Yoga has taken it on. Ana Forrest healed her own body and mind from a spinal deformation she was born with, to the abuse she suffered as a child, to the drug and alcohol addiction she developed in her adolescence in response to all she had hitherto seen, felt, and experienced. Fierce Medicine details her incredible story.

In this video interview, a glimpse into Ana’s dedicated healing spirit is presented. Although I have yet to meet this phenomenal woman in person, I am honored to have studied with several of her Forrest Yoga Guardians (Heidi, Cat, and Erica Mather), as well as several incredible Forrest Yoga teachers (Denise Hopkins & Ramona Bradley). I’ve been saving money to take the Forrest Foundations 200 hour teacher training, and hope to go to the first-ever Forrest Yoga conference Wind Horse this summer.

Everyone I have met in the Forrest Yoga community is real, human, vulnerable, yet incredibly strong, tough, funny, sweet, sensitive, and caring. The practice seems to attract intelligent, intense, introspective types with a legacy of personal challenge in life, who are wounded healers, and can, after tending to their own scars, help minister to those of others. It’s a beautiful practice in this way. Underneath the physical effort and hitting wall after wall of resistance as you’re asked to hold yet another interlock warrior pose for several minutes, sweat pouring down your face and puddling on your mat, is the sweetest release of ancient tension, wounds, thoughts, programs, blockages, and in general “stuff” that no longer serves. Forrest Yoga is tapas in action: the fire of passion burning away gunk and junk for a truly transformed vehicle, that is then more available to serve others. It’s a practice I first respected, then came to utterly love, and I hope to join the tribe of Forrest Yoga teachers in the coming years.

Please enjoy the video, linked below, an interview with Ana Forrest, reposted from Yoga Journal.

Gravity Surfing With Ana Forrest.

Self-Healing Through Breathwork and Asana – a workshop

Please join me on Thursday, August 25th for a two-hour workshop at Reflections Yoga.

During this workshop, you’ll learn techniques you can utilize in your practice going forward, ideas like emotional body scanning, deep Ujjayi breathing, and long-held poses to draw up and break down old, accumulated energy. The end result of work like this is a feeling of deep emotional and cellular release, increased strength and flexibility, profound relaxation, and increased well being.

Healing begins when we release energetic blockages, which most people have due to incomplete digestion of life experiences. Trauma, disappointment, sadness, fear, and injury can lodge in the body tissue and create constriction, both physically and energetically. Deep Ujjayi breathing helps break down this energetic gunk, and the long-held poses help digest it, literally sweating out old, stuck energy. Emotional body scanning is a technique for understanding your body from an energetic perspective, and using injuries, tight spots, and sore spots as markers to track life experiences that may have left energetic deposits throughout the body.

Sometimes instead of an actual physical area of the body, what needs release and opening is a particular attitude or belief. Whatever the blockage or thing that needs to be healed, this workshop can help you go deep into your physical, emotional, and energetic body. Using your own breath, body, and awareness to explore your energetic landscape, you will find the healing potential we all have, just have lost touch with due to neglect.

Many of the techniques I’ll use in the workshop I learned during a Forrest Yoga Continuing Education workshop. Forrest Yoga is an intense practice developed by Ana Forrest specifically designed to heal not just individuals, but “the Hoop of the People,” that is, all people, communities, and groups and the interconnections between them.

WORKSHOP

Self-Healing Through Breathwork & Asana
Thursday, Aug. 25th, 2011
6:30-8:30pm/cost $25
Reflections Yoga, 250 W. 49th St. (betw. 8th Ave. & B’way), 2nd floor

Download the flyer for my workshop here