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/

Yoga in Jersey City

Do you live in Jersey City, New Jersey in the Journal Square area? Are you looking for yoga instruction in the Jersey City Journal Square area? I am a certified yoga instructor living in Jersey City near Journal Square available for private, semi-private, group, and corporate classes.

There are not many options for yoga in the Jersey City area, especially around our lovely Journal Square area. I live a short walk from the Journal Square PATH station and can teach in the privacy of my home or yours. Private yoga instruction is actually the way yoga was taught eons ago, with one student and one teacher working together to raise the consciousness of the student, or devotee as they were called then. A modern teacher/student relationship is not too different, with me, the teacher, working closely with you, the student, to figure out what is most important to you, what is most valuable to you, and helping you become more aware of the immense power for creativity and manifestation within you.

Whether you want to build on a current yoga practice, start practicing yoga for the first time, relax, de-stress, calm your mind, improve your health, increase your flexibility and strength, defeat insomnia, become more balanced and serene, find more joy in your life, or just experience the beautiful presence of mind that is the gift of yoga, and you live in Jersey City, New Jersey, I may be the teacher for you.

My yoga teaching background includes the following:

• staff teacher for nearly three years at Reflections Yoga in midtown Manhattan
• experience working with teenagers, adults, corporate groups, beginner yoga students, and recovery from injury
• experienced thai massage therapist
• over 12 years of personal practice
• study with world renown teachers
• extensive study of yoga philosophy, pranayama, and meditation
• bilingual Spanish
• I have training in Yin Yoga, Forrest Yoga, hatha & vinyasa yoga, thai massage, and meditation.

Together we can design a custom yoga and wellness program for you (or with your family or friends) that will bring increased vitality, joy, and relaxation to your life! Yoga will keep you young in mind, body, and spirit.

Please contact me with any questions about creating a custom yoga program for your Jersey City Journal Square lifestyle. I am honored to be of service.  Please see my About Me page for more information on my teaching background and style.

I look forward to be of service in the healing, health and wholeness of Jersey City residents. Namaste.

Yin Yoga & Meditation

There’s a lot of reasons to do yin yoga. Yin yoga is an excellent counterpart to more active “yang” vinyasa or other physical practices. It’s great to practice yin yoga when you’re stressed out, over-heated, or for women in their moon cycle. Whenever you have been too yang, yin yoga will help re-balance your energy levels and serve as a tonic to an over-stimulated, over-booked life. Yin yoga can help quiet the mind and heal the body. Like all forms of yoga, yin yoga can help settle the mind by bringing awareness into the subtle realms of breath and energy, but yin in particular is well suited as a preliminary practice to sitting meditation. Why is this so?

Yin yoga helps lengthen and strengthen connective tissue (ligaments, fascia, possibly even bone!) by virtue of its “yin” methodology. The three principles of yin yoga are 1) meet your edge 2) stillness 3) hold for time. Once you meet your first edge in a yin pose, you’ll soak there until your body opens enough to allow you to find your second edge. Then you soak in stillness there, holding for time, until another edge appears, and so on.

The attention to detail it requires to follow the three-step path of yin yoga (find your edge, stillness, hold for time) naturally settles the mind. The breath in yin is used as much to invite space in (breathe into an area that feels stiff or congested) as it is a release (lion’s breath is a yin treat; holding a pose for a long time can sometimes feel claustrophobic and lion’s breath is a great way to release excess energy without moving). As the body cools down and the muscles become relaxed, the body naturally requires less oxygen. The breath can become slower and deeper.

The quality of breath that develops from a yin practice makes it a perfect antecedent to sitting meditation practice. Not only will the joints used in sitting (spine & hips) be open and lubricated (yin yoga practice actually helps create more of the substance, hyaluronic acid, that cushions the joints) but the breath and mind will already be well slowed down. A sitting practice after yin practice can go very deep.

I will be offering a workshop on yin yoga on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2012 at Reflections Yoga in NYC. The focus of this workshop will be on using yin yoga to prepare the body and mind for meditation.

Go Deeper With Yin Yoga: A Workshop

I will be leading a Yin Yoga workshop on Thursday, June 7 at Reflections Yoga in New York City.

This two-hour workshop will be a general introduction to the theories behind Yin Yoga, including a basic overview of Traditional Chinese Medicine meridian theory and the corresponding organs, learning about fascia, the connective tissue that literally binds the body together, and how to track emotional and physical sensations that arise over the course of the long-held Yin Yoga poses.

For more information and to register, please view the Reflections website. If you have any questions about the workshop or the practice, please contact me via my “Contact” page.

Crazy Wisdom: Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa Explored On Film

This weekend, I saw Crazy Wisdom, a documentary about Tibetan lama/Western guru Chogyam Trungpa. Trungpa was and is considered a “bad boy” of Buddhism, a reincarnated lama from Tibet who spread Buddhism’s wisdom to the West in his own, inimitable style.

A smoker, a heavy drinker, and a man known for having intimate relations with many of his students, Chogyam Trungpa was not the stereotypical image of a guru. He was known for having “crazy wisdom,” the kind of insight that could be seen as being entirely, totally free or entirely, totally crazy. And what is the difference, really? So long as one can exist in society, there is room for our eccentricity, our total humanness.

Loved by his followers for being totally, completely human and having no apologies about it, Chogyam Trungpa taught by example. He challenged accepted memes and spoke wisdom in such a way that it forced people to think for themselves. One of his most famous books also contains one of his (still) most controversial ideas: that those on the spiritual path may be reinforcing the ego instead of dismantling it if they become too enamored of their spiritual knowledge or pursuits (I’m referring to Spiritual Materialism, one of Trungpa’s most important books).

Crazy Wisdom has lots of great archival footage of Trungpa as well as of the Vermont meditation center that later became the first building of the growing Shambala spiritual community. There’s some footage of Tibet and Trungpa’s travels around the world, and at the end of the film, Trungpa’s cremation ceremony is shown.

This documentary sheds some light on Trungpa’s life and personality, although there is still a sense of “who was this man?” at the end of the film. And that’s probably just as he would have wanted it.

More on Trungpa from the Shambala website: http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/chogyam-trungpa.php

Crazy Wisdom Trailer – NEW from Matthew Mecer on Vimeo.

Check out Crazy Wisdom through Saturday, December 3, 2011 at the Ruben Museum of Art in NYC.