A selection of articles on Yoga

A More Perfect Union - Article by Lisa Meece

Out of My Mind - Article by Lisa Meece

The Meditation Thing - Article by Lisa Meece

What to Expect in a Yoga Class - Article by Lisa Meece

An Interview with Yoga Teacher Nancy Schalk - Interview by Karla Becker

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned on my Yoga Mat - Lisa Meece
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"A More Perfect Union" - Article by Lisa Meece

The word yoga translates into English as union, or yoke. Now, yoke isn’t a word we use very often these days, since even people who are still down on the farm don’t generally use yokes any more, but it makes for a great image. Farmers yoke oxen to a plow to do the hard work of turning over soil. The process is messy, and not all that attractive, and sometimes, but the result is a field that can sustain new life. Not just any life, but food that can sustain whole populations.

Of course, none of those component parts are nearly as effective alone. You can till the field faster when the oxen, the farmer and the plow are all working together. Yoga works the same way, joining together to stir things up and create the right environment for change and growth. Like plowing a field, the process is hard, and messy, and maybe even smelly, but these things are part of what it takes to create change.

One of the unions that yoga creates is breath with movement. Together, these provide a powerful tool for creating a relaxation response, the antidote to the fight-or-flight reactions we spend so much of our lives experiencing. The breath is sort of a gateway between the conscious and unconscious mind. For most people, the breath is the only bodily function that can be controlled either consciously or unconsciously. Try making your breath fast and shallow, and notice what happens to your state of mind. Now, and this is the one you probably need practice with, take long, slow, deep breaths. Notice what happens to your state of mind. The sense of calm flowing through you affects your body chemistry, helping the body process everything from lunch to the stress from a traffic jam.

Another union yoga creates is body with mind with spirit. Now, you may be used to thinking that your body, mind and spirit are inherently a package deal, as least as long as we’re walking around on this planet. Still, there are times when they aren’t all that connected. My mind, for instance, goes wandering off all the time. For example, I can sit at my desk working away, while my mind takes off all on its own for the library or the mall or that pile of unfolded laundry on my bed. My body is stuck at my desk. Sometimes it even keeps working.

We have whole industries devoted to taking the mind and separating it from the body. My mind has taken journeys through Middle Earth, on the Titanic, down rivers and up mountains, all while my body stays safe in the movie theater. My mind also enjoys leaving my body behind in my favorite reading chair on lazy afternoons while it takes off with a book. The mind even manages time travel, taking off for the party I’m throwing next week, or that conversation I had with my husband last week, while my body stays in the present moment.

This can be great fun, and certainly doesn’t need to be abandoned to practice yoga. These days, however, we’ve taken such experiences to an entirely new level. We are living in the midst of an incredible information hurricane spinning at us from all directions. That’s where yoga comes in. On the yoga mat, we make a point of doing things that take the full attention of both our body and our mind, in a conscious attempt to get them back together.

The whole self includes more than body and mind, though. It includes the spirit, as well, and spirit can be a touchy subject for a lot of reasons. As soon as you start talking about spirituality, some people begin to worry that yoga is some sort of weird religion, or wonder if the practice of yoga is compatible with their religion. Yoga is not a religion, though it is a spiritual practice for many people. It is kind of like prayer, a practice used by many religions to bring individuals closer to the divine, by allowing us to practice letting go of the distractions that play a part in keeping us from living the lives we mean to live. I like to think of it as similar to volunteer work. Lots of church groups participate in Habitat for Humanity projects, and doing so doesn’t require you to accept Jimmy Carter as your new deity.

Coming together, focusing on the present moment with body, mind and spirit is not how we live our daily lives. Multitasking is a way of life in the modern world, separating our mind into little sections, each one doing a different thing. Yoga practice is the opposite of multitasking, bringing all the parts we habitually split off back together. It’s harder than it sounds, and worth every bit of effort!

"Out of My Mind" - Article by Lisa Meece

Since I’ve started practicing yoga, I’ve gone out of my mind. Of course, some of the people who know me will suggest it wasn’t the yoga that caused this, but I’m pretty sure yoga has had something to do with getting me out of my mind, and into my body.

One of the most-touted benefits of yoga is a greater connection between the mind and the body. It’s actually one of the things that appealed to me early on. Back then, I was functioning under the common misconception that a better connection between mind and body would mean that I could get my body to do what my mind told it to. Remember those commercials for Advil, where the mountain biker suddenly realizes in horror that he is allowing his body to dictate how far he can push himself? By taking this little pill, the commercial crows, you can be freed of worrying about what your body needs and follow your mind wherever it wants you to go. I used to think yoga worked kind of like that little pill. If only you could get sufficient communication between body and mind, the body would start to do what you told it to. So far, however, my body has been completely unimpressed with this particular line of reasoning.

What has actually happened as I have become more aware of my body is that it has begun to take over. To make things worse, I am not always exactly pleased with what it is telling me. For instance, to feel really awake and refreshed, I require more sleep than I find convenient in my schedule. With my stack of unread books, my collection of under-visited friends, my un-weeded garden, my un-finished household projects, not to mention all that un-watched cable TV, where is sleep really supposed to fit into this fabulous modern life I’m trying to live here? To make matters worse, I had a chance a couple of years ago to live without an alarm clock for several months, which had the effect of rubbing my face in the fact that my natural sleep schedule isn’t the socially-appropriate 4-6 hours per night. Noooo, my body seems be squarely on the side of those boring scientists who suggest a completely unreasonable 8-9 hours of sleep every single night!

If the yoga thing worked the way I’d like for it to, I would be able to explain to my body that 9 hours a night just wasn’t working for me, and negotiate it down to, say 6 hours a night. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me, given that with everything else I’d like to do while awake, 3 hours a night would be my preference. Unfortunately, my body seems completely uninterested in this sort of compromise. While I can function on 6 hours of sleep, or even less if something really important (like the midnight show of The Return of the King) comes up, my body has ways of letting me know it’s not happy with me. Worse yet, my increased connection with my body makes those little signals much harder to ignore. I can still get by on sugar and caffeine, but pretty quickly I begin to feel like that is less fun than simply taking a nap or going to bed early, no matter who is on the Daily Show tonight.

Speaking of caffeine, my body has decided that it is also entitled to some say in what I eat. Diet coke used to be my very favorite drink in the whole world. There was a time when I would stop at the Safeway for a 44 oz glass of diet coke on the way in to the office, and then refill it at lunch. Often, I’d have more diet coke to drink with dinner. When I started yoga teacher training, I was still drinking prodigious amounts of the wonderful stuff and enjoying it tremendously. Not at the yoga teacher training sessions, mind you. I knew that caffeine is often cited as one of the cardinal no-no’s of yoga. And while coffee is the most-cited culprit of caffeine consumption, I hadn’t deluded myself into thinking that drinking my caffeine cold was going to get me off the hook. Still, my mind wasn’t convinced that I needed to quit drinking my diet coke, either.

Then it happened. My husband and I went on a week-long trip to an all-inclusive resort. Diet coke was available, but I was on vacation here and to be perfectly frank, most of what I drank for the first couple days consisted of some combination of rum and fruit juice. (Hey, there’s no rum in the world like the rum they make on tropical islands, particularly when you’re on a tropical island for the drinking part, too.) Halfway through the week I decided to have a diet coke with lunch. I was looking forward to that familiar first sip, the bite of the carbonation, the sharp refreshing taste, the no calories. So it was with great anticipation that I opened the bottle, raised it to my lips, and sipped. The taste was…terrible! At first I figured that the diet coke on the island had to be somehow different from the diet coke we get back home. After all, I had been drinking diet coke for years. It was not only my favorite drink, but an old friend, the one that helped me wake up in the mornings, and kept me from having to consume calories when I wanted to drink something bubbly and flavorful. I figured my taste for it would come back as soon as I got home to where they had the real diet coke. Instead, the aversion not only stayed with me, it started to spread.

Once I got home, I discovered that all my sugar-free stuff had started to taste a little funny. My sugar-free yogurt and low-calorie puddings, even my sugar-free gum, all started to taste, frankly, pretty gross. This was very disturbing. After all, like any good American woman, I understood at a visceral level that calories were my enemy. To the extent sugar-free stuff helped me avoid them, without actually giving up things I liked to eat, I blessed whoever it was who came up with the stuff. OK, sure, I might have suspected that the chemical processes involved in making something taste like something it isn’t might not be the healthiest ingestible on the planet. At some level, the wisdom of putting things that don’t exist in nature into a system designed to digest things that grow on this planet might not really be without side effects. But (and this is the critical argument) there aren’t any calories in the sugar-free stuff. I tried, more than once, to explain this to my body. I even used illustrations (if you can call the nutritional information on food packaging an illustration).

To be perfectly honest, even as my body was starting this process of taking over what I could eat, had I been asked if I’d choose an extra 50 pounds of body weight or an increased chance of cancer, I would have chosen the cancer without a second thought. Without a first thought either, as a matter of fact. After all, doesn’t chemo take off even more weight? This enhanced connection between my body and my mind, however, has made it a little easier for me to hear my body when it says “HELLO! Fat vs. cancer, and you choose WHAT? Are you out of your MIND?” Actually, I suspect the problem was just the opposite. I had been completely in my mind, and my body wasn’t getting any say at all. Now that I was listening to it, it was getting pretty mouthy, for instance, by starting to give me headaches any time I tried to re-acquire my taste for food-free-food.

In my office one day, I got one of those headaches, and a colleague caught me with the aspirin bottle out. “I figured yoga teachers wouldn’t get headaches,” she said. So did I, of course, but my body wasn’t exactly figuring it the same way.

I’m pretty sure that my body isn’t done with me, either. I keep getting these impulses to do crazy things like cook my own food instead of relying on Ronald or the King for dinner. Some mornings my body even wakes me up before my alarm goes off, and gets me out of bed to do some yoga before I go to work. I can tell the difference all day, even if my scale doesn’t seem to have noticed quite yet. I don’t know what all my body will have in store for me over the coming years, and I can’t exactly say I’m completely looking forward to all of it. But one thing’s for sure, I’m certain it will be an interesting journey. They say going out of your mind usually is.

"The Meditation Thing" - Article by Lisa Meece

I think it’s important to be clear. When I started taking yoga classes, I did not show up looking for a new and improved form of meditation. For one thing, I didn’t really have an old and improvable form of meditation. My decision to try this yoga thing wasn’t motivated by a desire to work on my personal relationship with the divine; I went to yoga class to work on my personal relationship with my pants size. You see, there was this thing called “yoga butt” that seemed like just what I was looking for. Not that I was closed to other potential benefits of yoga practice, mind you. Yoga arms, yoga shoulders, yoga abs, whatever else could be included with the basic yoga butt package would be fine, thank you very much.

For another thing, I didn’t realize that yoga is supposed to be a form of meditation. I mean, it’s on the front cover of Vogue because it makes you look good. Sure, I was stressed out, and sure I knew in sort of a theoretical way that constant stress isn’t good for you, and sure I was looking for less stress and more balance in my life. In fact, I even talked about going to yoga class to reduce my stress. But the stress was something of a badge of honor in my life. Everybody talks about having less stress, but actually doing something that was actually going to reduce it, was only appealing to the extent it was going to reduce my waistline at the same time.

With all of this in mind, the atmosphere in yoga class, quite frankly, bugged me a little when I started taking classes. Not only did we not get pounding gym music to inspire us, it was clear in that sort of unspoken way that applies in libraries and places of worship that we weren’t even supposed to talk. And if you missed the unspoken part and started chatting during class, I discovered later, some yoga teachers would actually shush you. We think of yoga teachers as all soft spoken and kindly, and let me tell you, sometimes that stereotype isn’t entirely accurate.

The thing is, I like to talk. Ask anyone I know, they’ll tell you. Better yet, let me explain. In school I was the girl who always put her hand up in class, the one the teacher quits calling on after the first three weeks in the name of letting “someone else” answer the question. When I started taking yoga classes, I wanted to interact with the teacher. I found that I was interested in how everything worked, and why it worked that way, and I had questions to ask. Also, these clever little comments kept occurring to me, probably because I knew I couldn’t share them. And I wanted to make new friends, to chat with the kind of people who go to yoga class. The whole silence thing was, shall we say, not my favorite part of the deal.

Lucky for me, there were a couple of things I really liked a lot during those early classes. For example, even though I wasn’t the most physically fit person in the room, my natural flexibility took me a long way into the poses. My 800-pound ego liked the fact that my 200-pound body could do some things well enough that other students looked over at me with envy and the teacher occasionally complimented my flexibility. Frankly, what drew me back to class at the beginning was the fact that I liked showing off, and yoga class turned out to be a natural opportunity for me to do just that.

The ego thing kept me coming back long enough to start noticing how much I enjoyed the way I felt after class. Once, shortly after I tried yoga for the first time, I told a friend that class reminded me of the old joke where the (insert your own politically incorrect stereotype for not-so-bright person here) hits her head against a brick wall because “it feels so good when I stop”. I kept coming to class not so much because of how I felt during class, but more because of how good it felt when I got done with class.

At this point in my practice, I noticed that it took a lot of focus just to get me into the poses. I discovered that a lot of poses take a lot more concentration than they look like they should take. To be honest, I really wasn’t used to concentrating on just one thing at a time. I was one of those people who talk on the cell phone while I drive, which didn’t seem like such a health risk for me, because even before there were cell phones I used to eat breakfast, change tapes, and occasionally change my clothes while driving. I listened to the radio at work, and played computer solitaire while talking on the phone at home. I figured, really, it’s the 21st century, we’re supposed to multitask every moment of the day, right?

I was particularly used to the assumption that thinking was something that could be multi-tasked in with any number of other activities. After all, the mind is separate from the body, right? Then I started to notice something really odd. If I started thinking about the grocery run I was going to make after class, balancing on one leg became noticeably more difficult. I had to, for what seemed like the first time in my adult life, focus every bit of my energy on one thing at a time if I was going to manage to stand on one leg while the other leg tried to do something else, like come up over my head behind me. It was while I was focusing on one thing at a time that I really started the sensation I came to call yoga buzz.

It was a sneaky thing, that yoga buzz. If I let my attention drift out of the room, the yoga buzz would drift right off with it. If I focused on how I looked in the pose, or looked around the room to compare myself to other students, no buzz. If I focused on finding the buzz, instead of finding the stretch, I wouldn’t find either one. I had to focus on the movement, exploring the sensation of stretch and muscle use, and let the buzz sort of sneak up on me from the side. I think this may be what athletes refer to as being in ‘the zone’, and I started to see why they might like it.

It got easier with practice. The more I learned to keep my mind focused on what I was doing, the more I could feel the buzz. The hardest part was learning to quit obsessing over whatever was swirling through my mind when I came into class. There are a lot of things in this world I worry about. Relationships, career, politics, how the laundry is going to get done, what to have for dinner, I can get a good solid worry up about any of these things and more other things than I care to count. In yoga class, I found out that worry would not only cause me to literally fall on my yoga butt, it would also chase my well-earned yoga buzz right out of the room. If I was going to find my balance, I was going to have to learn to let things go.

This wasn’t just challenging, it was actually threatening to the way I saw the world. I was used to being a person who made things happen. Here was something that didn’t respond at all to my efforts to make it bend to my will, but only seemed to happen when I quit trying to force it. I had to let go of what was happening in my head to find this yoga buzz, and my head wasn’t entirely on board with this plan. I began to notice that the remarks that kept popping into my head were most likely to do so just as I started to feel the buzz. This distraction served the purpose of knocking me out of the zone and back into my comfort zone. Now, mind you, my comfort zone is a very nice place. I spend a lot of very enjoyable time there, and have no intention of moving out in any permanent sort of way. But my comfort zone doesn’t exactly buzz, and I was starting to like the buzz.

Spending time in that state of yoga buzz, where it was impossible to obsess over whatever I was tending to obsess over that day, started to have an effect on my perspective. It didn’t take long for my husband to decide he liked me better after I’d been to a yoga class. This would have really ticked me off except for the inconvenient little fact that I liked me better after I’d been to a yoga class, too. My yoga butt may not rival Madonna’s, or Christy Turlington’s, but I found it hard to care so much.

I still don’t have a daily meditation practice, or even a disciplined daily yoga practice, if I’m going to be entirely honest about it. I’m still not feeling an acute hole in my life where it might fit, or seeing a hole in my schedule where I might fit it in. On the other hand, I do know that when things get too crazy, a quiet yoga class can help to put the sanity back into my life. And I’m still not the only person in my life to notice the effects, either. A few months ago, I said to my best friend “I’m just happier when I can make the time to go to class.” Without missing a beat, she looked me straight in the eye and said “Sweetie, we’re all happier when you make the time to go to class.” Hey, if it makes everybody happier, who am I to argue with that?

Concentrate on one thing at a time. Focus on the breath. It’s not the most sophisticated form of meditation. Meditation is still not my primary goal. Sometimes the best discoveries come from things you never even knew you were looking for. Somehow, without ever expecting or looking for it, the meditation thing found me. And, if I’m to believe what I’m told, everybody is happy that it did.

What to Expect in a Yoga Class - Article by Lisa Meece

Yoga isn’t quite the mystery it was a decade ago. Over the past few years, pop culture and the media have been full of references to yoga, or characters who do yoga. On the small screen Dharma taught yoga on Dharma & Greg, and Ross namaste’d the Janitor on Friends –in prime-time no less. Dilbert and Cathy and Bizarro and Rose is Rose all brought to yoga to the daily comics. Harrison Ford’s last cop movie paired him with a yoga-teaching cop. Meg Ryan and Mel Gibson and Sandra Bullock all practiced yoga in the movies. Some of the hottest celebrities in Hollywood have talked about how yoga made a difference in their bodies, and in their lives. Corporate America is using yoga to sell yogurt and software and tennis shoes. In the past few years, yoga has certainly secured itself a place in the popular culture.

Still, for people who haven’t actually been to a yoga class, the pop culture references may be less than helpful in figuring out what to expect. As is so often true, the pop-culture version may not exactly match what is most likely to happen in the world we are most likely to experience. Even though there is a great variety among yoga teachers, styles and classes, there are some basic principles that hold true for most of them. Even so, the pop culture version manages to get many of them wrong.

Mel Gibson’s character in What Women Want went to yoga class to use his new mind-reading powers on his fellow students. OK, probably I don’t have to mention that mind-reading powers aren’t part of the bargain. On top of that, most yoga teachers would agree that one of the goals of yoga practice is to shut everything else out of your mind. This means no making mental lists of things to buy or things to do while in the middle of class. Mental focus is one of the most challenging aspects of a yoga practice, but it often turns out to be one of the most rewarding. Leaving everything else “at the door” during class gives you an opportunity to come back to things with a different perspective. Also, finding stillness even in the middle of a mental hurricane can be a great tool for keeping our sanity in a world gone crazy, as our world seems to have a habit of doing.

Harrison Ford’s co-star in Hollywood Homicide answered his cell phone while teaching a yoga class. In the real world, this is a pretty bad sign. If your yoga teacher does this, I would suggest looking for another class (unless you’re there more for the teacher’s puppy-dog eyes than for downward facing dog). To put it mildly, most yoga teachers don’t appreciate electronic interruptions. Nor, for that matter, will most of your fellow students. Don’t plan on being able to keep a pager or cell phone on during class, and shut off any electronic alarms on watches and PDAs. Murphy’s Law holds in yoga class, meaning that electronic alarms of any variety are more likely to go off when the class is quietest. It’s very embarrassing to be the one who has to get up off the mat and shut off the source of everybody else’s annoyance.

The yoga students on Dharma & Greg were generally Victoria’s Secret models, and they generally wore a pretty Victoria’s Secret version of yoga-wear to boot. In the real world yoga students come in all shapes and sizes, and wear clothes better suited to movement. You’re really looking for clothing you can forget about once you get to class, which means something that fits fairly close to the skin. Those big baggy t-shirts that seem like such great camouflage suddenly become less helpful when you move into a position where your hips are higher than your shoulders, like bending over and reaching for your toes. Loose shorts have some of the same problems. Imagine lying on the floor and putting one leg straight up in the air. In baggy shorts, you may find your attention is suddenly diverted from the stretch in your hamstring. If you want baggy pants, stick with at least three-quarter length.

While we’re on the subject of attire, don’t bother going out to get any of those nifty shoes the TV-yogis are wearing, most yoga classes are conducted in bare feet. Shoes interfere with the movement of the feet, which are incredibly complex and chock full of muscles that get well exercised in many yoga classes. Socks are slippery, which can be dangerous when you’re moving into and out of unfamiliar poses. Those mats you see are called sticky mats. They’re not sticky in an icky way, like gum or post-it notes, but they do provide some traction against bare skin, and they don’t work nearly as well against socks.

You have probably seen the commercials that show people eating yogurt from complicated yoga positions. It looks cool, but I wouldn’t recommend trying it at home. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to not eat at all for an hour or two before class. In a yoga class, you are likely to twist your torso, or perhaps have your stomach higher than your head, like in a forward bend. These sorts of things are best done on a relatively empty stomach. It’s also better not to drink too much before class. You don’t want to be bothered by nature’s call sometime in the middle of class or, even worse, during final relaxation.

In some parts of our culture, being late is considered an indication of one’s importance. I suppose in Hollywood, nobody would dream of getting to anything on time. The value of being “fashionably late” in this fashion fails to register on any of the yoga teachers I know. Lateness disrupts the class to the point that some teachers actually refuse to allow latecomers to join. When joining a new class, it is actually a good idea to arrive early enough to meet the teacher before class. Rest assured that your coolness factor will not be in jeopardy if you do this. If you have any physical challenges that bother you, such as sore knees, it is generally helpful to warn the teacher ahead of time. There are a nearly infinite variety of poses and adaptations, and a good yoga teacher will be able to help you figure out options that will work with pretty much any physical challenges you may have.

The most important thing to look for once class starts is how you feel during and after the class. Though it may seem counterintuitive, particularly if your primary mental picture of yoga is someone with a foot behind each ear, but “if it hurts, don’t do it” is literally the first rule of yoga. (Ok, I admit I’m paraphrasing a little. The first “rule” of yoga is nonviolence. Pain is generally the result of violence, ergo, “no pain” is a reasonable paraphrase of the first rule of yoga.) Finding the point just before a stretch becomes painful is more challenging both physically and mentally than simply beating yourself silly with exercise. Find a teacher, and a class, that encourages you to pay attention to how you’re feeling. Yoga teachers usually call this something like “honoring your own body”, and it’s the key to enjoying yoga class. Ultimately, whatever your goal in coming to yoga class, you are more likely to stick with it, and reach your goal, if you enjoy the class enough to keep coming back.

Yoga in three dimensions can be very different than whatever you have seen in two dimensions in the movies or on television or in print. The thing to remember, however, is that the fad of yoga was fueled by the real-life benefits of the practice. Yoga can help develop flexibility, strength, a different perspective, balance, serenity and more, including maybe things you didn’t even realize you were looking for in a yoga class. It won’t be a Hollywood journey, but perhaps the reality will turn out to be what you were looking for all along.

An Interview with Yoga Teacher Nancy Schalk - Interview by Karla Becker

Why do you think yoga is so popular?

I think yoga is so popular now because it is so powerfully far reaching and inclusive in it’s positive effects, and people can feel that immediately. Our modern culture likes to do nine things at once, well, yoga does that! It’s benefits are innumerable! It is a great method of staying physically fit and healthy, not only muscularly; it improves function in all systems of the body. Also, yoga reaches our spiritual heart because it leads us inside, into the sacred quiet place inside ourself. That place is compellingly enjoyable! Just a taste is enough to remind us of our highest birthright, our Divinity! It helps us begin to reign in and take control of the mind. We become masters of our mind, instead at the mercy of it. Yoga also helps us relax and let go of hard things we’re holding on to. We release, and it feels great! Yoga is safe, simple, inexpensive, it feels wonderful, and can be practiced by everyone, anywhere.

How does it transcend specific religious beliefs?

Yoga is really more science than religion. For me, at the core of science is God. Yoga can be said to be a science of self discovery, and at the core of our self is God. It is a system of practices that bring us to our true Self, to God. It’s naturally a spiritual practice. Religions are often exclusive, yoga is inclusive. Yoga was developed 5000 years ago, so it predates religions. There are no rules, and no beliefs are needed. The first written material on Yoga, Patanjali’s “Yoga Sutras”, makes this very clear. No beliefs are required or encouraged. It’s simply states: “if you do these practices in these ways, you’ll likely get these wonderful results”.

Why is it good for people?

It’s good for people because it lifts them up to a higher and more easeful way of living and being. It helps us stay curious about our judgments and not believe everything we think! The benefits are innumerable, but I could sum them up as:
Improved functioning in all systems of the body
Improved functioning in all aspects of the mind
Aids in softening and opening our spiritual heart, and we begin to live lovingly and see all others as our brothers and sisters. Love increases, fear decreases! “It’s all good”, as the saying goes!

How has it been a way of growth for you?

For me personally it has been a HUGE help, maybe a lifesaver. I fortunately had a natural draw toward yoga early in my life, and very poor physical health compelled me to it. I recognized it’s value immediately, and have only been delightfully rewarded for my efforts ever since. It’s helped my heart open. It’s helped me be more sure of myself - able to stand firmly in my own boots. I value myself more, because I experience that inner me that is invaluable. Seeing that in myself, I can more easily see it in others. It’s a nice way to live!

How have you seen it affecting your students?

Oh, I’ve been so fortunate to hear the successes of so many students through the years. Students come to me, surprised, and share their stories, but I’m not surprised anymore. I’ve heard almost everything, so I just celebrate with them and marvel at what happens when we open the energy flow in our lives, which is what a yoga practice does! I’ve seen it in their bodies and faces and beings, in their confidence and self esteem. Students have told me it’s helped them live with more ease, in countless ways. Specifically it helps them digest their meals better, sleep better, enjoy sexual sharing more deeply, physically and emotionally. One man told me he was so thrilled, when he and his buddies were preparing their boat for fishing, he was the only one who could maneuver himself underneath and fix the problem! He was the hero!, which is fun because we do “Hero” poses in yoga. Another man said how nice it is to be able to turn his head comfortably while driving. Sometimes aches and pains just fade away almost unnoticed, others disappear in a moment, never to return. One woman told me her newfound yoga practice helped her be strong enough to leave a marriage that she’d known for years she needed to leave. (not that yoga encourages that in general) It helps with injury prevention, athletes especially love this aspect! A teenage student told me it helps her completion and her grades! She can concentrate better in school. One young woman says it stopped her anxiety attacks, and an older woman shared with a grin that her sexuality has been reawakened.

How does yoga work for so many different body types and needs?

This is one of the most awesome things about yoga. There are at least a million great ways to practice yoga. A knowledgeable teacher and student can work together to find the practice that suits that person perfectly. It’s through paying attention that we “know” how to use yoga toward our own goals. Yoga is here to assist us in accomplishing our individual goals, and is easily adaptable to that means. At All People Yoga Center we have 10 teachers teaching many different styles of yoga. We do “Yoga Therapy” there, where those with special considerations are guided into a practice that suits them. It is meant for people recovering from illness or surgery, are in chronic pain, or have any other challenges, and for those who want to prevent problems. (there is a “sutra” that states “conflicts/discomforts that are yet to come can be avoided!) We do “Vinyasa” yoga, which is heating, cleansing, athletic, and challenging, and is meant for people who are fit and want to work their body and soothe their soul. No matter what situation or condition a person finds themselves, yoga can be practiced successfully and beneficially.

Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned on my Yoga Mat - by Lisa Meece

If it hurts don’t do it- what comes from pain is not gain.

Being still is harder than it looks.

Observing without judgment is harder than it sounds.

Challenge can be fun.

Being comfortable starts with remembering to breathe.

Balance is not a still thing - maintaining balance requires constant attention and adjustment.

Good posture isn’t harder than bad posture, it just uses different muscles.

The right support can help you stretch.

Sometimes surrender is the only way forward.

If you can relax while you stretch your body, it will be easier to relax when something or someone stretches your patience.

Once you master one pose, there is always another – the practice itself is the only enduring goal.

Some poses will be easy and some poses will be hard and it’s that way for everybody.

Some days everything will be easy and some days everything will be hard and honoring the difference is part of the practice.

Relaxing feels better after you have had a really great stretch.

Stilling the mind is harder than stilling the body.

Silence can be more interesting than sound.