atlanta yoga

Playlist Drop - Bonne Nouvelle

Can I make it work to have distortion heavy, guitar led tracks in a playlist with Gucci? That was the jump off point for this playlist. I think I made it work, personally. Opinions are welcome. Share them in the comments. As much as a themed playlist can be fun, I enjoy a smattering of genres in one playlist more, I think. I’m a fan of random interludes - a 30s jazz track you never saw coming between Cardi B and Death From Above 1979. It keeps things fresh feeling imo. There are myriad ways to approach playlist creation. I find them all appropriate at different times. The impossible pairings keep me on my toes tho.

This playlist gives you ATL flavor with Mattiel, Young Baby Tate and Gucci. You get some female led rock with Mattiel and Charlotte Gainsbourg. International music from Flavia Coelho and DAM serve as an awesome energetical bridge between the beginning of the playlist and middle where we transition to a more hip hop vibe. DAM is of particular interest to me as they strike a global social justice chord with this song and their m.o. The refrain of Milliardat translates to “billions of dollars just to keep us separated.” I highly recommend a dive into this group and what they represent on the global stage. I heavily fuck with Pooh Shiesty, YBT and love this song by Amber Mark. I don’t think I have a favorite song on this playlist tbh. It’s good all the way to the end when the energy starts to simmer - after Killgxxd’s Y.I.M.B. Give it a listen and leave your comments below!

 

Touching In With The Past - Vintage Yoga Flow

I’m trying to archive old hard drives. I have like 40Tb of data that all needs to go into deep storage and be organized. Yes. That is 40, 4-0, no typo. I have enough data to warrant buying a RAID array. Anyway, I’ll save you the multiple wormholes those first two sentences sent me on. I came here to say that I posted some of my “vintage” yoga flows to my Congruence Yoga Youtube channel.

I practiced to “Challenging Upper Body and Core Flow” a couple days ago and I wanted to share it with you here as well as some thoughts since hindsight and all…

…Thoughts

1. I am so glad this phase of hair is no more. I couldn’t get my hair out of my face without what I call “The Unicorn Pony.” I have had so many different hair styles over the years. I think on this website alone you will be able to count at least 4 or 5. The Unicorn Pony was a necessary evil in growing my top knot out but damn. Not a fave.

2. My body has changed so much and also very little. It took about 6 months postpartum to get back to my normal weight range. Five years later and I’m still hovering in that same zone. Where I carry fat, muscle density, tone, etc. are all in constant flux. If I’m lifting I look different than if I’m walking, skate or doing yoga. But my overall weight is remarkably consistent. More noticeable to me is how I move. I look stiff here imo. I will never be hypermobile. I am just simply not expressing that gene, though it does run in my family. I have made huge strides in looking more fluid in my movement from this video shot 4 years ago but even to this day I find it surprising to actually see MY body get into some of the shapes it does. The way I get into flexy shapes is so different than how more flexible people get into the same shapes.

3. Wow. My pincha has come a long long way.

4. I’m immensely proud of my sequencing and cueing. This was a very challenging flow that incorporates methodologies that are just now being highlighted as “foundational” to any movement practice. And I was doing those things in very creative ways four years ago. I’m talking functional range training, spiral movements, breath-work and more. Not only that. I really did and still do my best to honor yoga’s roots when I’m teaching. I try to teach YOGA not just poses. I think that comes through.

5. Teaching at Thunderbolt was hard but it really elevated my teaching game. Some of that came from without. Carly gave me a limited structure to work within. The challenge then became to test the limits of the structure without stepping outside of it. I worked very well in that environment. Until I didn’t and that is a different story. For the most part, structure aside, my teaching is an offering of mySelf beyond self. I teach from a place of joyful creativity, expression, healing and intuition. The recordings for the video come from live classes I taught. Its a style I borrowed from Black Swan Yoga and I still prefer this format to pre-recording in a booth, teaching model students or dubbing over after the fact. You get to hear a moment in time that will never be re-created and I think that’s really special.

Five is an arbitrarily good number to close it out. I hope you enjoy this flow. Share feedback, successes, ask questions in the comment here or Youtube. Om shanti, shanti, shanti and thanks for your time.

Diary Day 2 - I'm Not A Trainwreck I'm Just Poor AF

Diary Day 2 - I'm Not A Trainwreck I'm Just Poor AF

Hi, meet me! I'm not saying I'm the poorest person you know, but I'm probably close. Maybe I AM the poorest person you know that isn't just someone you pass on the street corner on your way to work, isn't your elderly relative living on a fixed income, or your distant cousin who's strung out on opioids. This is not to say I'm the poorest person on Earth. Its just to show you what its like to be really really poor in case you aren't. And to show you how I can't stop being poor no matter how hard I try.

Ahimsa - A {Sacred} Thread Writing Prompt

Briefly, its been really fun to get to know the yoga community here in Atlanta. I'm lucky to teach at some truly wonderful studios that help me to connect with their students. Every studio does it a little different. At {Sacred} Thread one of the ways we get to interact is through a common teaching theme each month. I love it. We teach on it during class and submit our thoughts on it in writing as well. When it comes down to it I love to write but am undisciplined and work best from prompts.


Thoughts ON ahimsa:

Have you ever failed at being the bigger person? Have you ever lost your temper, slammed a door, raised your voice or wished ill upon someone? If not, please take me under your wing and teach me your ways. If so, what if anything are you intentionally doing to lessen or eliminate such behaviors? How often have you been on the receiving end of such lapses in kindness? 

When you step inside of a yoga studio designated as a quiet space for meditation, set aside for a moment the need to speak words and externalize your experience to the people around you, and start breathing and focusing on the internal state of your mind and emotions what do you notice?

Do you hear a calm, confident encouragement about the yoga that's about to happen, a loud clamoring about the things on your to do list that are not being done while you're in class, a rehashing of the missed opportunity to connect with someone, a barrage of how you have to do better on your next job interview? There are limitless possibilities as individual as the emotions and situations we experience from moment to moment each day. The consistent factor each time you or anyone else practices is that in those 60-90 minutes of silence and moving you have the opportunity to observe your relationship with yourself. Reviewing those times that you have had the opportunity to observe your inner dialog, are you communicating compassionately or with animosity? 

Yoga is multifaceted with the physical practice (Asana) being but one of many angles by which one might undertake to "do yoga." In fact, it is a more traditional approach that the student spends time and tutelage under a guru to demonstrate a mature self-understanding and an ability to externalize moral behavior in interactions with the rest of the living world. Those particular two facets of yoga are the Yamas and Niyamas - ten things to not do or do along your path of practicing yoga. At the top of the list of Yamas, the actions to refrain from doing, is to commit violence. In the West we talk about having compassion, being peaceful and non-violent and in the East this same concept is termed Ahimsa. Whatever you want to call it - ahimsa or compassion - this ethical construct is viewed as a foundational aspect of moral behavior cross-culturally. 

So often it is demonstrated that in order to get anyone to make a change we much lead by example. So often we find ourselves multi-tasking and underperforming. As far as kindness and compassion go the trend follows - its natural to want other people to demonstrate kindness to us yet we in turn fail miserably all of the time at being examples of said kindness. Yoga anticipates, predicts and provides a solution for all of this. When you step inside of the yoga studio and are allowed a consistent quiet space to go in and observe your relationship with yourself do you find that it is perhaps not unlike your other relationships? Do you perfectly execute kindness and compassion on your self or do you allow there to be some level of harsh critique...violence? 

Yoga is there to give you that time and space to practice compassion on yourself. Sometimes the teacher is there to push you to your very physical limits so you can see how your relationship with yourself is under stress (while getting a nice workout), sometimes the teacher is there to give you practice that will allow you to relax into a pose with as little work as possible so you can almost entirely focus on accepting exactly where you are. Each day is different, you are different each day but the yoga is there consistently in whatever iteration you need to begin to grow your practice of Ahmisa, your capacity for compassion on yourself. 

Being kind and compassionate to others is a much a skill as any sport or artistic talent. To become a master at painting one must attain the necessary dexterity of hand by holding different bushes and practicing different strokes. Chances are you learned to ride a bike by practicing with training wheels or on a tricycle. Doing anything that requires skill takes practice, consistently, emphasizing foundations but also increasing the difficulty again and again and again. Yoga, undertaken with intention is the perfect method for practicing compassion on yourself. The differences it might have initially in your relationships might be subtle but as you stand a little taller, compose your face through hardship, and remember to balance your breathing, external stressors seem more like tough poses - challenging, yes, but ultimately just one more step along the path of yoga.  

 

"Ahimsa calls for the strength and courage to suffer without retaliation, to receive blows without returning any."  M. K. Gandhi