Awaken Your Heart Song
It’s with great pleasure that we share with you this week a great photo of Judy taking yoga off the mat and onto the board on the Blackwood River in Augusta.
Judy is a wonderful advocate for taking yoga off the mat as she so often demonstrates when we are on retreat together. Always up for some yoga in the bush, and in any weather, Judy brings her sense of adventure to her yoga practice wherever she goes.
Keep it up Judy, you’re inspirational 🙂
The art of slow living is noticing the gifts given freely to us everyday.
For Mother’s Day this year Kelly and Rolf have me a box of tulip bulbs, my favourite flowers. Kelly and I shared the experience of planting these bulbs in my front garden and getting our hands in the dirt as we planted and blessed the bulbs being lovingly placed in the earth.
Imagine my delight on the first day of spring last week when I noticed the first bulb had opened up to reveal its beauty.
I received many gifts in that moment:
– The sight of the beautiful flower
– The thought of Kelly and Rolf giving me a gift that would keep on giving pleasure
– The memory of Kelly and I planting those bulbs in the earth a few months earlier
– The pleasure of photographing it and sending it to them with my excitement, a moment shared gratitude in my heart as I relished the moment and let the smile on my face ripple into my cells to savour
So grateful was I to have been going slow enough to notice that first tulip and the associated feelings it evoked. It wasn’t the most perfect tulip but it evoked the most perfect feelings of love and gratitude.
Gratitude – one of the keys to slow living.
Did you know that September is Australian Organic Awareness Month?
The campaign aims to spread the important values of certified organic across all industries including food, beverages, skincare, cosmetics, textiles, cleaning products, garden products and even pet food.
The values include:
• Non GMO
• Free to range
• Biodiversity friendly
• Sustainably fished
• Socially responsible
• Pasture fed
and of course grown free from harsh synthetic pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and added hormones.
Five Benefits of Choosing Certified Organic:
1. Good for the soil – Organic systems rely on a modern and scientific understanding of ecology and soil science, while also depending on traditional methods of crop rotations to ensure fertility and weed and pest control.
2. Good for the environment – Organic systems aim to reduce dependence on non-renewable resources. Organic production aims at all times towards sustainability whilst having best management of the environment and wildlife as a priority.
3. Good for people – Organic based ingredients have been shown in a number of studies to contain more vitamins, nutrients and cancer-fighting antioxidants than non-organic ingredients.
4. No synthetic chemicals – Organic systems prohibit the use of artificial chemicals, pesticides and fertilisers.
5. No GMOs – Certified Organic products are produced without GMOs, which are prohibited in the standards for organic food and farming.
Information obtained from austorganic.com and miessence.com.au
I encourage you to get on board and if you’re not already using organic products then please explore and use this month as an incentive to clean up your diet, skincare program, household cleaning products or gardening products and see if you can make some changes that will become new habits for the rest of your life.
Living in the moment! No mat, no planning, just a waterfall, a rush of pranic energy and an opportunity seized…
Hello reader yogis,
Kel here, hijacking Sarah’s blog while she’s away in the Eastern states. We travelled over together to attend a module of Dru Yoga Teacher Training – me so I could finally finish my course, and Sarah so she could be a senior teacher on the module. We met some lovely people while on module, many of whom wanted Sarah to stay! Don’t worry, she’s coming back, but not ’til next week, so you get my insight this week.
You are probably all familiar with the Energy Block Release sequences of Dru. They are powerful tools to move energy on different layers of being. On this particular module, we learned a new EBR and were invited to dedicate the practice to something we wanted to achieve or develop. The instruction was to focus on something intrinsic and all-encompassing, rather than a singular or material goal. In the past I have gone as specific as focussing my energy on successfully completing a maths exam (which seemed to work), so it was interesting to consider something broader.
At first I wasn’t sure. Love? Compassion? Joy? But none of these things felt like things I needed to bring into my life; I am fortunate to already have love and joy in my life. Where, I wondered, am I stuck? I thought about what I was about to do – an energy block release.
Where do I feel blocked?
I spend a lot of my time training in ballroom dancing. I’ve been doing it for nearly ten years, loving it, joyful for the pleasure of it, but always feeling inferior. I didn’t train as a kid, so I don’t come to dancing with the flexibility that comes from training as a kid. I felt like I was never going to be the dancer of my dreams because I wasn’t flexible enough, and wasn’t able to become flexible enough. Anyone who’s groaned when the ties come out for hamstring stretches probably knows how long it takes to get microscopic improvements.
Physical flexibility then. Perhaps, I thought, I could use some flexibility in my thinking too. If I was willing to bend on the idea that a dancer must be able to do the splits to be good, or willing to consider that becoming more flexible is even possible, that might help. I had a suspicion that flexibility of thought and attitude were things I would do well to adopt.
Right. Flexibility in all layers of being! Bring it on.
I went through the movements feeling good. I was bringing in flexibility. But as I got to towards the end of the EBR sequence, a realisation crept over me: I don’t need to ‘bring in’ or become flexible. I already am flexible. I just have to release anything that gets in the way of that.
Sounds obvious, but here’s the thing: I already am all of the things I need to or want to be. I have everything within me. And if you’d asked me before – do you have everything you need within you – I’d have said yes. I’ve been told that. I even believed it. But I didn’t know it, deep down. I was letting other beliefs, deeper ideas, get in the way. Ideas about being inadequate. Ideas about being untrainable. They were the problem, not my lack of early training or my inability to think differently.
The point was simple, and it probably would have applied to any quality I was looking for in my life: I already have everything. It’s just a matter of what I want to express. The EBR sequence clarifies what I can let go of – the energy block – to be better able to express and embody what I want to be. It can do that without me having to go anywhere or do anything except be present and willing.
Without even meaning to, I’ve come back to one of Sarah’s ‘three keys’ that she’s been talking about – presence. Interesting how it is all linked. I hope that gives you something to consider when you next practice an EBR, or perhaps resonates with your own experiences and discoveries. Sarah will be back next week and in the meantime, I leave you with a photo of a vibrant daffodil we found on our travels 🙂
Kel
This particularly delectable treat was served at the July Soul Spa. Here is the recipe for your enjoyment!
Although gluten-free, it does use some refined sugar. Next time Kel is getting creative in the kitchen, she might play around with some different sweeteners and if she is successful, I’ll give you an update. Of course if you are the adventurous type in the kitchen, feel free to do your own experiments and comment below if you have any ideas.
A couple of weeks ago, I reflected on being half way through my year of slow living. Slow living is about becoming more aware, more conscious of the wonder of the world around us. I identified three keys to unlocking the power of our consciousness. I then brought these to the most recent Dru Soul Spa.
You don’t need to nominate a year of slow living or raising consciousness. That’s an exercise – a valuable one, yes – but the real thing is to bring these ideas into your daily life.
I challenge you with committing to the three keys of slow living:
Commitment
See where commitment might serve you in daily life. What would it feel like to commit to ten minutes of silent sitting every day before your start your day? Or five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening before you go to bed?
Presence
Can you commit to practicing being more present firstly with yourself and secondly with the people you love in your life? When they are talking to you, stop whatever you were doing and be there, fully present, and hear them. Take time to listen to yourself too. How are you feeling? Can you acknowledge and release energies or thoughts that are no longer serving you?
Gratitude
Can you make a commitment to stop and acknowledge every day three things you are truly grateful for? Maybe keep a diary or a photo board, or write them on the fridge with a whiteboard marker.
Feel free to share your findings with me and meanwhile, be kind to yourself! It is never too late to start these practices. If you miss a day, start again with loving kindness, trusting that with your genuine intention, it will turn into a habit that serves you well.
I invite you to walk with the question of “Who am I?”
Or, “Who am I when I let go of the emotions, beliefs, perceptions, and roles that mask my true sense of self?”
We continue on our journey of awakening consciousness by coming to our practice with a sense of wonder, an awareness that each time we come to our practice, we are never in the same place as before. We are affected by so many outside influences such as our environment, the people we share our life with, and our physical state of being. We’re also shaped by our thoughts and beliefs, our perceptions, emotions and feelings. All these affect us moment by moment and move through our various layers of being, sometimes passing through and other times getting stuck, like a nagging annoyance that we can’t shake off. Therefore we must come to our practice with a sense of wonder, wondering what we can discover in this session about ourselves that we might not have noticed before, what might be lurking in the deeper layers, ready for release and freedom? Whatever is there can only achieve freedom by first coming to our attention.
How do we explore with this wonder? Take the same practice and do it again. And again. And then do it again, because you are never the same when you step onto your mat, and your experience will be different every time. If you went deep last time, this time you can go deeper. You will find something else to look at, acknowledge, and release. We are not attending yoga classes, events or retreats to be entertained with more and more content of new postures and sequences that would only act to serve the ego and keep you from going deeper and deeper. We are here to delve into the question of “Who am I?” You are not a yoga practitioner. That is something that you do, but if you didn’t do it, you would still be you. These are the roles and perceptions. They are tools for exploring ourselves, not descriptions of ourselves. With that in mind, walk with the question:
“Who am I?”
As we are working on this sequence for our winter term of yoga I thought you might like a video of the sequence so you can practise at your leisure. Hope this helps and of course we will be working on this for the remainder of this term so you will soon have it stored in your memory and it will flow beautifully for you, giving you all the energy you need to move through your day energised and vibrant.
