The Need to Retreat
When I made the decision to pursue a career in yoga, my motivation was to attempt to create a career for myself that would allow me to pursue what I was passionate about: yoga (obviously), helping people live the greatest lives possible, and travel. The first two goals have proven to be inextricably linked and most accessible in my daily routine, but the travel part is something that involves much more planning and foresight, especially when organizing a yoga retreat. I have made it my mission to lead at least one retreat per year, a mission that was galvanized by last year’s incredible journey to Santorini, Greece. I brought people there because I had been there before and had been almost knocked senseless by the majestic beauty and surreal landscape of the island. Before that retreat was over, I was already working on possible destinations for future yoga vacations, and I decided that every retreat I held from that moment on would take place somewhere in the world where participants could count on beautiful, peaceful surroundings, and preferably in areas of the globe that would be once-in-a-lifetime destinations. So for 2012, I chose somewhere I had never planned on visiting, but had heard was second to none in terms of natural wonders and flawless beaches: Croatia.
Open to the Openness
My focus for the past week’s classes has been something I usually incorporate into my classes, but I felt it was so relevant to the process of examining how we live our lives that I decided to not only make it the focus, but to also write about it. My work in waking people up to their true selves and their true missions in this life basically always comes back to what I’ve been discussing with students this past week, so please feel free to consider this to be a fundamental truth, one from which all other aspects of one’s life stems.
Nothing Really Matters
I’ve got a question to ask you: how many of you believe that you are alive, on this earth, in this minute, where you are geographically, for a reason? How many of you really feel that? That you have a higher, loftier purpose than what you find yourself doing daily?
Like Sands Through The Hourglass
It’s been a week since my first encounter with Sharon Gannon and David Life, the creators of Jivamukti Yoga. Spending last weekend in Woodstock, New York at the Jivamukti Immersion Weekend was a fantastic opportunity to spend time with some friends who work in yoga as well, so time together is usually scarce at best…and our exposure to the teachings of Sharon & David was enlightening, to say the least. We were taught countless things, while being reminded and re-directed to countless others, but among everything we heard and discussed, I found myself honing in on something that became my focus of the week for my classes over the past 5 days, and I wanted to get it down here as well.
Immersed in Niyasa
As many of you already know, the past few years have been formative ones for me, almost Richter-scale-esque on many levels. My time at Centre Luna Yoga continues to be a real gift, and because it’s the closest thing to a Jivamukti studio that can be found in Montreal, I have been majorly influenced by the teachings of Jivamukti founders Sharon Gannon and David Life.
Immersing Myself
I’m in Woodstock, New York on a brilliantly sunny Friday morning, staring at the diffused sunlight pierce through the natural cotton drapes covering the windows in my room. The sounds of life in the house where I’m staying are starting to become more frequent as one by one, the others staying here with me wake […]
Landmarked
It’s 9am Monday morning, and I’ve slept in (as much as one can do with a new puppy) for the first time in four days. My head is still buzzing from my weekend at the Landmark Forum, and when I look back at my post from last week, I have to say that it ended up being everything I thought it would be, but if I thought I really had a grasp on the big picture, I was absolutely wrong. The forum needs to be experienced first-hand to actually see that regardless of what its detractors may say, this organization is helping people…guiding people…re-directing people…and ultimately, opening their eyes. It really is about empowering every single person (regardless of the usual demographic classifications we use to separate ourselves from each other) to become complete and whole, to face their fears, and to show them how those fears and obstacles that have often paralyzed them from living/growing/loving/expanding/sharing/hoping are based in the decisions that their 5-year-old selves made long ago.
Landmark or landmine?
Tomorrow morning I start the Landmark Forum, an internationally recognized organization that brings together those who would like insight into how they live and how the decisions they take dictate where they end up. Landmark is as well-known for having participants in their weekend-long program experience massive breakthroughs as they are for being labelled a cult, a sect and a shameless money-making machine. I was asked by Lululemon if doing the program would interest me, as their employees who know me believed that Landmark’s philosophies correlated well with my own, and I jumped at the chance to experience first-hand what Landmark is all about…but leading up to this weekend, I’ve experienced a multitude of emotions about my participation in the program, and at the suggestion of my friend Frances Vicente, I decided to put everything down here to have as a “before” reference once the weekend is over and I’m looking back at the whole experience.
Trivial Pursuits
About 12 years ago I lived in a massive apartment with my then-partner and our best friend. We three were always hanging out together, and we had decided that we might as well split rent three ways instead of rotating where we would hang out day after day…so we got this great place and each assumed our share of the (then-massive) rent. About a year after we moved, I walked into our living room (as one does) and noticed a pile of real estate listings with houses for sale, so I went to go speak to my friend to ask if he had any plans to move out in order to buy a house. He totally shrugged it off, saying he was just checking to see what was out there in the market but he wasn’t really looking. Cut to a few weeks later when he came home and proudly exclaimed that he had bought a house! So, trying to roll with the punches, I congratulated him and then asked him to give us his moving date as soon as he knew it because a) our rent was exorbitant and we needed to absorb his third of it, and b) our stove and fridge were his, and so I’d have to go buy new ones to replace his when he took them with him. Cut to a month later when I came home and saw the fridge being wheeled out the front door. Needless to say, our friendship pretty much ended there.
The Heart’s Memory
I’ve recently found myself getting involved in some pretty thought-provoking discussions with friends about the state of the world. From politics to religion, from daily dramas to life and death, it seems like there is a common undercurrent of negativity that we are being fed, and given the right company and circumstances, it erupts forth and instigates a healthy dose of communication and debate.