Balance Yoga Studio
For Women
Inspiration
Learning to Love
Sarah Jones
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” –Ray Bradbury
How many times in your life have you found yourself guarded? I think inherently we want to spread our arms around every being we see. We find love in everything around us when we are open to feeling that way. However life is not always that comfortable and that supportive. When life gets hard we tend to guard our feelings for fear of judgement or even feeling vulnerable. Yoga asks us to face these fears, to be open to confrontation, and to accept it. Does this mean we do not change? No of course not! Where would the world be if we had not progressed. However we do have the ability to see and examine how we react to it.
One way you can see this directly is awareness. Take for example, someone yells at you for no reason. What happens to your body? Do you tense up? Can you breathe? Where does your mind go?
Yoga simulates this same circumstance on the safety of your mat. It recreates this stressful environment to bring awareness to your body mind connection. Once your awareness is present, then the change really starts to happen. Afterall, awareness brings change!
In our postures we learn to breath deeply through the pain, through the tension, and find the joy, the openness, and even the love that we carry in our bodies, our thoughts, our actions, and our smiles.
Take a few moments to close your eyes today and think about how much love you inherintly have inside of you. Think of each inhale blossoming that love, and each exhale sending it out into your life, your world, and maybe even off to someone or something in your life that could really use it. Let the beautiful stuff out!
Hips!
Sarah Jones
Working on the hips can be pretty confrontational! It takes time and energy to learn how to let go of tension that we hang on to in the body and the mind. It is extremely important to breathe in these postures too. Try imagining that the breath is bringing space and freedom into the glutes, hips, joints, and muscles. Take a deep breath in, pause, then exhale it out. Continue this for 5-10 breaths. Then move into whatever posture it is that you are working on. Stay in the posture for 10-15 breaths aiming to extend the exhales. When you are done with the posture on both sides sit or stand breathing again for 5-10 breaths and see if you feel more aware of the space and freedom you created. It is a beautiful gift to yourself to practice this way at home. Take the time this month to take your practice home with you. Start by picking just one pose at a time to try at home and work on it all week. Explore how the pose makes you feel and notice if it brings up confrontation. If it does sit with it for a minute. Remember that in letting go you are opening up space for love to fill. One of my favorite books, Eat, Pray, Love, says, "If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with the doorway? It will rush in and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using whatever it is to block that door. Let it go." Elizabeth Gilbert
If you need some hip or letting inspiration try these
5 helpful yoga poses for the hips
Eat Pray Love the Book and Movie Links