Date: Jan 24 - 25, 2009
Tuition: 175
Register: Click here to Register

Awakening to Unconditioned Being

Jan. 24-25.09

A yoga student of mine asked me a question after class one night. “What is Radiant Mind?” he asked.

“Radiant Mind,” I told him, “ is a training, in which many different kinds of people can discover their own way to access unconditioned awareness, and allow it to become part of their everyday life.”

“But what is that?” he asked me, “What is unconditioned awareness?”

“That is the part of you that is not separate from anything, that is OK, no matter what happens.”

“Oh boy, “ he said, “I’d really like to learn about that.

“Yes, “ I said, “in light of what is unraveling on a global scale right now, I can’t see any other way of meeting the challenges that face us. What might have seemed like something of a luxury, has now become a necessity.”

If awakening to unconditioned awareness calls to you, why postpone it any longer? Jump into the wide river of Radiant Mind, and let it reveal itself.

For more info or to register, click here.

Click here for more information about Radiant MindClick here for more information about Introductory Weekend

Date: Jan 17 -Jan. 18
Facility: 282
Tuition: $125
Register: Click here to Register

The Yoga of Effortless Being

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” (Mary Oliver)

Students are encouraged to join Shayla’s morning Soma Yoga Class in Nelson, from 10am-11:30am, as part of this retreat. We are doing this retreat near Ainsworth Hot Springs, so we have a chance to soak in the springs as part of our retreat.

In Soma Yoga we begin in a place of deep receptivity, with a willingness to listen to the intelligence that lives in every cell of our body, to listen and respond. Sometimes we are strengthening our core muscles, sometimes we are working with our flexibility, sometimes we are grounding our energy, sometimes we are working with the energy meridians, sometimes we are working with our brain patterns.  But we are not trying to control the life force in the body. We are opening, creating a much wider container so that the life force can flow freely, spontaneously.

How does that happen? It happens when I come back, in a very simple, easy way, to the simplicity of the moment when I am just feeling my body. Just breathing, opening to this moment, this experience, allowing my breath to hold it all, and the next moment, and the next.  A flow, an aliveness, that emerges out of stillness and comes back to it, again and again.

I can allow the energy that is usually entangled with the thoughts in my head to stream down into the body. I can feel the openness inside my head when I let the energy descend, down into heart, into belly, into earth.  I can feel the difference between the direct experience of this moment and what my thoughts are telling me about this moment.  I realize that the body is not what I think it is. I am not who I think I am. How fully alive am I actually willing to be?

Tuition: $125, includes yoga and our overnight stay. We will cook our dinner together, with each person contributing some of the food. Breakfast on Sunday will be granola or hot cereal, or whatever you want to bring.

For more information about Shayla and her work, visit barefootjourneys.net, or call 250.352.7908, toll free:1.866.795.4968

Click here for more information about Soma Yoga

Date: Dec 6 - 7, 2008
Facility: 240
Tuition: 140
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Click here for more information about The Heart of CommunicationClick here for more information about Retreat

Date: Nov 30 -
Facility: 259
Register: Click here to Register

Fee: By Donation

I’ve had people asking me about getting together to sing for a long time, and now I’m actually going to do it. I’ve been through some really hard times lately, and one of my greatest resources has been the power of both song and prayer. I’m offering this circle at ManiStone, where we will be singing, praying and just sitting together in silence.

A lot of people have told me how much they love to sing, and how they hold back because they don’t have a great voice. The kind of song circle I am offering has nothing to do with that. I also thought I couldn’t sing for many years, and I was wrong. I just kept singing, because I loved it, and bit by bit my voice opened up. Now I can even sing in front of groups.

So this is a circle where no-one needs to worry about how they sound. We are going to be learning how to sing from our hearts, and our bodies, how to open up our breath and listen to the whole group as one, as well as to ourselves. Music and sound have such a natural way of opening the heart, and releasing all the places in our being that get tied up in knots. We’ll also be learning some of the sounds and visualizations from Tibetan sound healing as we go along, which really help with opening up our bodies, hearts and voices.

For our first session, I’d like to teach you the Medicine Buddha Mantra, and one more of my favourites from India. If you have a song or chant you’d like to share with us, please bring it along.

Prayer-opening to the field of love/intelligence
It’s easy to think of prayer in a way that makes it seem like something archaic, precious, or irrelevant. My experience has been that if we can drop our ideas and beliefs about it, it is actually something quite natural and spontaneous, something we have all done at one time or another, without even calling it prayer.

Opening to the power of prayer can be amazing. Working with prayer reveals a lot about our whole relationship to life, to the universe, and to what we really care about. For me, prayer has been a way to drop my defences, and to ask from the heart for what I really want, without demanding or feeling entitled in any way. Each one of us can discover our own natural way of praying, something that is authentic, alive and constantly unfolding.

Then we can know, not because we believe it, but from our own deepest experience, that we are never without help, if we can really ask for it. It may not be the help we are hoping for, the help we are expecting or demanding, but help is always here.

When we pray and sing and sit together, we create a field of energy and consciousness that is tangible, a place where we can really begin to rest, to lay down our burdens and trust our own deepest resources and the mysterious movement of life itself.

Click here for more information about Singing and Prayer Circle

Date: Nov 19 -
Facility: 192
Register: Click here to Register

Dear friends:

We are having some wonderful classes, now that the dark and cold of November has brought us all back to our beautiful studio.

Current Classes: Saturday mornings: 10-11:30am, Wed. evenings: 5:30-7pm

I will be here each week until February, except for 8 days in December, from the 11th to the 19th, when I will have a great substutute teacher doing my classes. Any other classes that I will not be here for will be listed in this section.

Soma Yoga is evolving, deepening and unfolding in some exciting new directions. We are going much deeper with both our breath work and our work on the balls. I have done some new training in both areas, and am excited to bring both of these to both my new and old students.

Your first class is free with me. Just remind me that it’s your first, and I will offer it to you as a gift.
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We have also been focusing on building more core strength, grounding down into the earth, and experiencing how that core strength supports us in showing up for our life, and meeting each challenge as it arises.

The original purpose of yoga was to connect you with your authentic being, which is not a separate, static thing, but a living, flowing field of presence.
When we look at the body from the outside, it certainly appears as a solid object. But when we drop inside and open to our inner experience, all that we find is a stream of experience, sensation, and feeling. And when we let go a little more, we realize there is a lot of spaciousness and tenderness in this experience, an openness that lies at the heart of who we really are.

Soma Yoga gives us the opportunity in each moment to drop from the world of our thinking into the simplicity of feeling, breathing and letting go. When our yoga practice opens the heart, and reveals our connection to all living beings, it becomes a powerful force for transformation. This possibility exists for each one of us who is ready to receive it. All we need to begin with is our willingness.

Please note the Soma Yoga retreat coming up in Ainsworth in January.

Click here for more information about Soma YogaClick here for more information about Winter Schedule