The Fall Soma Yoga Schedule, Soma Yoga Retreat in Yelapa Mexico, Soma Yoga & Transformation

Dear friends and yogis:

One of my longtime yoga students, Tracey Scanlan and I are offering a Soma Yoga retreat in Yelapa, Mexico, Dec. 1-8. The full flyer is at the end of this newsletter. Please speak to us if you have questions. It’s going to be a marvelous retreat, an opportunity for deep renewal and awakening.

Our fall schedule at Shanti Yoga studio is just starting. I am now teaching my Saturday morning class as usual, from 10am-11:30am, and a Wednesday evening class, from 5:30-7pm. Please come and bring a friend with you. Your yoga buddy receives their first class with me for free. And our new punch pass, 5 classes for $48, has no expiry date on it any longer.

I have been encouraging all of my students to relate to their yoga practice as a living, evolving thing. If we do this, then our experience keeps growing deeper and more alive-we stay on the ‘living edge’ of what is unfolding for us.

Since the spring, we have been going deeper, opening up to ‘the inner body,’ the whole field of energy and presence that underlies our physical body. When we are able to directly contact the aliveness that the body is actually made of, our capacity to heal, regenerate and renew ourselves really opens up.

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Last night my partner Jonathan and I had a very simple and powerful conversation. As we were preparing dinner he said, “I’m really struggling inside myself.”

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“I’m experiencing a global feeling of resentment, and I don’t like it at all.”

“Can you change it? “ I asked him. “Can you actually choose the feelings that arise in you, moment to moment?”

“Well, I’m telling myself that I should be able to, that I should be able to choose something else right now, other than this resentment.”

“But is that true?” I asked him. “If you ask the part of you that really knows, can you actually exercise that kind of control over your experience?”

He paused for a moment and dropped inside himself. “No,” he said, “I can’t. The only thing I have control over is how I respond to what arises.”

“And what happens,” I asked him, “when you focus on not liking that feeling and wanting it to go away?”

“It gets worse.” he said, “It feels solid and compacted.”

“And for me, “ I said, “ in relation to difficult feelings, I often get caught in wanting to know why-why am I feeling like this, what is this really about? But as long as I am resisting what is, there is no insight, just suffering.  When I finally stop struggling, and open to whatever is here-then directly out of the experience itself, insights begin to flow.”

“Yes, “ he said, dropping his shoulders, and taking a deep breath, “that’s just how it is. When I decide that I can’t stand my present experience, I end up being resentful about being resentful!”

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