What choices are you making?

I believe that there is a huge difference between choice and habit. Making a choice, also known as a decision, requires presence, awareness, and discernment. Habit is a default setting. Habit is you on repeat. Habit, is your foot on the gas while you are asleep at the wheel. We become what we repeatedly do. Sean Covey Since most of our daily behaviors are habituated we stay on our track, comfortable with the familiar. Humans dislike discomfort and when I say dislike I mean HATE, humans hate discomfort. It doesn’t matter one lick if the habit is helping or hurting you, I guarantee you that even your baddest, darkest, ickiest habit is comfy like a perfectly worn pair of jeans. So many people desire change. They want it so badly they can taste it. They yearn for it. Yet they run their day exactly as they did the day before. Each habit bolstering the track they are on. They get to the point where even the desire to change becomes habituated. How many friends do you have that are talking about creating the same changes in their lives that they were embarking on a decade ago? Life is a series of choices. Each choice leads to the next, a chain reaction that starts in the past and impacts our future. Minor choices, major choices, and all the choices in between create ripples of impact, ripples of possible change. Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind. Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening. The simple truth is that when we change it is going to...

Heal Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow!

Our thoughts dictate whether we are in peace or strife, pain or pleasure.  Often we don’t realize that our thoughts are on repeat – the majority of thoughts you think today are the same as the day before. Have you ever tried to listen in and hear what you are saying to yourself? Are you nice to yourself or are you downright mean? You might be shocked by what this practice of awareness will reveal to you. In Heal Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow Brianna will discuss the power of thought and its role in moving you towards Joy or Despair....

Singing in the Sunrise

I always loved singing but when I first started with yoga I hated chanting. HATED it.  In my world chanting was not singing – at that point in my practice my personal comfort zone was so narrow and tight that I am amazed I could breathe. Looking back I think it was the delivery of my first teachers that turned me off so much. In the classes I attended chanting seemed tortured, usually the teacher was loud and everyone else was whispering.  We were all uncomfortable and for years I thought it was the lamest most antiseptic thing ever. Sometimes I would get so frustrated by chanting in a class that I would simply roll up my mat and go. I was years into my practice before I attended my first Kirtan and my belief about chanting shifted. Kirtan is a beautiful practice of call and response chants.  I realized then that chanting is uplifting, it is freeing – my first Kirtan was absolutely opposite of every experience I had had with chanting until that moment.  I fell in love with the practice – in LOVE. Singing as healer is as old as human kind.  It is part of every tradition.  Like songs chants can be short and sweet or long and elaborate.  By nature chants are repetitive and repetition is a known doorway to the meditative mind. Chanting is an energetic expression and a powerful tool of healing.  Now, I use it daily and infuse it into my world by chanting while driving, or cooking, or showering. I interweave it into my classes and try to inspire my...

Learn to breathe through discomfort

This past year I feel like I have been seated in a sea of discomfort in many of the facets that make up my life.  Nothing is horrible but it is uncomfortable. I feel wiggly inside and often I want to run away. If you start to feel uncomfortable or hurt, sad, tired, depressed, or angst ridden, where do you go? Are you able to allow yourself your feeling? Or do you cover it over, metaphorically burying the sharp object in the sand, and try to pretend it isn’t there. Choose your poison, the list of ways to escape is endless. I believe that a powerful tool that rolls off of the yoga mat into our daily life is the requirement that we actively practice presence while remaining in discomfort.   Recently I was flipping through Teaching Yoga and stumbled on this simple yet encapsulating statement: In [practice], stay in non-painful discomfort – breathe and transform. Relate the discomfort in [practice] to the discomfort in life…stay with the difficult feelings as a way to explore breakthroughs, cultivating balance and strength in the [practice] and applying this to the healing process. ~ Teaching Yoga by Mark...

I am aware that I am breathing in. I am aware that I am breathing out.

When I first started with Yoga I was so uncomfortable with myself that being present was a very difficult thing. For that reason I hated to hold stillness and observe my breath. Even when guided to by a teacher I didn’t do it and sometimes to be entirely honest I just left. The breaking of my resistance to breath-work took time and didn’t occur until I encountered an entirely different style of yoga then I was practicing. In 2001, a friend invited me to yoga (which at that time I defined as Vinyasa) and drove me to a Kundalini Yoga class. Almost five years into the practice and the turbaned woman in white who greeted me made me distinctly uncomfortable.  If I could have, I would have immediately run away. A traditional Kundalini Yoga practice is made up of Kriyas, repetitive movements that utilizes both powerful breath-work and chanting. Everything about Kundalini made me uncomfortable but as the class started that day I made up my mind to do it anyway. So I breathed, chanted, stomped my feet, and jumped around like a crazy person long after I wanted to stop. As the class progressed I moved through a litany of emotions but at the end I was calm, I was still, I was aware of my breathing and at peace. I was changed. In fact that one class altered my whole perception of Yoga. It shifted me forever. One of the most remarkable and lovely parts of being a teacher is having the opportunity to observe the transformation that the practice inspires in others.  Sometimes those shifts are...

Is that you or is that me?

Historically it has been difficult for me to remain calm when others are being emotional. Like an absorbing mirror I breathe their emotion in.  Always categorized as extremely sensitive, it wasn’t until my late 20s that I realized my mood was transient because I was constantly absorbing other people’s feelings. My personal boundaries were so blurred that I didn’t realize where I ended and others began. My energetic awareness shifted one day waiting for the ATM in a line that was two people deep. I went from feeling happy and light to being pissed. It was a heady enough shift that I stopped and asked myself: “where is this emotion coming from.” It was then I realized the line had grown and was full of agitated people. Without a doubt, my willingness to make inquiry was rooted in my time on the mat.   Since then I tune in when I feel myself shift and I ask: “Is this really my emotion or is it theirs?” That question and the awareness to ask it changed my life and set me on a path of energetic exploration.  Sunrise at the Healing House I first began to share the energetic toolkit that I developed as a presentation in Charm City Yoga’s teacher training about four years ago.  In it we discussed mirror neurons, the idea of a professional persona, the need for grounding through presence, protection through appropriate boundaries, and the awareness and willingness to release.  I have made this presentation numerous times and its content has grown into a three-day retreat that I offer once a year.   During my most...