A new year has arrived. And in the midst of the surreality and heartache of the news headlines, somehow I have found myself overcome with waves of gratitude.

I cannot pinpoint what has shifted, but these waves feel more tender, more urgent, more precious than usual.

“Pay attention!” they intone, “This IS the ‘wild, precious life’ Mary Oliver wrote about. You are already living it, and approaching 50! A whole year has again passed, and a whole year is again ahead (if you’re lucky), but here you are, NOW, again. What is being taken for granted? What can be cherished? What can be let go? What is ready to be birthed?”

I hope today and this holiday weekend finds you healthy and nourished on every level, amid an abundance of joy and peace. It’s been some time since I’ve sent something to your inbox. It seems like there is much to say, but lately my practice has been an endeavor to listen.

Do you need some beauty in your inbox – instead of another Black Friday email promotion? :)
Here are a few of the beautiful things with which I’ve been soothing my senses lately:

The Pause Pod (in its prior form) has been on hiatus for awhile, so I’m very excited to share that Jaime and I are offering a “mini” version of The Pause Pod this October: Yoga for Perimenopause – an in-person, 4-week series at 8 Limbs Yoga (Phinney Ridge location) in Seattle.

This upcoming series is geared toward those who are either in the initial stages of the transition (or suspect they might be getting there).

Participants can expect discussion, embodied yoga practices, and plenty of rest time – all in community with other folks on this meno-adventure. Our goal is to reframe the conversation, support and empower participants with resources, self-care tools, and the reassurance that they are not alone at this time in their lives!

“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty.
It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.
The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” 

My invitation to us all today:

Let’s remember that behind the Labor Day holiday lies a critically important, centuries old, sometimes violent continuum-history of sustained and often heroic efforts by countless human beings to gain basic and decent working and living conditions for us all, including the right to rest.

I’ve said this before, and I will say it again: We do not need to earn rest.
It is a birthright.

I remember being told as a child that time would feel faster and faster as I grew older. I have found this to be 100% true. Is it simply because we have so much more lived experiences and memories stacked up in relationship to the span of a single year? I don’t know, but here we are at the end of August. Somehow. Already.

I am seeking individuals who are willing and able to commit to a series of four (4) private yoga therapy sessions with me. This will include an initial intake session, plus 3 follow-up sessions. (Additional sessions will be an option.) Sessions can be done together in-person in Seattle, WA, online anywhere in the world, or a combo of both.

MANY of you have expressed interest in this part of my training. I’m excited to announce that my waitlist is now open! If you wish to learn more when the time comes, please complete THIS FORM.

I’m pretty excited to announce that I’ve transitioned over to a new scheduling software that will allow you (or someone you know) to book private sessions with me, manage your appointment(s), and even purchase gift certificates – all online, at any time!

As a reminder, I offer both in-person sessions and online sessions. So those of you who don’t live in Seattle can still practice with me!

Bhramari pranayama (bee’s breath) can be a wonderful way to lengthen your exhale, quiet your mind, and stimulate your Vagus nerve and therefore your parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”). Even kids often love this practice!

A couple weeks back, I was listening to All Things Considered, and this segment caught my attention: Teens say social media is stressing them out. Here's how to help them. Reporter Michaeleen Doucleff said at one point during the story: “Enrich your life offline”.

Enrich your life offline.

Yes, yes, yes! How simply and perfectly put.

What happens when we put down the phone? Instead choosing to embrace our offline sources of spontaneity, joy, creative inspiration, IRL (in real life) connection? What are your favorite things to do that don’t involve a screen How much time are you spending doing those things? When was the last time you learned how to do something new & creative with your hands? Are you using screentime to check out, and calling it rest?

Cultivating a tech-balanced lifestyle is fast becoming a lost skill. Yes, a skill. And it takes strong intentionality to do it nowadays!

”

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.
It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.
It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

“

I’ve not been offering a lot of special events lately (due to my coursework time commitments). So, I’m quite excited to be collaborating with Michele for our Full Moon Restorative Yoga & Healing Touch event this Saturday evening, 6:00-8:00 pm, at Datza Yoga Studio in Eastlake.

The full moon is a monthly invitation to embrace your wholeness and life’s abundance; it’s also a potent time to invite peace, possibility, and clarity. If you’ve been finding it challenging to carve out time for yourself or are over-busy lately, this may be just what you need.

This will be a sweet, spacious, and s-l-o-w two-hour practice – with gentle movement, long-held Restorative postures, Reiki and/or massage, and optional aromatherapy.

There’s a lot of napping in my house. And it’s not just the pets that nap; we humans nap regularly, too. :) This will probably come as no surprise; as all of you know by now, I’m a huge advocate of rest, naps, and slowing down.

Why? Well, partly because I’m a recovering overfunctioning perfectionist who believed that what I accomplished was somehow more important than who I was being in the world. That I had to “keep up”, make straight As, do all the things, be all the places. That my value was tied to my level of productivity. That when I (or someone else) set a deadline, it was set in stone. These were all beliefs that I held (and I see so many people currently hold) and they took my toll on my mental health. These are hard habits to break/beliefs to release.

But, we can start somewhere.

This past week, it has felt as if summer suddenly jumped out of spring here in Seattle. We hit the 90s over the weekend. If you need a cooling, grounding practice to beat the heat, consider this on-demand class recording that I offered a couple year’s ago during another Seattle heat wave. Or maybe this one for cooling & heart tending! :)

I often use the Waking Up app and recently, during one of the guided meditations, Sam Harris (the creator) said something along the lines of not all problems can be solved by thinking.

It made me take pause.

Not all problems can be solved by thinking.

This struck me as deep truth.

Some of the most empowered and beneficial choices in my life have been made by listening to and following what I call “my heart-truth” – that is by feeling into my wisdom, rather than hyper-thinking, analyzing, or rationalizing.

The challenge here is that our world often overvalues thinking-mind and undervalues heart-centered truth.

Where is the balance?

The power of stillness.

I am willing to bet that just like me, all of you “get” it.

So, why do we resist/avoid/push it away/find it so hard to make a regular part of our lives?

I already know all my own answers (ie. excuses :); perhaps yours are similar. Not enough time. No space in my day. Important and urgent things to do. Dog needs a walk. Can’t keep up with email and homework, as it is! Etcetera…

It’s been 3 years since our world seemed to shift a little off its axis. In one of the more incredible and blessed traits of the adaptable human brain, now in hindsight those early months seem to have lost some of their intense flavor of surreality, desperation, and confusion (at least for me). However, when I re-read my journal entries or watch videos/read stories from that time, I remember well. My memories now feel like Time took some fine grit sandpaper to them, the impressions slightly smoother than I know they actually were experienced then.

My partner captured the photo above on one of those surreal late March 2020 days when the city was newly shut down and eerily quiet. We found joy that day in the way the light was reflecting off of the trippy purple MoPOP wall.

I remember the quietude brought on by the lack of traffic and tourists… and the sudden awareness of so much birdsong in our very urban neighborhood. There it was, an early recognition for me: for the birds and most other non-human species, our global pandemic was not an emergency. Indeed, quite the opposite.

Spring is coming. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the hellebore, crocus, and daffodil have pushed up their green shoots – some have even begun to bloom (as seen above)! The melodic (and sometimes territorial) songs of twitterpated birds are everywhere. I even saw my first hummingbird already sitting on her tiny nest this past weekend.

Another sign of spring… don’t forget to set your clocks ahead one hour before you go to bed this Saturday night!

In other exciting news… I am fundraising this month for Seattle’s own Yoga Behind Bars (YBB)!

Join me and special guest Laura Roberts for a deluxe version of my regular Sunday night Candlelight Restorative class THIS coming Sunday! Laura will accompany the 90-minute practice with her beautiful crystal bowls. It will be a sweet evening of deep vibrational healing & rest. Dress cozy, bring your fave eye covering, and come as you are.

It’s February. The new year has emerged, and the first glimpses of spring are showing themselves in the Pacific Northwest. Plans are percolating that stretch into the late spring and summer already! Despite so many other dark things happening in the world, I feel glimmers of hope renewed.

This is the time of year when my former studio, Seattle Yoga Arts, would have launched the popular “Love the One You Are” campaign. The studio’s chosen theme for this month that contains Valentine’s Day was to embrace and wholeheartedly love yourself, from the inside out… to flip the script on the “I’m not ______ enough” culture that we all swim in. We teachers constructed classes that wove the beautiful and important yoga teachings of self-love, self-regard, santosa (contentment), svadhyaya (self-awareness), ahimsa (compassion), brahmacharya (balance), ishvara pranidhana (surrender), and so on.