Tag: magic

10 tips to deal with the festive season yogi-style

KathrinLeave a comment

Forget about any end of the year stress and find peace of mind during the holidays with these techniques:

  1. Keep on practicing. No time to take a class? No worries, practice at home. Turn your favorite music on, it might be slow and calming or fancy and rhythmic – whatever your practice asks for is right. Start with some warm up, a couple of sun salutations and just continue flowing, allow your body to guide you. If this doesn’t work for you, youtube has loads of classes!
  2. Don’t care about time. Got 15 min? Practice. Got 60 minutes? Practice. All that counts is to show up and move your ass.
  3. Meditate. Right after waking up, before sleeping or any time in between. Same here, time doesn’t matter that much, even just 5 min a day will have an impact. Too much noise around? Go out, do a walking meditation!
  4. Practice yoga off the mat: stay present. What ever you do, do just that. Be fully there.
  5. Don’t listen just to answer. When you listen, hear and understand what someone wants to share with you, it’s not about you.
  6. Breathe. Lengthen your breath into your belly, extend your exhales. The easiest you can do to nourish yourself, calm down and refocus.
  7. Be grateful for all that is now. Literally everything. All the beauty, everything that is perfect and also the rather difficult and complex things. Everything has a reason, so just embrace it!
  8. Stop judging. Oh yeah, particularly during stressful times we tend to be less tolerant. But finally, this doesn’t help at all. The moment you recognize you’re about to judge, take a deep breathe, let it go, smile.
  9. Enjoy everything you do! Accept an appreciate your decisions. No matter if you’re attending a class, baking cookies or taking a nap, enjoy it.
  10. Repeat and surrender to the magic!

Unexpected feelings

KathrinLeave a comment

We put so much focus on our physical wellbeing, but what about our emotional and mental? When practicing yoga, we do both, we work on our body and mind. I’m not referring to any yoga practice off the mat, for now it’s still about practicing asanas.

A way to recognize that we are working on other layers too, is when unexpected feelings pop up. Are you sometimes getting emotional during or after practice? No worries, you’re not alone! Sometimes all of a sudden we face certain reactions in class, that might feel strange. We feel tears running down our face, we get upset or sad… without really knowing why. As if a button was pushed and the doors are wide open for any kind of emotions to flow.

What happened? Well, yoga isn’t just a workout for our muscles! When we reach deeper levels, we do exactly this, we open doors. Particularly in yin yoga, when we’re working on the connective tissues and facia, it’s all about opening and release. Yin yoga is the art of letting go. When touching areas where we store our emotions, such as the hips, it can be really liberating, but same time we also face those emotions we’re about to let go.

Yoga works on different levels. And if you feel emotional, no matter what kind of yoga you’re practicing, it shows you, that something happens within and this is just stunning beautiful. Accept it, embrace it! Allow these feelings to be there, go into them, see, look at the details, feel, give room, be a mental observer, without any judgement.

Guide your breathe into this sections, take a deep inhale and exhale everything out that you don’t need anymore. Let it go. Try a little smile, enjoy what you are capable of! You’re pure magic!