Tag: meditation

How to quieten your mind

KathrinLeave a comment

You can’t? Welcome to the club! To not be able to quieten ones mind is one of the mysteries we tend to believe.

As long as you’re busy trying to calm your mind by getting rid of all thoughts, sorry to tell you, it’s not gonna happen. Well… let’s be more specific: you can calm your mind, but you won’t be able to stop your thoughts of having a party when they feel like it. Even worse, as soon as you feed them, maybe through following them or telling them to leave, they got you.

Instead, ignore them. Let them pass. Don’t give them any attention, but bring your awareness to your breath. No matter if you’re meditating, practicing asanas or just include a little break into your day, it’s a quite good idea to fully focus on your breath. Feel your breath, listen, follow your breath through your body and concentrate just on this. It helps to be fully aware and keep your focus.

If this isn’t enough, you can add a mantra. A short mantra that you recite mentally. This keeps your mind busy and guides your focus. The beauty of a mantra is of course additionally it’s meaning. I like to use Sanskrit mantras, as they require a bit more concentration. Just saying a mantra mentally and repeat, non stop.

I’ve got some suggestions for you, some short mantras I like to use, particularly in meditation:

  • Aham Prema (I am love)
  • Aham Brahmasmi (I am the universe)
  • Sat Shit Ananda (truth, consciousness, bliss)
  • OM Mani Padme Hum (the sound of silence, the jewel in the lotus)
  • OM Ram Ramaya (an invocation to Rama, whose perfection exists in us all, to radiate confidence and strength)

As everything, it’s not just a one shot, but implementing a regular practice!

Pause

KathrinLeave a comment

The most challenging practice is to pause. Terrible pain in my ribs released a huge moaning out of my mouth and made me fall on my face in chaturanga. Damn. Not again. I can’t practice asanas since two weeks and I’m close to freak out. I know, not very yogic. I miss my Ashtanga practice badly! At least some yin yoga postures are manageable and do the daily work to calm me down.

What do I have to learn? Patience. Trust. Let go. Looks like I’m getting this lesson once in a while the hard way. But hey, I take the challenge, I’m working on it. I meditate, sending my breath through all my cells. The good thing about it, I use the time to bring all my attention to the yoga off the mat. Read here what else yoga has to offer. There’s a lot to learn and to do and I have to admit, it’s time to invest a bit more time here!

And for the time being, getting up, is my ultimate yoga practice.

NEW! NEW! NEW!

KathrinLeave a comment

Yogis, TUNEin:CALM is opening its doors and will finally start this year!

TUNEin:CALM is about learning certain tools to turn the volume down and tune in. I’m currently planning a series of workshops, which will be run on a monthly base (Saturdays) and take place from 6 participants.

Please let me know if you’re interested — see all details here, so we can schedule this first one. Are you in? Click here to let me know.

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!

Creating

KathrinLeave a comment

Yogis!

I’m working on the Yin classes for our retreat next year — and I’m happy to give a hint on what to expect:

Next to the Ashtanga or Vinyasa classes in the morning, we will practice Yin Yoga in the evenings, which means we will go into the postures and hold them for several minutes. Our focus will be on our breath while we will strengthen the mobility of the joints and stretch the deeper muscles, the connective tissues and fascia. The meridian systems will be stimulated and inner organs massaged.

Each class will focus on one of the five elements — wood, fire, earth, metal and water. We will learn about the relating organs as well as the assigned emotions. No worries, we won’t go to much into the theory, but experience it!

Each class will have an introducing meditation and/or breathing sequence to prepare us for the calming, but intense practice.

I’m so looking forward to seeing you there! Get the details here and contact me for any questions!

Meditation is Mindfulness is Yoga is Meditation

KathrinLeave a comment

Mindfulness is not just a hype everyone is talking about at the moment, in these times it’s the key to stay sane. But what is mindfulness? Mindfulness means being in the present moment, in the here and now, without any judgment. The past is gone, nothing we can do about it. The future is not yet there, so why waisting our time with being rather in the past or in the future? We miss all we have, the present moment.

I’m working quite intense on this since some time and during a yoga class I taught recently, I recognized how easy it is for me to be fully in the present moment when I teach. I’m focused and concentrated, no thoughts that don’t belong to exactly what I’m doing. Why is it so easy in this situation and difficult in others? Is there any magic formula to be mindful? Nope. But passion is a good trigger to keep us exactly where we should be, in the here and now.

Luckily there are different techniques that help us learning how to stop the ‘autopilot-mode’ and focus on the current moment. Meditation is one of them. I wrote already a lot about it and my struggles (https://tuneinyoga.com/2016/07/16/meditation-vs-meditation/), but I didn’t gave up, I so much wanted to sit cross legged in stillness. I was looking for this quietness in my head, this emptiness, that I already found when practicing asanas. And I finally found it. In my daily meditation practice, I understood how my thoughts appear in my head and where. Just through moving them mentally to a different place, I can get rid of them. My god, so easy and it took my ages to find out! Well, this is my way and it might not be yours, but I cant tell you, it’s so worth to find out!

The more and the longer I practice meditation, the easier it get’s for me to stop the craziness of jumping between not existing time zones. The present moment is all that counts, all that matters, all that exists.

Give it a try! If you are in the Zurich area, stay tuned, learn how to create calm in your every day life and we will do it all together — soon to come: TUNEin:CALM 🙂

Let the games begin!

KathrinLeave a comment

Woop woop – the work started! Just creating the first Yin Yoga sequence for my Yoga Retreat next year. A new book with blank pages is waiting to be filled…. We will practice Yin, Pranayama and Meditation each evening to relax and unwind as well as soothe our soul. We will float into the evenings with a huge smile on our faces 🙂

Stillness

KathrinLeave a comment

Is there a difference between stillness and meditation? Is it the same? Is it finickiness? Honestly, I don’t care, for me, there’s a difference, as I don’t have the same expectations when talking about stillness vs meditation. A different approach.

This is how I start my practice, and even if I don’t practice, I rarely miss this moment, my moment of stillness, my moment of deep connection, my moment of emptiness. It’s a readjustment for me, kinnda back to neutral.

This is how I practice stillness:

On my mat, going into childs pose, with my knees mat distance, big toes together. Allowing my hips to open, my ribcage to settle between my legs, my chest sinking down onto the mat. Couple of deep breaths, slow down, opening, letting go. Feeling pureness, just me, nothing else. All that comes to my mind is an animalistic sound, „ahhhhhhhhhh“….. a moment where it’s easy to eliminate any thoughts. It’s also a moment of honesty, I can just be myself and experience what’s going on with me. No matter what.

A perfect preparation to teach a class. A perfect way to start my practice, it feels neutralizing, I easily forget about the day, don’t care what’s on the schedule, just this moment, my practice. It’s magic.

Ashtanga yoga and Yin yoga are the same

KathrinLeave a comment

Ups. What? Ashtanga yoga and Yin yoga are the same.

Let this melt in your mouth, and even more, swallow it. Don’t reply darling, read first:

What we do in Yin yoga: we hold a posture, we connect, we tune in, we feel what we’re doing. We breathe intense, we relax. We meditate.

What we do in Ashtanga, a Yang yoga practice: the same. Really? Well, we don’t relax, but it’s about finding ease. We make our practice a meditation. Yes, when practicing Ashtanga, we move a lot, we sweat. And best case we find ourselves in a moving meditation.

If you look at the Yin/Yang symbol, you can see there’s a black dot in the white and a white dot in the black. There’s always both, there’s a little Yin in every Yang, there’s a little Yang in every Yin. It’s all about balance. Obviously not just in yoga, it’s everywhere, literally.

So, where exactly is the Yin in Ashtanga? Think about it. It might be different for you, but for me it’s this: when holding a posture for 5 counts (or more in the closing sequence). We connect, we aim for stillness, we are in deep ujjay breath, looking for steadiness as well as ease. That’s Yin! Even if we don’t relax, we get kind of soft in all our stability. We don’t close our eyes like we do in Yin yoga, but we practice drishti. A focus point that supports us to go internal. We tune in, we feel our body, we feel what we’re doing. Same as we do in Yin, right.

I like the idea of balancing. Doing some Yin to balance my Ashtanga practice, but also being aware of where there’s Yang in my Yin practice and of course the other way around, where I find Yin in Ashtanga.

Same objectives, same tools. Just such a different implementation!

Don’t break your body – do yoga 

KathrinLeave a comment

There seem to be about 900 asanas… can you imagine?! Darling, honestly, you can only master a certain set of them. So why don’t you take it easy, forget about the rest, forget about just jumping from one level to the next. It bears repeating, IT’S NOT IMPORTANT. You are not in a competition! I already wrote about this and I won’t stop repeating, as the principals of yoga go beyond asanas.

“Yoga is the journey of the self through the self to the self.” (Bhagavad Gita)

Yoga is transformation. You define the purpose. It might be bliss, higher consciousness, find your true self, you name it. For sure the final state isn’t a certain degree of flexibility or mastering super duper advanced postures. But the asana practice is the entry point, this is where we start our transformation.

I like the idea of my asana practice being a moving meditation. I experienced it a couple of times and it felt out of this world. An awesome connection, with me, with everything. It’s an approach about stopping the mind going crazy, it’s about detaching. Yoga isn’t just a fitness tool, yoga is about working on yourself. Yoga is a transformation. Transform your body, transform your mind.

The asana practice is just one of the 8 limbs – read more about it here.

Take care yogi, don’t break your awesome body, do yoga and enjoy life!