Date: March 20th 2012
Time: Yoga 10:30 – 12:15 Lunch 12:15 – 13:00

There comes a time when dreams come alive, when our ideas become experience, and our actions call for forward movement. We have spent the winter thinking, planning and cultivating our creations. As spring approaches, now is the time to bring them to life.

In this workshop, we will use an ancient yogic kriya (series of yogic postures), our breath and a powerful meditation to awaken our motivating force. We will focus on the third chakra, which represents the fire element, in order to release fear, blocked emotions and uncertainty of the future. As we bring our third chakra into alignment, we will be connecting with our own personal power. When we own our personal power there are no limitations to what we can experience in life.

To finish our afternoon we will share together as friends and enjoy delicious vegetarian sandwiches, cookies and tea.

Creating a Solid Foundation

A solid foundation is the most essential thing in life. Trees need strong roots to grow; a building needs a strong base so it won’t crumble and fall; humans need to be solid and conscious of both their highest potential and who they are.

Throughout life we are influenced by society and we build a false identity of our “I am” (who we think we are) based on what others tell us. I believe our “I am” is limitless. The foundation of who we think we are reflects every experience we have: the people we attract, the work we decide to do and the dreams we choose to create. We are beautiful, compassionate, powerful, intelligent, creative and loving human beings. Our “I am” is our most basic foundation.

During the month of March we will work to break down and let go of the qualities we carry that do not serve our highest good. We will rebuild and move to align our own personal foundation with the person we choose to be in this moment. Our “I am” is our personal choice. We choose who we are and who we know ourselves to be. The third chakra in your body is where we hold the deepest power of our own identity. When our third chakra is strong we have the knowledge and stability to build and create our life. When the third chakra is strong we have the commitment and discipline to go forward even when challenges arise.

We will unite as a group to do meditations that will help us to clear our minds and change old patterns. We have the ability to create a foundation that will serve our higher good. My goal is for us to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say: “I love myself, I believe in who I am and I know I have the power to experience anything I want in life.”

I have decided to dedicate February’s yoga classes to opening up our power of communication. Representing the fifth chakra, communication is the ability to be vocal and express our ideas, feelings, needs and experiences to the people in our lives.

My goal is to move the blocked energy in our throat area, which may be keeping us from speaking up when it is necessary for us to communicate. Sometimes we feel inside that this may a difficult thing to do. However, it is so important that we have the confidence to ask for what we need, to say “No” when we can’t do something, and to share with those close to us what we are thinking and feeling inside. People don’t always know what what we are thinking or what we need. Good communication is the key to experiencing harmony, peace and understanding in our relationships.

Over the past five years, this has been one of the chakras that I myself have put a lot of focus and effort into. I grew up in an environment, and with a father, where I was not able to voice the things I needed to say. This made me fearful of speaking up in life: to teachers, in front of groups and in my relationships. After moving through certain yoga exercises and doing specific meditations focusing on the fifth chakra, I have made amazing progress and created permanent changes in my ability to express my needs and feelings to the important people in my life.

The fifth chakra also represents the tone and way we go about expressing ourselves to others. If we have had a family member that communicated through yelling, or with harshness, we might have picked up this behavior and started expressing ourselves in the same manner. Just being aware of how we communicate is so important and will help us to make any changes that may allow us to create stronger bonds and loving connections with those we are closest to.

Our goal this month is to build our confidence. To be direct, yet harmonious in our communication with other people, and find our own inner strength so that we will know when it is important for us to speak up, and when it may be wiser for us to remain in our own stillness.

January: Creating This Year’s Intentions

Our life experience is our own magnificent creation. I like to think of life as a story. A story that is written by our own imagination. We have the blank pages, the pencils and paints to create whatever it is we feel in our hearts.

On Jan 1, 2012 we begin a new chapter in the story of our lives. My yoga class for the month of January will focus on creating your intention for the new year to come, focusing on two main areas that will assist us in our creation. We will move through heart opening yoga sets that unleash our passion and love for the things that matter the most to us in this life. We will also move through yoga sets that focus on our commitment and discipline in life. This represets our third chakra, our navel area. When we have a strong third chakra we have faith in ourselves and confidence we can succeed.

Opening the heart will help us to know what we want. Regardless of whether we know in our mind what we need, when we open the heart we become honest with ourselves. Sometimes we settle in life because society, family, and other people tell us we need to live in a certain way. If we listen to our hearts we have the greatest possible chance of creating happiness and of having fulfilling experiences.

The navel area will give us inner strength. This area is responsible for giving us the power to move through challenges and obstacles which can arise in everyone’s life no matter who they may be. When this area is strong we have the ability to stay in balance and maintain our stability.

Our meditations will be aimed at learning how to silence the mind. I will teach you how to use your mind to set an intention and then release it to the universe. During meditation our soul and the soul of the universe become one. In this oneness we can plant the seed for our creation to begin its first stage of life. This is the beginning of all life experience.

Our goal this month is to merge with our heart’s purpose and set our highest intentions and highest goals for the new year.

A new year is about to begin as we say goodbye to 2011. A new chapter in life will open its doors as we enter 2012. Our final yoga class for this year will be focused on shedding away the things in our life that we do not need so we can start the year with a clear, fresh focus on where we want to go and what we want to experience.

Many of us hold on to negative emotions, poor habits, fears, and unhealthy relationships that do not serve our well-being. As we hold onto these energies, they often show up in our body as physical pain, sickness or unbalanced emotions. These are actually signals from your body that a shift is about to begin in your life, and some changes need to occur before it happens. Our body often needs a little downtime to cleanse and release the old toxins so that we can be renewed and prepared on a physical, mental and spiritual level.

The yoga set we will move through will specifically focus on eliminating the dis-ease in our body. We will use asanas, breathing and a meditative mind to assist us in cleaning out the body. The meditation will work on our subconscious mind, helping us to let go of habits and patterns that we have difficulty changing on our own. Meditation is thousands of years old and has extremely powerful healing qualities. This yogic set will help us to relax, breathe, and cleanse our mind and body. Together we will prepare ourselves in the best possible way for all the new experiences to come our way.

Namaste dear yoginis,

As most of you may have heard by now, I am leaving Japan at the end of this year. I love my life in Japan, and I am very fond of all the people I know here, especially everyone I’ve met through Imagine. But the time has come for me to move on, and search for new horizons. I will be returning to my motherland, South Africa, to reconnect with friends and family that I haven’t seen in over five years, and when Fall comes to Africa and Spring comes to Japan, I will be making my way to South America to learn Spanish and do volunteer work while traveling.

November will thus be my last month during which I’ll be teaching yoga at Imagine full-time. From December, my lovely friend Casey Easlick will be taking over some classes, and then teach permanently from 2012. I’m positive that you will enjoy her classes and I’m happy to leave you in her experienced, capable hands.

As it’s my last month, I decided to teach my favorite type of yoga: Vinyasa. The next few months of my life are going to be kind of crazy, hopping around between completely different countries, all of which have different languages, are at different altitudes and I’ll even been going through the seasons in a different order than what my body is used to. For me, the only way to go through all these extreme changes successfully and without stress, is to flow through it. By learning to not resist the changes around us, but to flow with it and through it is an important key to cultivating a lifestyle where stress will bounce off you and not crush you.

There is an excerpt from the book “Change your thoughts, change your life ? Living in the wisdom of the Tao” by Wayne Dryer that I’d like to quote:

The Tao and water are synonymous according to the teachings of Lao-tzu. You are water; water is you. Think about the first nine months of your life after conception: You lived in, and were nourished by, amniotic fluid, which is truly unconditional love flowing into you . . . flowing as you. You are now 75 percent water (and your brain is 85 percent), and the rest is simply muscled water.
Think about the mysterious magical nature of this liquid energy that we take for granted. Try to squeeze it, and it eludes us; relax our hands into it, and we experience it readily. If it stays stationary, it will become stagnant; if it is allowed to flow, it will stay pure. It does not seek the high spots to be above it all, but settles for the lowest places. It gathers into rivers, lakes, and streams; courses to the sea; and then evaporates to fall again as rain. It maps out nothing and it plays no favorites: It doesn’t intend to provide sustenance to the animals and plants. It has no plans to irrigate the fields; to slake our thirst; or to provide the opportunity to swim, sail, ski, and scuba dive. These are some of the benefits that come naturally from water simply doing what it does and being what it is.
The Tao asks you to clearly see the parallels between you and this naturally flowing substance that allows life to sustain itself. Live as water lives, since you are water. Become as contented as is the fluid that animates and supports you. Let your thoughts and behaviors move smoothly in accordance with the nature of all things. It is natural for you to be gentle, to allow others to be free to go where they’re inclined to go, and to be as they need to be without interference from you. It is natural to trust in the eternal flow, be true to your inner inclinations, and stick to your word. It is natural to treat everyone as an equal.

This month, on the yoga mats we will go through a series of flow sequences;
*Lower back flow
*Triangle flow
*Arm strengthening flow
*Warrior flow

Let us learn to be like water, and flow according to our true nature.
I’m looking forward to another month with you.

Namaste,
Marilu

Hello! My name is Casey. I am from Los Angeles, California, in the United States. For over five years of my life I was thinking to myself: I really want to live in Japan and get to know the Japanese people. I did not know how I could do it. In November of 2010, after years of patience, one of my long time dreams came true: I was invited to Japan to be a yoga teacher. I had been teaching yoga for over six years in California and lived in the Maldives Republic in 2009 where I taught yoga to people from all over the world. I have studied yoga for over seven years and traveled to Thailand, China and many places throughout America to expand my experience, knowledge and teachings of the yogic science.

In 2005 I retired from my job as a professional stuntwoman after experiencing several yoga classes that impacted me so deeply that they changed my life forever. Although I had a good career and many friends in the stunt community, I did not have a deep feeling of inner harmony and contentment that I really believed was possible to live with. When I began doing yoga I started to feel alive. Through simple postures and basic meditation my mind started to feel clear. I felt healthy and in balance with my physical body, and my heart began to open in the most amazing way. I felt so happy. I am a gymnast and martial artist and have been working with the physical body all my life. I have always been interested in how to use the body and mind together in order to live to our highest potential as human beings. Yoga united my mind, body and soul. It gave me direction and a higher purpose for my life. I decided to make a commitment to teach and show people how to use their mind and body to create a life of purpose, peace and love. It is my honor to be here in Japan to share what I have learned through my own personal life experience.

Opening the Heart’s Center

On the most finite level our human body is comprised of five elements: fire, water, ether, air and earth. We can put these elements together as one group and call it energy. To live at our healthiest and happiest it is important for the energy in our body to flow.

As humans, our energy flow can become blocked as we put our body and mind through emotional stress and challenging experiences. This is natural. The beauty of yoga is that we have a way to shift our stagnant energy and return to our basic foundation of balance and harmony.

In this workshop we will focus on the opening of the heart’s center. We will move through specific yogic postures that will help us to release the old emotions, tension and hurt feelings that we have held deep inside our heart’s center.

Our goal is to create a change… A new opening in our ability to feel, and know a higher experience of our most pure and simplistic state of being called Love.

Namaste Ashiya yoginis!

As a teacher I feel that in class there is a constant opportunity for role-reversal, and I always find myself looking at the students as my teachers. This month too, some of the students provided me with the idea of looking into balance as the topic for October’s yoga. After reading up on it and thinking about it, I realized that balance is a much more complex topic than I thought. I would like to share some of my findings with you.

As I was delving into the world of balance, I started wondering: What exactly does it mean to be balanced? We know that we need to eat balanced meals, have a good balance between work and family and lead balanced lives. But what does this mean, and what does it have to do with yoga?

One of the most popular types of yoga practiced today is Hatha Yoga. We looked into this yoga a few months ago, and said that the word Hatha comes from the Sanskrit words for Sun (Ha) and Moon (Tha). We live in a world of dualities, of opposites always acting on each other, and we always find ourselves somewhere in between opposing forces. Hatha Yoga is a system designed to bring balance and ease out the tension between these forces. Ying/Yang, Hot/Cold, Male/Female, Work/Rest. Latching on to either of the extremes usually has detrimental effects, but staying flexible and flowing in between the extremes brings peace and happiness.

Yoga itself is a systematic practice that helps the body/mind/soul find balance through asana, breath work and meditation. With a regular yoga practice, your body will constantly find its own way of reattaining balance. The key word here is reattain. Our lives are not static. Things are always changing and moving, as we do. This means that balance is not something that can be attained and kept. The moment you find a sense of balance in your life and you try to desperately cling to that, you will find that things around you keep changing and suddenly, one day, your hard-earned balance is now an imbalance. Distressing? It doesn’t need to be. By cultivating a regular practice, you will develop a sense of connection to both your inside and outside worlds, and you will learn how to flow with the times and re-adjust yourself so that you can always reattain balance.

On the yoga mats, I believe that we can express this philosophy of balance through asana. By physically practicing to reattain balance in your body, you will find that it spills over into your mental and emotional worlds, bringing balance there too. Balancing poses are challenging and often frustrating. Mastering it could take a lifetime, and on the way there you will fall. Many times. By letting go of that frustration and self-judgement, we can learn to slowly work our way towards better balance. And there’s nothing more satisfying than finally being able to hold a pose that’s been eluding you for weeks or months, even years!

Even physically, balance is a complicated process. To attain and keep your balance, you use the brain, the nervous system, the eyes, the vestibular system (in the ear) and many muscular systems. In October’s class we will focus on the core or stability, and the legs/arms for strength. Some of the postures we will be doing will include:

Seated balancing poses: Adept pose (Siddah asana), Boat Pose (Navasana)
Arm balancing poses: Crow Pose (Bakasana), Peacock pose (Mayurasana)
Standing balancing poses: Eagle pose (Garudasana), Half moon pose (Ardha chandrasana)

In our end-of-class meditation this month, we will focus on a meditation that balances the chakra system.

Have a fantastic October, and see you on the mat!

Namaste,
Marilu

Hello Yoginis!

Can you believe it’s already September? Time seems to be going by faster and faster every year!

Recently, all over the world we have been experiencing an increase in strange weather patterns. Hurricanes and typhoons have been appearing all over the globe, often causing chaos in many people’s lives. Nothing in the path of a hurricane or typhoon stays untouched, it ruffles everything it passes over.

What fascinates me most about hurricanes is that, in the middle of all the chaos and unrest, there is a quiet, calm centre in the hurricane where the wind is perfectly still and the sun shines as bright as a summer’s day. So what can we learn from hurricanes?

We can learn to be the eye of the storm, the tranquil centre when everything around us is a big mess of wind and rain in our life. Whether you are in a meeting, with your family, trying to find a parking space, or preparing for an actual hurricane, you might find yourself in a situation where everything around you starts whirling out of control and falls in with the stream of chaos. In this situation, are you going to hop onto the unstable wind, or will you be the calm centre of the storm where the sun always shines?

With yoga, we can learn how to mentally step out of a challenging situation and take control of our thoughts. We can learn how to become the calm eye of the storm.

For September, we are going to focus on power yoga. Power yoga is essentially Vinyasa yoga, but with an increase in the level. By doing and holding these challenging poses, we can learn how to make that mental shift into control and away from the temptation of chaos. By shifting your focus from the challenge / the chaos / the storm around you to the quiet calming feel of your breath, you can learn how to take control of your mind.

Power yoga is usually based around the sun salutation, but we will add some challenging poses into this. This month, we will explore binds and inversions we haven’t done before, as well as some challenging balance poses like Side Plank.

We will spend extra time in meditation this month too, learning how to quieten the mind and increase concentration focus.

You can’t control life.
You can’t control situations around you.
But you can control your breath.
And you can control your mind.

Namaste,
Marilu

月毎に行うポーズ名をご紹介します。レッスンの状況により多少変更することがあります。

Namaste yoginis,

We are well into the second half of the year and feeling the hottest part of summer. I always feel that summer in Japan is a very liquid season. Droplets of sweat, rain, steam and bottles of water to rehydrate… there’s a definite flow and liquidity to summer life.

In that spirit, we are returning to our original vinyasa flow yoga this month. Vinyasa, which means “breath synchronized movement”, can fall under many kinds of types of yoga. Most often, we take it from Hatha yoga though, and we just connect the asana (poses) to each other with smooth, liquid movements. The well-known Sun Salutation is the perfect example of a hatha flow sequence. Vinyasa always has breath synchronised to movement, and we will put extra focus on that this month. Always let your breath lead and your movements follow – not the other way around.

As we said last month, Hatha comes from the two Sanskrit words Ha and Tha. Ha means SUN, tha means MOON. This month, we will look for the first time at the lesser-known Moon Salutation (Chandra Namaskar), the complement and sister sequence to the Sun Salutations. Some of the asana included in the Moon Salutation are:

As for the Pranayama (breathing), we will be doing two sets of breathing exercises this month. At the start of our flow sequence, we’ll get our prana flowing with the standing deep breath, and end the lesson with the Skull Brightener Breath (Kapalanhati pranayama).

Keep cool… and see you on the mat!

Namaste,
Marilu

月毎に行うポーズ名をご紹介します。レッスンの状況により多少変更することがあります。