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

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。

Hello there yoginis!

We have made it into the second half of this year already. How has 2011 been for you so far?

July brings with it a sweltering, sticky heat… the sign that it’s now my favorite season in Japan: summer. Despite the discomfort that all this sweating might bring, summer is a season of celebration and relaxation. The heat seems to slow things down a bit, and it’s much easier for us to relax. If you take good care of yourself during this season, it can be a very healthy one. We tend to eat fresher foods, drink more water and yes, sweat out more toxins. So embrace the heat and come join us in the yoga class to help your body detox!

This month we’ll be taking a look at a very well-known form of yoga: Hatha Yoga. The term itself is sometimes confusing, as what most people know as “yoga” is in fact Hatha yoga. Other famous branches of yoga, for example Bikram yoga (hot yoga), Iyengar yoga and Ashtanga yoga all find their roots in Hatha yoga.

The word hatha comes from two Sanskrit words: HA (meaning sun) and THA (meaning moon). Hatha yoga is a system that helps the practitioner to confront and balance out opposites/dualities in the body and mind. We live in a world of duality: sun/moon, hot/cold, male/female, positive/negative, etc. According to the yoga system, any problems that come up in our bodies and minds are due to one aspect of these pairs being overactive, and the other underactive. Hatha yoga provides us with the tools to bring our physical, mental and spiritual systems back into balance, and in this balance we find health and happiness.

Traditional Hatha yoga focuses primarily on the asana (postures) and pranayama (breathing), in a slow, meditative set.

This month, we’ll be doing a relaxing, yet challenging set, bringing in a few balancing poses. The balancing poses we’ll be doing include Tree Pose (Talasana), Eagle Pose (Garudasana) and Warrior 3 (Virabradrasana 3). Then, we’ll be exploring quite a few floor-based poses like Butterfly pose (Baddha Konasana), Bow pose (Dhanurasana), Plough pose (Halasana) and Locust pose (Shalabasana).

Our Pranayama for this month will be a return to Alternate Nostril Breathing (Nadi Sodhana), a calming way of breathing that is said to bring balance to the flow of prana (life force) in our bodies.

From my side, keep cool & namaste!

See you on the mat,
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!

As we enter June, nearing the middle of the year, we can look back at everything we have done and learned up to now in our yoga class. Looking at the beautiful yoginis in class from my green yoga mat, I can say with pride that all of you have improved SO much since the beginning of this year! With regular practice, patience and breath awareness, we can all become stronger and more flexible in class.

Last month, in May, we spoke a bit about Karma Yoga. As we said, Karma Yoga is the yoga of selfless service, and is a road to enlightenment by way of continuous awareness of thoughts and actions. In this vein, for the next month I’d like to talk about another type of yoga, called Kriya Yoga.

Kriya Yoga was brought to the West from India in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananada. To gain more insight into this advanced form of yoga, I’d really recommend reading: “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Mr. Yogananda.

Kriya Yoga is a systematic and ancient way towards enlightenment. It uses a combination of meditations, asanas, breathing exercises (pranayama) and visualisations to slowly but surely train the mind, body and soul to come closer together, towards one-pointedness.

Following the Kriya Yoga way could take decades, and we only have a month. For our asana practice, we will take one of the prescribed daily practices that is part of the preparation leading up to the advanced practices and finally, true Kriya Yoga. Because the asana practice involves a lot of single postures done one after the other (as opposed to vinyasa flow-style postures), our program will look something like this:

I’m looking forward to June’s practice and to finding out more about Kriya Yoga!

Our reading this month is from Swami Satyananda Saraswati:

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 all yoginis!

I hope that all of you were able to use the golden week time to wind down, relax and connect with friends and family. We often get so caught up in our routines that we forget how good it is to stop those routines momentarily and place our focus on something more personal and closer to the heart. Thank goodness for holidays!

During last month’s class, the topic of different types of yoga came up. The yoga we practice at Imagine* is of the vinyasa kind, but apart from the workout-kind-of-yoga, many other forms of yoga exist, all with the final purpose of bringing a union between the body, mind and soul.

There is a type of yoga that requires not even one asana (pose) to be done, and that is much more focussed on making the mind flexible, rather than the body. This is Karma yoga, and in May I would like to talk about this yoga, the yoga of action.

Karma yoga is the practice of gaining awareness through action. By practicing karma yoga in everything you do from your 9-5 job to washing the dishes, you bring your awareness closer and closer to the present moment. If you do everything you do with full awareness, and without expecting any kind of reward, you remove the ego from the equation and daily upsets, big or small, tend to affect you less and lead to more efficient and powerful actions. The beauty of karma yoga is that you can practice this every moment of every day. All it is is a change of mindset.

On the yoga mats, we will be focussing on asanas that are called heart openers. By practicing these poses, we learn to open ourselves up to others, which in turn helps us to start living a more selfless, serving life. The karma yoga way.

Some of the heart-openers we will be doing include:

Our reading for the merry month of May is by an unknown author, but it is something that every single person should keep in mind. Especially if they are on a quest to increase their awareness.

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

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。

Spring is on our doorstep, and this means a lot of exciting things: warmer weather, beautiful blossoms, hanami parties and being more comfortable outside. Unfortunately for many people, especially in Japan, it means another thing: hay fever.

With this in mind, I have designed April’s yoga sequence to help us fight the season of allergies and stuffy noses the natural way. Although yoga is not a replacement for your trusted allergy medicine, it is an excellent companion. With regular asana and pranayama exercise, the occurrences of allergy attacks can become fewer, and this might mean that you’ll be able to take medicine less frequently.

The main way that yoga can help you to clear the way to smooth breathing is by helping you to strengthen your immune system. The three main ways to do this are:

1) Relaxing. As simple as that. Stress breaks down your immunity and relaxation makes it stronger. Yoga poses that are done slowly and with deep breathing have an automatic relaxing effect on the nervous system. We will therefore be focussing a lot on breathing techniques, including Ujjyai breath and Alternate nostril breathing.

2) Increasing the blood flow. More blood being circulated means that more antibodies can circulate through the blood, building immunity. We will get the blood flowing with a nice warm-up sequence of Sun Salutations.

3) Opening the chest. In the middle of the chest is a gland called the thymus gland. This gland plays a big role in immunity, and stimulating this gland with chest-opening asanas is a great way to boost the immune system. We will be doing poses that focus on stretching the chest area, including Cobra pose, Pigeon pose, Fish pose, Bow pose and, this month’s challenge pose, Bridge pose.

Something old, something new… April is looking like a good month to be doing yoga. Our reading this month is from B.K.S Iyengar:

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。

Winter is starting to leave us with the warmer spring creeping into the days. Spring is a time of new beginnings and rebirth.

In this month’s yoga sessions, we will focus on techniques to bring rebirth into the body and mind with detoxifying asanas (postures) and breathing. Yoga is very good for detox as it targets the three main systems involved in toxin removal from the body: the circulatory system, the lymph system and the digestive system.

This month’s sequence contains a series of poses focussed on detoxing the body. Twisted poses wring toxins and tension out of the core of the body, while the Downward Dog pose brings the heart above the head, helping blood and lymph circulation.

Some of the twisting postures we will be doing are: Twisted chair pose, twisted lunge, spinal twist and seated twist.

In pranayama, we will practice Khapalabati breath, a breath seen as an excellent way to detox through the lungs and increase our lung capacity, helping us to get more oxygen into the body and release more carbon dioxide.

I leave you with our reading for March, a quote by Robert Fulghum which reminds us that life is not always as complicated as we think it is.

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。

Hello yoginis!

The first month of the year has flown past, and we’re getting ready to stretch into the shortest of them all: February.

As the previous two months had us work up our strength with many balancing poses (which take a lot of concentration), I think that we’ll move into more of a flow again in February.

The sequence that we’ll practice from February is adapted from one of my favorite yoga teachers on earth: Sadie Nardini. She makes yoga available for everyone with her excellent youtube videos, which already number over 200, and her easy-going personality. Her main focus is the core of the body, because when your core is strong, it will support the rest of your body and being, and allow you to reach new personal levels. If you want to check out more of her work, have a look at her website ( Sadie Nardini | Ultimate Wellness Expert ) or search her videos on youtube.

Rather than just list the poses that we’ll be working through in February, I’d rather tell you what we want to achieve with these poses:

Sounds like quite an exciting series this month!

Our class will end, as always, with a reading. For this month, I’ve chosen a piece called “Our Deepest Fear”, written by Marianne Williamson.

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。