Yoga off the mat
Category: Life

Sheesh, sometimes I forget I'm supposed to have this blog going, what with living life and all!

I'm busy with yoga classes, my "real" job, sick (and well) kids, very busy and beautiful partner, and a neglected yard that I'm trying to get back in shape. Bought some koi and got the little pond cleaned up and the pump fixed and I can feel the energy of spring just pouring forth.

The yoga classes at the men's prison are really going well. The guys are learning a lot and I can tell they are settling in and getting more comfortable with me. In some cases, maybe too much so! I find myself having to re-direct them a bit more than I did at first, but they are still very respectful and working very hard at this. We've added a couple of newcomers and one of them I think is shocked at how physically demanding the class can be. I must admit I push these guys a little more than I do my mostly-women classes and I guess that's showing a bit of gender bias in some ways, but I intuitively feel like they are in need of this bit of energy burn off.

I just finished some private sessions for several soon-to-be NFL Draftees who seemed to gain a lot from classes. They were at a camp for NFL wanna-bes at Walt Disney's Wide World of Sports and then have gone to the NFL Combine to be scouted by the NFL. I won't name any names, but the guys did very well in yoga and seemed to benefit. One of them ran his fastest 40-yard dash after his first yoga class, and attributed it to the stretching. They often worked out soreness and felt definite benefits and gained considerable flexibility in just a few sessions.

The guys will be drafted soon as they were all top college players for Maryland, Boston College and Virginia Tech. I'm not a big football watcher, but  I will pay attention and see where they end up. I'm wishing them well and sending positive energy their way, hoping they take their yoga practice into the NFL.

For those students who read the blog, the Wednesday morning class is moving to Thursday morning in Davenport.

That's all for now,

Om shanti,

Kumari

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Website updates
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

I just forgot to say that I updated the website with some home page changes, adding some info on the prison work as well as the thai bodywork. I'm not sure what's wrong with the font situation on the page, but it's the best I know how to do!

If you get a chance take a look at the site. Click on the handcrafted eyepillow page in case you have interest in ordering one. They're great for relaxation.

www.yesyouyoga.com

kumari

5:58 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Catching up - and life behind bars
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Sorry I haven't written and updated things here in a while, but I've been in prison......Teaching yoga, that is!

I am so happy to say that I have finally been able to get into a men's state prison and am teaching a 1 1/2 hour yoga class there. The NYTimes had a great story earlier in the week about more yoga teachers extending their efforts to this population of people.

I find it so rewarding to go there and share yoga with them. It's a dismal place to be in that you really are sorta out of sight out of mind of the rest of society. Not too many people seem to realize how many people we have locked up and what its like. Many of them have been abandoned by their families when they became incarcerated and some of them haven't have a letter or visitor since they've been there. I'm not naive and I realize they have hurt people and their addictions have often created years worth of mistrust with family members, but nonetheless, I feel called to do this work.

I also have been off to Thai Yoga Bodywork training, which is another way of saying "yoga therapy" or thai massage. I hestitate to call it massage because you stay clothed, you don't use oils and, well, most massage therapists aren't going to be putting you over into a Plow or Cobra anytime soon. This is a wonderful modality that works on the energetic systems and channels as much as the physical body. I find a thai yoga session to be like having three regular yoga classes on the prana quotient,

I've also been teaching a few more private classes. In addition to trying to get more experience with the thai work, I've picked up a few private yoga classes that have really kept me busy. I have an interesting group I am working with now, which are some NFL hopefuls who think yoga will help them with their flexibility. They are huge guys but I'm impressed with their first-foray into yoga.

Keeping the blog updated is a challenge, because my regular job (the one that actually pays the bills) also has me blogging. I guess it's pretty cool to be paid to blog in your regular life if I think about it. If you are interested in that you can see it at: www.orlandosentinel.com/outdoorsblog. The more the merrier on that one. Feel free to link to it!!!

I've been also doing more tratak meditation, which is staring at a candle until your eyes water and then closing your eyes and bringing the attention to the anja chakra (point between the eyebrows) until the candle flame "reappears" to you as an "after image." I have had some interesting experiences with this of not only total bliss, but also of seeing visions of mandala-like colorful designs. I am trying to draw them with colored pencils before I forget them. I think it'd be neat to give them to a real artist to have them converted into artwork --- or mosaics.

Anyway, I need to go relax a bit. Thanks for reading the blog and I am going to try to be more active with it.

om shanti

kumari

5:48 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Update on yoga classes
Category: Religion and Philosophy

And while I'm posting (I realize its been too long between posts!), I'll update the situation with classes:

Classes in Davenport which are convenient to Walt Disney World vacation guests, by the way, are going well with little advertising. I just got a banner that advertises Yoga and just hung it, so we shall see if that gets more people in. If you are in the Davenport, NE Polk or extreme S. Lake areas, check out the website at: www.yesyouyoga.com for class details.

Next, I am now offering a FREE "Spiritual Yoga" class at the Davenport location on the third Saturday of each month at 6 pm. This will include a short meditation, kirtan, light postures and reading/discussion from a yoga master. If you have interest in yoga, join me! No one will be forced to chant or sing or do anything they aren't comfortable doing, but it is a great chance to learn more about yoga philosophy and experience a devotional yoga class. All religions welcomed.

Om shanti,

kumari

6:30 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Finding divinity within
Category: Religion and Philosophy

In the past two or three weeks I have really had a new awakening and awareness to the concepts of the divinity within. For years I've allowed myself to believe this and have rested in a sort of inner knowing that this was true (which relates all the way back to things I read in the Bible as a late-teen) but in the past couple of weeks I've had actual real experiences that allowed me to have a deeper understanding.

One was while jogging. I simply went on my normal run and was using my mala and repeating my mantra internally as I typically do. After about a mile, I turned onto the trail and suddenly without any real forethought, became aware of the energy of all the trees and grass and plants around me. It was as if their prana was so evident and tangible, as if I was swimming in a sea of this tangible prana that was just being exuded from all the living plants around me. It was a tremendous feeling and I felt even dwarfed a bit by this, although I felt safe and secure and totally at peace, as if I were just being wrapped and bathed in this sensation.

I became then aware of this prana entering my own being, not through my breathing per se, but rather as if I were a membrane and the prana just passed into me, as if into my pores and into my being, as if my whole being were "breathing" not necessarily through the mechanism of lungs. (Of course I was still breathing, but I had a real awareness of this prana just passing in and out of me through my being on a horizontal plane.)

I then became aware of the breath, traditionally speaking and I had a sudden vision of a woman named Rebecca from Sudan who exhaled and at the very moment she exhaled, I inhaled and in that cosmic moment, it was as if this were the same prana passing from her to me. No time or space separated this experience but it was as if on this cosmic plane,we were one, not only with each other but with the entire universe filled with prana around us.

This sensation lasted about 5 minutes and I know this because it was about half a mile or so and then I became aware again of my jogging, my pace, my regular breath patterns while running. This experience was over, but I was changed. I have not seen plants, trees or others the same since. I feel a true part of them.

The second experience I do not have time to type about right now,but it happened withhin a week or so of this one and it was equally as powerful in teaching me about my own divinity and that each thing I do is in fact, nothing less than the Divine God in me. I really felt and experienced this and didn't just read about it.

My frustration now is that since these two experiences, I have found myself mired in issues related to my normal everyday humanity --- communications with others, being patient, understanding and all these things that a person who understands they are divine "ought" to understand. It seems as if I struggle, as the Apostle Paul said, with "doing the things that I don't want to do." (modern paraphrase)

Om shanti,

kumari

I

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Family ties to spirituality
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Last night the family and I went to Tampa to celebrate the lives of two family members. We ate at a nice restaurant in Ybor City and enjoyed the company of the extended family.

I had a long discussion with my unofficial mother-in-law -- and I say unofficial as until my partner and I can legally marry it's probably confusing to people if I call her my mother-in-law, but I regress --- about spirituality. I will, though, since I consider her such, all her my mother in law.

So, the mother-in-law is an very spiritual woman who is a research psychologist by profession but who studies human spirituality. Her doctoral thesis (completed recently) was studying Korean monks and their consicousness during meditation and how it relates to their perceptions of wellness. She spent a lot of time with them, talking to hundreds, I believe, of monks throughout the country on more than one visit there.

She has bookshelves and bookshelves on everything from kundalini yoga to native am. spirituality, which happens to be the famillial line. Her mother was 100 percent cherokee.

She will be traveling to India in Jan. speaking at a conference where among other speakers will be BKS Ieyengar and a host of other swamis, spiritual leaders from around the world, many in her field as well. i is actually a psychololgy conference, where the paradigm is shifting in that field it seems.

Anyway, as we talked she discussed her heritage and how she'd discovered things on her father's side -- not the native am. side -- that she didn't know. She discovered one of her distant relatives in the pre-revolutionary war days was a pioneering psychologist/rebel type who was actually studying human consiousuness in the US and who was talking about the mind/body/soul connection in that field and was saying things that made him very out of the mainstream at the time. She felt a great kinship to him immediately upon finding this out and reading more about him. She felt validated in her how familial way and felt his energy with her even.

We discussed the idea of not only familial influences, but those of samskaras -- the impressions, experiences, scars etc. -- passed through lifetimes of change into our consciousness and how this filters into our own experience without even knowing it.

I pondered how, for many of us, this process of yoga not only begins to harmonize many of these things, but also pulls back the veil to allow us to see them more clearly. My own clarity is as if I have taken off a pair of fogged up glasses and suddenly I can understand so many things about my connectedness to all that I see.

Om shanti,
kumari

6:31 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

What a week!
Category: Life

I can't believe a week flew by, but yesterday I was already back at the prison and was able to lead yoga, which was great and I just love being there working with the women. I only wish I had more time, more classes as certainly the need and hunger for it is great there.

One young woman (about 23) is having shamanic-like experiences/relationship with a plant and she doesn't really realize that's what it is. She is connecting to this particular sago palm, feeling its energy as a friend and stroking it with her cheek daily and gaining a lot of energy from this plant. I enjoyed hearing the purity and certain innocence of her experience as she'd never been trained or read anything on any of that and had no understanding of what it even was. She was just sharing from her heart and willing to be vulnerable to her peers -- something many of us on the outside are afraid to do. The women there often teach me a much or more than I could teach them.

In my newspaper life, the past week has also been very busy with me having to chase breaking news on children being trapped in a minivan underwater with a frantic mother on the shore. That was a stressful day and yoga at the end of it felt like a necessary cap, not a luxury.

(The children were rescued and so far are alive.)

My dad also had triple bypass at a nearby town, but is now doing really well.

I am busy as well with my own children, my partner, my job and about 5 yoga classes and somewhere in here, I feel a need to re-order priorities soon and figure out what needs to pare down, what needs to rise to the tippy-top and how I need to make adjustments. I did drop one of my classes in Orlando recently, recognizing my limitations .

My class in Davenport, though, is off to a really great start, which is exciting.

om shanti,
kumari

2:23 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

mindfulness in jail
Category: Life

Today I assisted with a mindfulness-bases stress reduction program at the women's prison (and will continue doing that every Thursday morning) and was struck by how the women stayed with the process and how much they got out of a single session.

Going through the slow body scan, becoming aware of the smallest nuances like air on their skin, how their clothes felt against their legs, their bodies against the floor,etc., they really tuned into this process. What's different about the prison environment than the yoga students I teach is that the yoga students are in a nice, quiet yoga spot with incense and nice music and dimly lit rooms to create the right ambiance to foster this mindfulness training. The inmates, however, are in a brightly lit visitation room where every now and then someone comes clanging through the room with keys jangling or another inmate gets up to tromp to the bathroom or something of this nature. Hardly ideal for relaxation.

But what strikes me is how, despite all these distractions these women really stay with this process of mindfulness. I'm not sure they even realize how hard what they are doing is. They think this is normal but what they are doing is not normal. Most people AREN"T so mindful. Most of us talk on our cell phones while we are doing something else. We drive for miles and dont' remember what we passed. We eat handfuls of peanuts, popcorn and chips without stopping to taste them or feel their texture in our hands and mouths. We gobble. We are not a mindful people.

Take time this week to practice mindfulness. The women in jail are trying. Some of them are anyway.

Om shanti,

kumari

7:47 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Yoga Classes near Disney (Florida)
Category: Travel and Places

Just a quick update that my yoga classes near Walt Disney World in the Four Corners area of Davenport, Florida (easily assessible to Kissimmee, Haines City, south Lake County, Celebration and the Florida vacation homes in the area) have started off with great success!

We had our first classes last week and they were very well received by the community there and we had a nice group of students show up who bought passes to continue, so I am very encouraged. If you work at Disney, are visiting Disney on vacation or if you work on the tourist strip in Kissimmee or along the U.S. Hwy. 27 corridor in and around the Interstate 4 area of Florida, this is close to the new location where I am teaching.

Full details are on the "class schedule" page of my website at www.yesyouyoga.com but the location is 101 Polo Park Blvd., Suite 5, which is upstairs above the pizza place in the yellow building at the corner of Polo Park Boulevard and U.S. 27 in Davenport. This is just south of the U.S. 27 and U.S. 192 intersection on U.S. 27, north of I-4.

Classes there are Wed. morning and Thursday night. Call 352-536-2565 with questions or go to the website.

I am really enthused to bring yoga to that area!

Om shanti,
Kumari

www.yesyouyoga.com

6:07 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Back from Yogi Hari’s
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Greetings!

I have been having so much trouble logging into this blog from my PC! I am on a Mac now and its working fine so go figure. But that's why I haven't posted as I simply couldn't get in! Maybe I'll start using the Mac all the time now! My kids are probably the only kids in town who have something like a $3,000 Mac they "play" on because the partner was able to pass down her "old" one to them and I don't particularly care for the Mac, so there they are, playing online games with this really nice Mac. I'll have to edge them off the keyboard long enough to post.

Anyway, this weekend I went to Yogi Hari's Ashram for Yoga Day and took my oldest daughter and it was lovely and beautiful and divine and a much-needed Guruji yoga class. His classes are always nice and sweaty and a bit tougher than you make them on yourself. Shoulderstand is held longer; plough is longer and he'll grab my feet and pull me up into locust where my feet are straight above my head instead of that measly little thing I call a locust normally. I love it.

I love his classes and this one was particularly workshop-like as he did a lot of instructional work with us, having us gather-round for some guidance on this or that.

Four friends from Orlando and two from Clermont also went and I think everyone loved it just as much. Some of them spent the night at the ashram, although I drove down and back the same day, a do-able thing, but it makes for a long day.

I love being down there and feel like I am "home" when I am there. I hate to leave when the time comes. i just want to stay and work in the garden and help in the kitchen and relax in the serenity that permeates the place. It's a real refuge and I feel so comfortable just being there.

I brought a bunch of Yogi Hari's music home with home, hoping to get it all on Itunes soon. Right now I have a couple of his chants on my own podcast and have discovered they are being downloaded 3x as much as anything else! And also many more people are visiting the podcast and downloading everything than I ever imagined !!! It's amazing!

But the popularity of Yogi Hari's chants is obivous when you look at the numbers, so I am going to try to get it all set up on Itunes so people will really be able to access all his much from all over the world. I think he is a gift the universe has offered us and his music is so divine and it is really hard to fine. Most of the yoga music I fine is synthesized music or has added a lot of modern beat and melody to it. I am not making a judgement about it as I have a lot of that music in my collection, but it still makes the the traditional and classical music difficult to find and when you experience this very traditional and classical sanskrit kirtan for yourself with harmonium and tabla and Yogi Hari doing things like the Eternal Om chakra chanting, it is simply divine and does things for me that a synthesized modern beat simply does not do.

Anyway, stay tuned as I will let everyone know when it is ready on Itunes.

The Down Dog! podcast is on Itunes already and we are happily able to say the podcast is doing well and we are trying to keep a variety of things on there, from mere conversation to instructional stuff to music. Our latest offering is a conversation between myself and a professional artist about being mindful of the negative things in our life and how we often try to speed through or past negative events instead of really slowing down and experiencing them. Why that is, but also how artists sometimes have learned to capture negative events as learning and artistic opportunities. Tune in and listen. The artist in question is Triesta Hall, owner of Blu Art Design in Orlando and also my partner in life! I love talking to her about such stuff and we can talk for hours on such topics, so tune in with us and see what we talk about when no one else is around.

And speaking of Triesta, she is redesigning the website and logo for Red Door Yoga in Orlando, which has changed its name to Red Sun Yoga. Elizabeth Arden, the company, thought the old name was too much like its logo of a red door. I just saw the new website last night and it is beautiful. The changes will be wonderful for students of that fine studio and I am proud she has been able to work on using her talents to share yoga in her own way with her own energy. This is where she thrives and it shows in this new web design. Stay tuned. It will be unveiled soon by the east Orlando studio. (She designed my Ahimsa Yoga logo too, which is also a very beautiful logo that radiates her energy with it.)

If you are interested in ordering any of Yogi Hari's music since I've mentioned it, visist www.Yogihari.com. His cds are available there now.

Om shanti,
Kumari

5:51 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment