Make Yoga Work for You

Published April 29, 2012 | By admin

Do you have an important life mission? Find out how to make yoga work for you and your life!

Two Foot Take Off

Making Yoga WORK for You

April 30, 2012

In This Issue:

Blog of the Week from Beth – Making Yoga Work for You

The 12 Week Spring Yoga Challenge/Moon Yoga is On!

Coming Events

Yoga Tip of the Week

What’s Beth Up To?

Beth Recommends

Blog of the Week from Beth

Making Yoga WORK – First Quarter Moon Building Energy

If you’ve got work to do (like who doesn’t?), then now is the time to get down to it. And don’t expect it to all be easy either!!

When I learned about this time right now, where the planets and the moon are aligned to facilitate productivity, it gave me anxiety…[read more] and it still does. And frankly, it should!

Why should we feel anxiety – that isn’t the long-term, chronic anxiety garden-variety style – but the kind that gives us an acute shot in the butt? Because this is nature’s way of kicking our butts and letting us know that “now is the time,” and not later, to fulfill our life purpose. The bus is leaving now, get on it, for God’s sake.

How often have you ruminated about something so long that by the time you decided (How to Decide is the topic of next week’s blog!) about doing something, the opportunity was gone for one reason or another. Hopefully this never happens to you, but I’ve seen it a lot over the years.

You must have noticed me doing time-limited offers on various programs. This is not to pressure you into working with me, taking a class or doing something good for yourself (like a liver cleanse!). This is so you can see that life is always now.

And at times like now, the forces that be gather themselves up and get behind our intentions, give birth to that for which we have been planning and injection-fuel our creations into the world where they belong.

What would we rather do at this time? Anything else! Anything at all. This is when we clean our kitchens, do the laundry, go shopping, read magazines, anything but that for which we came to earth in the first place. Why do we pathologically turn away from our purpose and the perfect time to act upon it? Because it’s easier.

Sadly, that “ease” registers as anything but to our nervous system and underlying soul. Despite hardships, there is no greater pleasure for the soul than following through with it’s deepest desires and the work for which it is meant.

So, blessings to you as you carry forth with your projects this week. Take hold of the reigns and let those horses gallop for a few weeks while the moon becomes full and its energy more and more available.

BUT pace yourself, build in healthy (yoga!) breaks and don’t forget to check in with the silent partner that lies beneath every breath and action you take.

What is This Week’s First Quarter Moon About?

It’s time to run with your projects, to take action and go for it.

Moon Yoga Online explores how you can use lunar energies to guide your life and yoga practice, so you can live a yoga life that works with the forces that be. And find out that you are the forces that be!!!

12 Week Spring Yoga Challenge!

Mondays 10 AM until the end of June – Cloud 284 – Calling all stay-at-home moms!

Tuesdays 8:00 PM until the end of June – Lindenwoods Community Centre

Moon Yoga Online – Live in the Flow of Natural Cycles!

Fridays 2:00 PM a new HD Moon Yoga video goes out to subscribers until the end of June.

For women and yogis who need to make the most of their time, so they can get their best stuff done at the time when nature most favours it AND in time to catch a break!

If you got this email, your investment is 25% off: $147 – for 12 Weeks of Video Downloads, You Get to Keep Forever!!!

Coming Events Summary

Manitoba Goddess Festival Fundraiser

Mother’s Day May 13th from 7 – 10 pm at the fabulous Gas Station Theatre for the “Crone’s Cabaret.” Tickets are a mere ten dollars

Manitoba Goddess Festival – August 31 – September 3

Moon Yoga Online – special offer to sign up at 25% off!

12 Week Yoga Challenge through the end of June, drop-ins welcome!

Brandon Folk Music & Art Festival – July 19 – 22

Kirtan and Moon Yoga Workshop – Saturday afternoon, TBA

Yoga Tip of the Week

Can’t focus your mind so you can get to work on the stuff that’s really important to you?

Do this standing pose from the Warrior sequence: Virabhadraasan 2!

What’s Beth Up To?

~Planting fenugreek sprouts and enjoying the delicious sprouts!!

I Recommend

Watching my video Two Foot Take Off:

“…roots deep in the soil, eye on the Life.”

~Beth Martens

Sending you warm wishes for the week, until we meet again.

Kind cheers and namaste,

Beth

yoga@bethmartens.comIf you’d like to remove your email address from this list, you can click here to unsubscribe.

Yoga Isn’t For Everyone

You Heard Me

April 23, 2012

In This Issue:

Blog of the Week from Beth – The Pros and Cons of Yoga

The 12 Week Spring Yoga Challenge/Moon Yoga is On!

Coming Events

Yoga Tip of the Week

What’s Beth Up To?

Beth Recommends

Blog of the Week from Beth

Clear Visions – New Moon Beginning to Wax

Butterfly Meditation

Is yoga really on your path to enlightenment, fulfillment and the overall sense that life is worth living?

These days, given its popularity, yoga is often put out as a one-size fits all, cure all, be all and end all. You often see the phrase, “Yoga is for Everybody!”

I’m tempted to agree of course, because I teach yoga for a living, because I’ve devoted my adult life to it and because I have seen a yoga practice completely transform myself, and many others.

However, my interest in yoga coaching has begun to shift my approach. I prefer to stay connected to those who are already getting the benefit of what I do, who have been in my zone and know that means engaging at a deep and committed level.

I was recently challenged by Warren Wojnowski, the fellow who has created my websites for me, to write an article about the pros and cons of yoga, because as it turns out, people need to hear the truth about who can really benefit, and for whom it will drop away like other fitness fads that have come and gone.

1. Pros:

Flexibile schedule and hips.

After a few trips to India where I studied yoga at its source, at the banks of the sacred River Vyaas that feeds the River Ganges from the peaks of the Himalaya, I learned how to take the practice into my own daily life, no matter where I geographically put my body. Personally, that is one of my favourite thing about yoga is that it offers me a fully flexible schedule. It has also conditioned my health, to where I feel more flexible and stronger than I ever was in my teens and early 20′s.

I was taught, luckily, that the point of studying with teachers, was so I could practice on my own – and this was considered equally important as following guides. So thanks to a nine-month immersion experience, (my first trip to India), I was ready to do a daily practice that included meditation, yoga poses, breath and contemplations.

Since then I have my yoga any time, any where. I am utterly independent in my practice. There are no scheduling conflicts, missed practices or regrets about having made a commitment to myself that was unfulfilled.

I was taught, again at the source, that a daily practice is more important than a rigidly scheduled one. That means that better to set your goal on doing yoga every day, rather than doing it at xx time and place every day. That way the perceived failure goes way down. And the sense of having a flexible life, as well as body, goes way up!

Has enormous scope.

Personally, I’ve always been attracted to big subjects and railed against the increasing specialization of our world (thought there’s nothing inherently wrong with it!).

I landed in an honours anthropology program in university, because I discovered that unlike any other subject that was available, it had the largest scope of any. Why? Because human beings decided that any study of humans could be related to nearly anything – geography, climate, science, art, culture and on. Great, I’m in!

In my last year of an undergrad program, I completed a directed study on The Transformation of Consciousness through Shamanic Initiation – again the biggest subject I could find. And it led me directly to yoga, because even the biggest subject to anthropology was severely limited as it tried incessantly, annoyingly to remove the observer, the subject.

When I got to yoga, it is revealed over and over that the subject – ourselves – is in fact where we have to begin. Any study that doesn’t include the observer is not telling the whole story, and while anthropology would struggle with this subject, yoga put the subject out as the entire point. And because the subject is the door to any object, then yoga’s ability to approach any subject as higher than anything I’ve come across.Makes your heart sing even if just like a jail bird.

Without fail, the practice of yoga gives me joy. Not the fast food version (see below), but the long, slow burn of growing awareness, self discovery and the feeling that we can live right from the heart of our purpose.

At times when I felt everything was lost to me, I turned to these practices. They returned to me a staggering wealth of inspiration to keep going, to put one foot in front of the other, and even under the worst circumstances, to still feel the subtle bliss of life itself.

2. Cons

Requires commitment to have pleasure with it.

Whomever seeks the quick fix for their ills, or the blue pill for their blues, or simple answers to simple questions, will not be happy doing yoga.

Instead, they will quickly be frustrated with the fact that it can take years to open the hips that have been tightened by a life time of sitting in chairs, and more years to lengthen hamstrings that have been compacted by lifestyles that don’t require us to touch our toes.

Not to mention how long you may have to regularly meditate to sense that there are spaces between your thoughts.

Or the what-seems-like eons before your exhale relaxes, or your teeth remember not to grind themselves at night while sleeping. Or for your shoulders to realize they are not in fact part of your ears.

Back to the pleasure part, the true pleasures of life are revealed and made exponentially more available through a yoga practice. I will no doubt be blogging more on this in the future, as it is one of my favourite subjects.

Despite the prescribed austerities in some yogic traditions, it is my experience that yoga can unblock all the path ways that would from your labour of love, give way to flow and the experience of deep human pleasure.

Yoga self-enforces a slow food lifestyle – more on that to come in the future.

Will make you painfully aware.

Likely the worst of what should stop someone from blindly going into their yoga practice without a clue of the pros and cons, was illustrated beautifully in an account of a discussion with the Dalai Lama.

Upon the death of someone with whom he was close with, he was asked why he, an enlightened master who had faced many hardships including exile from his own country and the torture of his people to this day, would he experience grief?

His answer was a staggering affirmation of what i had already discovered about my yoga practice – that it made me more sensitive by the day.

I was no longer able to watch violent movies or much of the news when on the same subject.

I was no longer able to turn away from a child begging in India.

I was no longer able to turn away from my own body in its time of crisis and soul reclamation.

I was no longer able to go into a bar and avoid the inevitable shrinking of my spirit as the alcohol dissolved consciousness right down the drain.

I did actually believe that my yoga practice would give me better endurance, make me more resilient and more able to take on the BS of the world. Actually it’s made it harder to integrate and feel normal about the habitual trouble in which the world finds itself. If I went back to cons, however, I’d have to share that it has allowed me to create new normals, new standards for consciousness and new ways of being that are life supportive, loving and fully alive.

What are This Week’s New & Waxing Moon About?

Time to create a big-picture vision about how you want your life to look and feel.

Moon Yoga Online will explore the ways you can use lunar energies to guide life and practice, so you can live a yoga life that works with the forces that be.

12 Week Spring Yoga Challenge!

click here to book now

Mondays 10 AM until the end of June – Cloud 284

Tuesdays 8:00 PM until the end of June – Lindenwoods Community Centre