Yoga For the Urban Lifestyle
For people making the choice to live, study, work and raise families in the city.

Wanting a healthy lifestyle, but not wanting to suburbanize? Are you zooming through the days of your life without pausing to notice it? Are the daily stresses of work, family, school, and society having an affect on your bodymind? Does your body hurt, or feel “okay except for the usual pains”? Do the words “I should” creep regularly into your vocabulary? Is it hard for you to commit to a gym membership when there is so much else to be done?

How can we reacquaint ourselves with ourselves, recuperate, and yes, even grow?

Come try Vinyasa yoga.
At my office, I offer private lessons and small, group classes in a peaceful, comfortable setting. Try settling into your day with an enlivening yet soothing group yoga class in a positive, supportive environment. Schedule a private lesson if you want to work on something specific, to compliment your yoga practice or if you just want to work at your own pace. I also teach at a variety of other locations around Madison and offer yoga parties. Check the schedule for more details.

Yoga can be athletic, but it is also more than that. The simple act of doing a few poses every day in a mindful way can have a fabulous affect on our lives and the way we interact and connect with our surroundings. Yoga can help us tap into our own vital energy, so at the end of the day, we’re saying to ourselves, “Can’t wait to get home so I can play with the babies/ partner/ dog/ goldfish/ neighbor/ kazoo/ garden!” instead of, “I just want to watch TV”. Other fabulous benefits of a yoga practice are that we can tone our bodies, increase our flexibility, increase our lung capacity, and may feel less aches and pains.

If you look at a yoga book, magazine, or calendar, you may see some very famous and beautiful yogis and yoginis in astounding poses. The question remains, however, “Is that a pose that I want to do and how would it help my life?”

I believe the pose should be fit to the body rather than to force our body into shapes that don’t necessarily work for us at that time. We all have different bodies; there will be variation in our poses too. Building on the foundation of the form, we see how the breath can lead us to strong, yet comfortable, places in our bodies. The body is smart. Let’s see what we can learn from it by paying attention. At forty years old, I am still discovering the amazing and unfolding abilities of my own body. You can too. Not that we will put our feet behind our heads in five quick lessons, rather, we explore poses as a foundation for understanding our bodymind. I use the made-up term "bodymind" to emphasize how the mind and body are not really separate, but aspects of the same thing. Certainly, whatever your spiritual beliefs, the fact remains that without the body, the mind wouldn’t exist, and without the mind, the body cannot function properly.

I’ve found yoga works best by noticing with honesty and compassion where you really are, starting there, and working just UNDERNEATH your edge. My own body responds well to hard, physical exertion, but I, surprisingly, found that the long-term lasting physical and mental affects of yoga came, not by pushing into my “edge”, but by letting it dissipate through patience, repetition, and breathing. Maybe it’s different for you. Be skeptical, come and find out for yourself what happens in your bodymind and life. Best of all, first group class is free.