Yoga Therapeutics Workshops

Yoga Therapeutics with Lisa Baker

LOVE your back 

Saturday Feb 20th 2.30 - 5pm

 at Yoga East

LOVE your belly 

Sunday Feb 21st 10.30 -1pm

 at Yoga East 

 Yoga Therapeutics

LOVE your Back

Learn tools to deal with a busy mind, troubled sleep, sore back, nervousness, anxiety, fibromyalgia and hormonal irregularities.

Based on the 5 elements and the meridians of Chinese medicine, Lisa will guide you through yoga poses to move energy into the lower back, kidneys, bladder, reproductive organs, adrenals and into your lower limbs. Learn ways to reduce tiredness, stiffness and manage ailments on a daily basis. Suits all levels.

 

Yoga Therapeutics

LOVE your Belly

  

Explore yoga sequences to move your bowels, get regular, detox, control sugar cravings and improve digestive health.

Discover how chakras support your digestive system and enhance your overall sense of vitality and wellness. In this workshop, Lisa, a qualified herbalist and naturopath, will blend Yoga with Western Naturopathy and the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine, to show you how to put together your personalised sequence. Suits all levels.

About Lisa Baker

"Lisa started her yoga journey in 1992 with Elleke van Kralingen in the Netherlands while she was studying Naturopathy. Lisa graduates in 1997 as a herbalist and naturopath.She moved to Australia in 1999where she settled down in the beautiful Dandenongs near Melbourne. In 2009 she finished her yoga teacher training and has been teaching yoga since. She has studies children's yoga with Loraine Rushton and finished another teacher training with Donna Farhi in 2015. Lisa has a down to earth approach to teaching yoga ans is interested in tis therapeutic effects. For Lisa yoga is a life style. Her goal is to empower people to use the principles of yoga beyond the mat into each day and each moment as a guidance on how to reduce stress and live a fulfilled life."

To book 

Details: LOVE your Back

Saturday Feb 20th

2.30 - 5pm

Yoga East

206 a Main Street, Bairnsdale 

$40

Payment secures your place.

Limited places.

Bookings required:

To book via Direct Bank transfer email Margot or message me on Facebook

Book by credit card.

No refunds.

Details: LOVE your Belly

Saturday Feb 21st

10.30 - 1pm

Yoga East

206 a Main Street, Bairnsdale 

$40

 Payment secures your place.

Limited places.

Bookings required:

To book via Direct Bank transfer email Margot or message me on Facebook

Or pay by credit card.

No refunds. 

See you on the mat. 

Om shanti, Margot XX 

margotporteryoga@hotmail.com

Yoga Intensive Dragon Dance Feb 14th

                                  Dragon Dance Yoga Intensive
                                                       Play! Move! Groove!

Saturday Feb 13th

 2.30 - 5pm 

Yoga East 

 Dragon Dance

           

Feel the heat of summer with this vigorous and fluid dance. 

The Dragon Dance is a wonderful blend of Daoist and Classical Indian Yoga. Move through a whole body work out, work up a sweat and challenge your mind, ego and body. In this workshop, we build up into a flow of poses in stages with each stage adding to the dynamism and spirit of a yoga dance. Work to improve your flexibility and increase your concentration and focus.  

 Experience the flow of energy and feel the magic of 'prana' as it moves through the body.

Once the stage is set and we are familiar with the dance, let's slow it right down and work with holding poses or variations of poses to build strength and stamina. Then wind down into a selection of yin poses echoing the dance. Finish with pranayama and savasana.

Details:

Saturday Feb 13th

2.30 - 5pm

Yoga East

206 a Main Street, Bairnsdale 

$40

Payment secures your place.

Limited places.

Bookings required:

For Direct Bank Transfer payment details email Margot Porter
 or message me on Facebook
Or book and pay with a credit card

No refunds.

A Yin Approach to New Year

A Yin Approach to New Year

“We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions.”

Image source http://www.livescience.com/32675-how-do-fireworks-get-their-colors.html

So the saying goes and yet each year we have the luxury of thinking about what we would like to improve about ourselves and then off we go and make our New Year resolutions/intentions. 
This post is a reflection on resolutions and why I no longer make them.  

What are New Year resolutions really all about?

In the past, like most people my resolutions have been about changing myself in some way or another. 

They generally fell into two main categories:

1) Something I wanted to stop doing

2) Something that I wanted to do but wasn't doing.

Example: get fitter, eat less (I love eating), spend more time with Marc, read more, be creative, garden more, start that book and so on.

This year I had the pleasure of completing Yin Yoga Teacher Training and this involved spending time learning and practising the art of yin - just being  - and witnessing and reflecting on the way my thought habits supported (or not) my happiness and inner peace. 

How to reconfigure resolutions in a new light?

Making changes to become more balanced and at ease in life is important. In all honesty, in the past I have stuck to some of the changes I have promised myself - shifting long held habits, moving into new uncomfortable places to grow and instigating new routines to support myself. In essence, a yang style approach tapping into my active, dynamic yang energies to make healthy shifts.

But what about the resolutions I haven't stuck to?
I do struggle with New Year's resolutions and have stopped making them.

 Summer is here, the days are long and I am on a break from work - everything seems possible and so the New Year Resolutions are cast into the swirl of the universe. Once back working, well, I think we all know what happens - yes we stick at activities for a while and then they drop away providing that little voice in the head an opportunity to come out to play and make comments about a lack of discipline and self love. Not helpful and certainly not nourishing to wonderful you.

Let's unpack!

When you have a good hard look at resolutions they are based on an assumption that in some way or another you are not good enough the way you are and that you should change. 

Where is this idea/assumption coming from? 

Us, our family, partner, friends, social media or marketing. 

Whose voice is whispering in your ear? 

An Alternative

My friend and I now use a guiding word or phrase to suggest a direction for our interactions with ourselves and the universe. This can be made anytime and can be adjusted to suit circumstances. The word or phrase is more about a vibration, feeling, or mood to live with. 

I am love.

 I am light. 

Relax.

Slow down.

Chill. 

Mine for this year is balance.

balance balance balance balance
balance balance balance balance

balance

Me out in the Australain bush

Yang is about being active, dynamic, moving, passionate and accomplishing big ideas and projects. Yin is about being still, quiet, allowing, relaxing into the present moment, accepting and experiencing the small acts of daily life with care and attention.

Balance connects with and acknowledges both the yin and yang aspects of life. Perfect! 
 
Balance is an art in itself for as we know from our yoga practice a balance requires constant tweaking, adjusting and modifying. It is not as if we get into a balance  and then hey presto we are there static and still. There is the more gross movement in the body as muscles switch on and other lengthen and relax, but also that beautiful, subtle oscillation of the breath moving from our centre out to the edges and back in again.

How to work with your guiding word or phrase?
 
Once you have your theme or feel then it is more about honesty asking yourself how to live with your chosen vibration. 

What can you accept, allow or just let it be about yourself?
 (Yes I know it is counterintutive and goes against all that that society/media tells us to do).

What is your vibration or feeling for 2016? 

love love love
peace peace peace
 
Margot XXX
 

Yoga practice and the three bodies of yoga

Yoga practice and the three bodies of yoga

Yoga is the practice of self-transformation, a practice for deepening our experience of our authentic ground of being. Through calming the fluctuations of the mind (citti vritti nirodha) and moving deeply within we can open up to our true nature. Here we begin to understand and experience that we are not separate beings but rather we are all one, we are energy, we are light, we are love.

                                                                           Poppy Photo by Margot Porter
 

The concept of the three bodies of yoga - physical, astral, causal - is intimately intertwined with our yoga practice. These three bodies describe different levels of awareness and blend into one another: the physical feeds into the astral, the astral feeds into the causal. For many in the West the desire to increase flexibility, build strength and improve physical appearance is the gateway to becoming bodily aware. Moving slowly and mindfully with the breath in yoga creates space to be with sensations in the body anywhere along a continuum from joyful to pleasant to uncomfortable to confronting.

Mandala by Margot. Photo by Margot Porter

 

Physical body awareness paves the way to the astral body where we can explore thoughts, feelings and emotions as well as memories and desires as they arise and dissolve during our practice. Time on the mat lets us to unpack and transform our habitual thinking patterns and responses. Moreover, our yoga practice helps us to understand and reflect on where and how emotions sit in and affect the body. With this emotional awareness, we begin to shift our behaviour off the mat to positively transform our lives and the lives of those around us.

A committed yoga practice continues our journey into our unconscious thought and action behaviours making it possible to dive deeply into an exploration of the causal body, that is, our long held beliefs about who we are. We may not be aware of these deep seated beliefs or the ways in which they are holding is back from expressing and being our authentic self. 

Om shanti, shanti, shanti,

Margot XXX

Whole Body YIn Yoga Intensive Nov 14th 2015

Whole Body 

Yin Yoga Intensive

Saturday Nov 14th 

2- 4.30pm

Yoga East 206 a Main Street, Bairnsdale 

 

The last intensive for the year...and what an amazing time we have had exploring the different koshas - physical, energetic, mental, emotional and spiritual.  

It is nearly November and soon end of the year festive joy and craziness will be upon us so what a perfect time to unwind with a session of sensational whole body Yin Yoga.

Yin Yoga is a brilliant way to put some hydration back into your body. It is like watering the body garden by giving space to let the seeds of your intention flourish. Hydrate the whole body matrix through stillness and mindfulness.

In this intensive, we will works systematically through the whole body from the tips of our toes to the crown of our head. The whole hip area - quads, hamstrings, inside and outside of the thighs will be included as well as spine. shoulders, neck, and hands. This practice will finish with the relaxation practice of yoga nidra.

Juice up your body!

Contact Margot Porter to register.

Om shanti, shanti, shanti XXX