As the year comes to a close, it is the perfect time for a yogi/yogini to look back on what he or she has accomplished in that time.  Whether it was perfecting an old pose, or trying a new one… Or maybe it was learning a new relaxation or meditation technique… Or maybe you found a new teacher to learn from (and maybe it was me ), now is as good a time as any to appreciate it and hope for more good things in the next year!

2011 brought me many new experiences in both my personal and professional parts of my life.  I started to dabble in Ashtanga yoga and I know it’s going to take me a lot longer than I thought to master the new sequencing and Sanskrit terminology, but I’m excited to add something new to my practice.  I’ve had the opportunity to teach a meditation class at the studio, so I’ve been practicing my voice inflections and guided relaxation techniques.  I’ve been at Esteem for over six months now, and I’ve learned so much from my amazing (and entertaining!) students.  Lastly, Jennifer, the owner of Yoga With Style, and Janine, the owner of Esteem, have been so supportive and kind throughout my time at the studio, and have been such great mentors for someone starting out in the field of health and wellness.

As the new year and spring semester of my classes approach, my teaching schedule is going to change.  I hope my current students are able to find a way to make their schedules work with mine, because I don’t know if class would be the same without them!  I’ve seen them make great strides in their practice, and it has been a blast coming up with class themes with the help of student suggestions in order for them to get even more out of their practices.  I also hope the new schedule will bring new students to their mat and experience all of the good things that yoga can bring.

I do not have a New Year’s resolution, but a few years ago I was introduced to a different tradition: instead of a resolution, assign a word that will be your mantra for the next year, and have it be something that you aim to represent.  Last year my word was “calm.”  It was very difficult to accomplish, but I feel like I can move on to a different word this year, and not have to keep practicing the one I had last year.  What will your word be?  Peace?  Love? Focus? Patient?  How will you go about accomplishing it?

Setting an intention at the beginning of each class is something that I emphasize each week.  If I don’t have a specific theme, I leave it up to the student to create a personal goal for the hour or so they spend with me, and use their practice to help them achieve it.  It is no different with your yearly mantra.  Yoga can help any person of any level achieve whatever they set to do.  It helps to keep you focused, motivated, and have a clear plan as to how to get it done.  How will you use your practice to help you achieve your goals for the year?

Looking to start or continue your yoga practice in a semi-private, vinyasa flow class?  Stop by Esteem Fitness and Wellness in Greenlawn, NY Tuesdays at 7:00PM to practice with Laura!  All levels and abilities welcome.  Schedule will be changing at the end of January to weekend classes, so check Esteem’s website for class schedule: http://esteemfit.com/

Back in February, Yoga With Style published an article about jewelry designer, Susan Reeves, creator of Moondog Treasures.  Susan has graciously donated one of her amazing necklaces as a raffle piece to benefit families affected by Tropical Storm Irene here in the Deerfield Valley of Vermont.  This weekend (raffle begins tomorrow and goes through Sunday) Clothespins Consignment Boutique in Whitingham will be selling tickets to win this wonderful piece.  All sales go to the flood fund maintained by Twice Blessed Community Thrift Shop in Wilmington. This is the first in a series of raffles hosted by Yoga With Style at Clothespins Boutique over the coming weeks – so stop in and stay tuned for more goodies for a great cause! (Oh, and P.S. Clothespins has “We will Rebuild” charity t-shirts for the whole family – just in for the weekend!!) We have deep gratitude to all those who are pitching in to help fellow Vermont families – together we will rebuild – and thanks to Susan Reeves (giant hugs to her!!), we are that much closer!!

Tickets are $5.oo each or 2 for $8.00 – if you cannot stop by, or are not local, you can also participate and pay via Paypal by sending your payment to info@yogawithstyle.com – just reference Moondog Treasures Raffle purchase for VT   Below is a photo of the necklace being raffled this weekend as well as a reprint of the article about Susan from www.yoganomics. net

“Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.” ~Rumi

This quote appears just below the signature of every e-mail Susan Reeves sends out – After learning about Susan and her amazing talent, you can see that she lives this mantra…Moondog Treasures is truly all that – uplifting handcrafted jewelry designs that inspire in so many ways. The love that is within each piece is clear.

Susan Reeves created Yoga Jewelry by Moondog Treasures out of her desire to merge two of her favorite things: yoga and art. Her jewelry includes mala bracelets, thai silver pendants on beaded strands, soldered pieces, stamped pieces, and jewelry made from PMC (precious metal clay).

Susan is a vinyasa yoga teacher, and creates jewelry from her home in Highland Village, Texas where she lives with her husband, daughter and son. Her work is sold online and at yoga studios in the Dallas area. Susan’s jewelry has been presented at various craft fairs and trunk shows, including Exhale Spa Dallas and The Art Show at Yoga Island.

Yoga With Style aims to connect with artisans who work with charities that we support as well.  Every year during the month of September, Susan donates 54% of all sales of her mala bracelets to charity. She does this in honor of the Global Mala, an incredible annual yoga event that was set into motion in 2007 by Shiva Rea to raise awareness and funds for causes that affect our planet. See www.globalmala.org or www.yogamonth.org for more information.  We hope to further support Susan’s efforts in this charity by designing a Yoga With Style mala to be donated to this cause in 2011.

As with so many of our designers, I just love hearing about how they started out and what inspires them:

YWS: When did you decide to become a designer/artisan?

SR: Probably when I first dipped my hands into finger paint as a child. Creativity is our birthright. We are all artists in the way that we express ourselves in the world. It comes about in different forms and at various times in life. At one point, I expressed myself through learning another language and teaching it to others. Then I discovered an endless well of creativity when I gave birth to my children. I love peering through their eyes and seeing the fresh view that they had of the world. Creativity emerges through my evolving practice and teaching of yoga. My jewelry creations came about in the past 5 years, and recently my passion for yoga and jewelry have combined to form the collection, Yoga Jewelry by Moondog Treasures.

YWS: Where (or how) did you train?

SR: I learned how to bead from my best friend, Cynde. We’ve signed up for jewelry workshops together as birthday gifts to each other. I’ve learned many techniques that way, including metal stamping, soldering, and working with silver clay.

YWS: How did your training influence you?

SR: My training has given me the basic techniques. Beyond that, pure inspiration guides me.

YWS: Where do you get your ideas?

SR: My color ideas come from the outdoors. If the colors appear together in nature, they look good together on a necklace or bracelet. I also gain inspiration from the beautiful language of Sanskrit. Several of my pieces include Sanskrit words, phrases or mantras.

YWS: What artist or artists inspired or inspires you currently?

SR: I’m inspired by what I see. Soon the bluebonnets will be blooming all over the state of Texas. Their bright violet-blue color will show up in my spring collection. I’m also inspired by what I hear. I’m in love with kirtan! The first time I experienced it live was hearing Dave Stringer perform during a yoga class in California. Some of my other favorite kirtan artists are Jai Uttal, Donna DeLory, Steve Gold, and Girish. Just last summer in Venice Beach, I was walking along the shore and happened upon a small group of yogis sitting in the sand and singing, only to find out that it was Girish. I definitely joined in!

YWS: Is there any symbolic imagery in your work?

SR: I’m fascinated with the stories behind the great figures of Hindu mythology. Many of my pieces contain images of Ganesh, the god of wisdom and remover of obstacles; Hanuman, the monkey, revered for his courage and strength; and Nataraj, Shiva as the cosmic dancer.

YWS: What helped to shape you?

SR: My biggest influences have been my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother expressed her creativity through sewing. My mom feels most alive when she is in her garden. Jai Ma!

YWS:  How did you decide on this medium? What are your favorite materials and colors, media, to work with?

SR: I started to create yoga jewelry because I was not seeing it for sale anywhere at the time. So I made my own. My favorite jewelry art medium is PMC (precious metal clay), which arrives to me in clay form. I mold it into a design that inspires me, and fire it at 1200 degrees in a kiln. This burns off the clay binder and leaves a pendant of 99.9% pure silver. My pendants are unique, containing tiny marks and faint fingerprints where I worked and formed the clay. I don’t sand these away because it shows that the pendants are made by hand and are one of a kind.
YWS: Tell us a little about your personal yoga practice and how it affects or inspires your designs?

SR: I began practicing yoga in 1998, after the birth of my daughter. I’ve been teaching vinyasa and gentle yoga since 2005 and became an RYT-500 through Yoga Alliance in 2009. My teaching style is influenced by Shiva Rea, with whom I completed an advanced teacher training program. I continue to study with Shiva and serve as a mentor to new teacher trainees in her program. I love how Shiva encourages all people to discover their own creativity in the flow. I experience this flow every time I step onto my mat and every time I sit down at my work table to design a new jewelry piece.

Yoga With Style offers Moondog Treasures to our customers and we literally cannot keep it long in our studio space! We look forward to having some exclusive designs just for Yoga With Style that supports Susan’s efforts with charity as well as personafies our mantra and Susan’s:…love & light! We have so much gratitude for sharing Susan’s designs with you!

When I was learning the subtleties of teaching, my teacher put a great emphasis on avoiding demonstrating the poses during class, and that we should be able to teach a class just by verbal cues.  I completely agreed with her, because I always found that it was easier to learn by listening while focusing on myself, instead of directing my attention to the front of the class and focusing more on what my teacher looked like in the pose.  However, in practice, I found teaching to be somewhat easier done than said, per se.  Demo-ing somehow developed into my biggest teaching “crutch,” or “training wheel,” as my teacher would call it.

I would always introduce my class to new students as a class that I would not demo the poses myself.  Unfortunately, I would sometimes doubt my ability to describe the poses with words, and I would rely on actually doing the more difficult poses for my students who were having trouble with them.  That gradually evolved into me doing almost the whole class with my students, which was very difficult to do well, because it would become harder to talk at the same time, and soon the class would be more about whatever I was able to do with them, rather than what my students were able to do on their own.  I tried to break this new bad habit, but that was easier said than done.

Then, while chopping wood with my brother, my hand got hit with a sledgehammer (accidentally), and one of my fingers was jammed and badly cut and bruised.  Nothing too major, it only required some bandaids and a whole lot of Neosporin, but it stopped me from using my left hand all together when it came to my practice.  Little did I know, this was a blessing in disguise for my developing teaching style.

The next night, I was asked to sub a class, and I showed up, introduced myself to the few new students, and explained that I would not be demonstrating any poses.  And due to my new injury, I followed through on that promise.  I was able to see my students, and know what verbal cues they needed to get into the pose I was asking for, and they didn’t need to see me do it.  Both my students and I were not distracted by my demonstrating anything, and I became more confident in my verbal cues.  It was an eye-opening experience to teach the way I was trained to, and I left the class feeling better about the way I teach.  My demo “training wheels” were forcefully taken off due to a sledgehammer mishap, and I was surprisingly thankful.  I now teach my classes with as little demonstration as possible, and I feel that it has improved my classes significantly.

I am still teaching every Tuesday night at 7:00PM at Esteem in Greenlawn!  Come check out my vinyasa flow class!

Another great lesson I learned about Maine was how to really tune into myself without my usual crutch of my music that I normally play while I practice.  While I was on the dock with just my mat facing into the lake, I had no choice but to listen to the sound of silence that came from the lack of the external noises that I was used to.

We didn’t have any form of technology in the cabin.  We went without cable, internet, and cell phone reception for ten days, which I thought would have been much more difficult than it really was, with me being a true Long Island girl with an insane schedule and my phone strapped to me at all times.  It was actually very easy for me to let all of that go.  I quickly stopped feeling the need to check my email, I never turned on my phone unless it was to call my parents back at home, and we had plenty of things to do to replace watching television.  It was something I didn’t know I was capable of doing, and it felt great to not be dependent on these things.

Without my technology pulling me back to the place I was trying to escape for a few days, I was able to focus on myself a little bit more.  There was no pressure to accomplish anything, no assignments or deadlines, and no expectations set by other people for me to live up to.  I could just be myself, enjoy my practice and my time away from other people, and let go of whatever did not serve me at that moment.  My practice reflected that as well.  There were no interruptions or external influences that I normally found while practicing.  I was alone, with nobody watching, and only the loons calling, running water hitting against the rocks, and fish splashing around me as my new meditation music.  I almost did not want to write about this experience, because it felt so personal in the moment, and that it would be too difficult to describe well enough to others.  However, it seemed important enough to try to share with whoever would listen about the importance of removing yourself from your normal environment to take yourself to a more peaceful place and find yourself in a more loving and accepting mode.  It is much easier to reflect the same feeling of peace within yourself when you are able to do this, even for just one moment.

What I ultimately learned from my practice on the lake was that it is much easier to love yourself and accept what your body can do when there is nobody else around.  I hope to be able to refine that feeling to apply to situations where I am surrounded by other people, but for right now, I just need to focus on having that self-love experience whenever possible, and eventually I will be able to accept myself more readily when both taking and teaching a class.  It helped me to open up to myself, and guide me to examine what I needed to work on, both in my physical practice and my emotional state.  Now that I am back in New York, I will have to try to make more of an effort to remove myself from my noisy, more stressful environment and bring myself back to that place of peace, where the sound of silence can support me in recognizing and developing my true self.

Today it is 65 degrees and sunny, with the wind coming from the south, indicating rain coming soon to the lakeside cabin in Maine where I am staying with my boyfriend and his family. There is a small, aluminum dock from the backyard of the cabin out onto the manmade lake, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The dock is the perfect size for my yoga mat.

This is the first morning in a while that I have woken up without an alarm clock, and it is not blistering hot like in the heat wave that New York was having when I was there just a couple of days ago. The air smells pure, with no sounds except for the gentle wind from the mountains, and the occasional rumbling of logging trucks on the dirt roads around us. There is no internet, cable, and very little cell phone reception. As foreign as it is to this city girl, this is the most peaceful environment I have ever practiced in.

I place my mat in the center of the dock, and begin my practice. Everything is going well, until I start to notice that I’m falling out of basically every standing and balance pose. I eventually realize that the dock is slanted forward, into the water, just so subtle enough for it to not be that noticeable, but to affect even the simplest poses, such as my high lunge and Vira II.

As discouraging as it may have been, I decided to not let that stop me. I was looking forward to this all month, and I wasn’t going to stop practicing in this breathtaking location because of a hurt ego. I tried to make myself as grounded as possible, and I focused on balancing that strength with the softness of allowing the unlevel-ness of the dock guide me into the pose. I released the tension in my neck and shoulders as best as I could, because that is where I tend to hold my frustration, and switched my practice into a lower gear, so to speak, so that I would be able to do some poses that didn’t threaten to make me fall into the water.

Once I changed my perspective and accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be doing any advanced balance poses today, my practice opened up and I let it take me to where my body was comfortable and what felt natural. It was so refreshing to only have the sound of the lake and the birds overhead, and not be worried about anything interrupting me. I was still trying to shake off the ego that wanted to take each pose deeper, but I accepted where I was actually able to be in my practice for that day.

As much as I teach my students to accept where they are in their practice at every given moment, I had never had to experience the frustration of not being able to do what I wanted to do like this before. I had to become humbled by such a slight disadvantage created by my environment, and I quickly learned to accept whatever my body was able to offer me. Once I allowed myself to soften, my practice opened up again and I realized the beauty that I became a part of with every pose I decided to explore. Not a bad time to learn, considering I wasn’t in a crowded yoga studio either surrounded by other people or in the front of the room teaching this type of internal balance to my students. It wasn’t what I was expecting to practice out on the lake, but I appreciated it just the same.

A couple weekends ago, I decided to take the ferry home from Connecticut after visiting my boyfriend.  I was so stressed out and anxious about my upcoming midterms for my classes, and it was very difficult to get my mind to focus on other things.  Fortunately, the drive to the ferry was on these beautiful, winding side streets, and the ferry trip was just what I needed.  It was almost as if the gusts of wind on the deck of the ship blew my worrisome thoughts away for a little bit.  The bright sun reflecting off the water, me being surrounded by people happily enjoying the ride next to me, waving to the other boats we crossed paths with.  It was such a relaxing atmosphere, even though I was taking this journey alone and normally that gives me anxiety just thinking about it.  That day, I was actually glad I was taking the trip on my own, and just being with my thoughts and processing everything without too much interruption.

That night, I drove home from my family’s home out east on the island, and again took some quiet side streets and empty highways home, allowing myself to enjoy the ride and make the weekend last just a little longer before I had to think about all of my responsibilities waiting for me to take care of over the next few days.  During this trip is when I reflected back to some of my Anusara classes, where we focused on harnessing earth energy to maintain a sense of grounded-ness, and trusting the stability of our foundation, whether it was our hands and feet, or sitting on our mats, connecting to the earth.  Tuning into nature can help us do that, appreciating the overwhelming beauty, respecting it for all it can offer us, and realizing that most of our problems are insignificant when we acknowledge how huge the universe is in comparison.

Once I started thinking about that, I then remembered my chakra lessons during my teacher training.  The Mulandhara, or root, chakra, is our most direct route to channeling and using earth energy to become more stable and grounded.  I decided to focus on that chakra that week when I meditated each night before going to bed.  It helped to ease my anxiety about school, because it gave me the confidence I needed that everything would get done.  One of my favorite guided meditations when I was studying with Laurie was the one where we brought up a thought that was bothering us, and then “released” it to the universe, allowing the universe to then take care of it so we wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.  It is to this day the most effective meditation I have ever participated in.

Since that trip, I have been focusing on my root chakra and finding myself a little more centered every time I come to my mat.  I have been incorporating more foundation alignment into my classes, and I can see a difference in my students’ form and how they flow through the poses more easily and with grace.  It’s a very simple technique, but can work wonders when all of that earth energy works to help you become one with your surroundings, and you become immersed in your yoga practice to eventually become more confident to go deeper in poses you didn’t think you could do before.  When you are able to tune into nature, and let the universe take care of some of your worries, beautiful things can happen.