Rooted in Practice – Page 8

How the Hillside Festival brought Acrobatic Yoga back to QSY

This post is brought to you by Emma Dines!

The Magic of Hillside

If you’ve never been to the Hillside Festival in Guelph, you are missing out. This weekend festival that takes place on in late July on Guelph Lake Island has become a beacon of environmental sustainability, creative expression and wonderful music. Where else can you find crocheted covered bicycles, workshops happening every hour of the day on everything from home fermentation to hula hooping, with incredible musicians and poets performing on four different stages?

Hatching the Perfect Plan

In March of this year, I began hatching my plan to offer a unique workshop at Hillside. Workshop spots are coveted by many people, as being selected to offer a workshop means a complimentary weekend pass and a chance to contribute to the magic of the festival. I had submitted workshop proposals a few years in a row (without success) but this year I felt like I had a royal flush. I submitted a proposal for Acrobatic Partner Yoga, and then sat back and waited. Plain old yoga workshops were a dime a dozen, but I hoped that I would be the only one submitting this particular workshop topic. In April, I got the good news. I had been selected! I worked on my workshop description and waited until July.
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Take Your Yoga With You – A Guide to Practicing on the Road

This post is by Aimee Morrison, one of our wonderful yoga teacher trainees. Aimee travels a lot for work, so she wrote this post to share what she’s learned about bringing yoga along on her travels.

Summer time is travel time! Maybe you’re at the cottage, or visiting family. Maybe you’re taking a big road trip or going camping or waiting to see which city has the best summer festival to go to. If you’re out of town, you can’t come practice with us at the studio. And it’s hard to maintain a home practice when, well, you’re not home. But you can still incorporate yoga into your travels, no matter where you are.

I travel a lot for work, taking between five and ten trips a year, and I’ve discovered I’m a lot happier (and less kinked up from air travel) when I do yoga. There are a lot of ways to do this, from studio practice to self-practice. Here are some of the ways I incorporate yoga on my travels–and some ways that you might, too.

Find a studio

I like to practice in at least one studio in every city I visit. Most studios in most places accept drop-ins, with rates from $15-25, depending on location. Some studios even have introductory pricing, like first class for $10, so this can be pretty inexpensive.

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Looking Behind the Drama Curtain: A Path to Resilience

This blog post is by Danette Adams, who will be facilitating a workshop on “Building Personal Resilience” on Sunday August 10 at Queen Street Yoga. Explore how the beliefs behind your drama curtain may be impacting your life choices and experiences without your awareness . You will leave with practical strategies that you can implement even before you leave the workshop. Read on for some ideas on beginning to look behind the “drama curtain”.

Summer Stress in the Self Check-out Lane

The pace was summer slow on this particular summer day when my sister and I wandered through the grocery store near her home. Once we agreed that we had all we came for, my sister indicated that she was going to go through the self-check lane with her items. Without even taking a breath, I scrunched up my nose and told her that I was going to go through the express lane where a tired-looking cashier was distractedly checking out a customer in front of me. “The self-check option is too stressful”. My sister lifted her eyebrows and twisted her face incredulously at me and said “Seriously! How do you make it through the day?”

I am peculiarly sensitive to stress and work hard to avoid it even though I absolutely know that some stress is completely natural and even beneficial for me.

But what was interesting to me was how reactionary I was to this insignificant event and so unaware of the process behind the scenes. It led me to consider how indicative my quick and unprocessed reaction was of how I handle more compelling situations that hold more meaning.

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Teaching Yoga in Public Spaces: The Power of an Outdoor Practice

A Post by Leena Miller Cressman

Taking Yoga Outdoors

Practicing and teaching yoga outside is a big highlight of my summer. I love to take my own practice to the park as soon as it gets warm, either by myself or with friends. I love how soft and forgiving the grass is when playing around with new things like arm balances or handstands. I love feeling the breeze on my skin and looking up at the tree tops while I’m in a pose. To me yoga is about relationship and connection, and in practicing yoga outside the feeling of connection to the environment and the world is more palpable and sweetly profound. I’ve been teaching yoga outside for the past few years (partnering with the City of Kitchener for Wednesday classes, and sharing Queen Street Yoga love on Sundays) and I love sharing the practice of awareness, breath and movement with new people.
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Handstands Don’t Lie

A Post by Emma Dines

“Is handstand the ultimate yoga pose?”

A yoga student recently asked me after class, “Is handstand the ultimate yoga pose?” This really surprised me because I try to say plainly in all of my classes that practicing yoga isn’t about achieving shapes with your body — it’s about being in a learning relationship with yourself and your body-mind’s capacities and limitations. In a recent class I described yoga as “truth-telling” and as “a practice of paying attention to the way that our physical and personal truth can shift and change from moment to moment”. The poses help us tell the truth to ourselves. Early on in the practice, or at the beginning of working with a pose, the truth is more black and white; either you are doing a handstand or you are not. Continue reading “Handstands Don’t Lie”

Establishing a home practice, not always as easy as it sounds

No matter who you are, keeping up a home yoga practice can be difficult at times. Heck, even our Yoga Teacher Trainees struggle with it sometimes! We showed our YTT’s this article on 10 Tips and Tricks to Establishing a Regular Home Yoga practice and asked them what they thought. Continue reading “Establishing a home practice, not always as easy as it sounds”

Prenatal Yoga – What’s it to you?

Are you or a friend interested in practicing yoga during pregnancy? Here’s what our prenatal instructor Julie Zettel has to say about why she thinks yoga is helpful for women during their pregnancies.

Prenatal Yoga has become a huge draw for many women looking to stay healthy and vibrant throughout their pregnancies. Pregnancy is an ideal time to begin a yoga practice under the guidance of a certified yoga teacher. These classes are a great environment for the first timer to learn basic postures in a safe manner and experience the incredible healing effects that the practice has on body and the mind.Continue reading “Prenatal Yoga – What’s it to you?”

Building Fires: A reflection on a cozy yoga retreat

When I thought about what a retreat was, I thought of it as an individual endeavour, where one went off on ones own, sat in silence away from the world and came back with some answers or a better understanding of things as a result of that time away. While the building fires retreat was indeed away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the demands of our day to day lives, it was not as solitary as I imagined a retreat to be. Together, there were 21 of us: a handful from Queen Street Yoga, and an equal number from a studio in Toronto known as Kula.Continue reading “Building Fires: A reflection on a cozy yoga retreat”

Adjustment Cards: Keeping you Comfortable in your Practice

At QSY we are continuing to work to make our studio a fun, safe, and comfortable place for all people to come and practice in. As part of this effort we are introducing Adjustment Cards to help make our classes more welcoming. What are Adjustment Cards you ask?

THESE are consent cards — These are Adjustment Cards

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Flight Club! aka Acro Yoga

I went to my first Acro Yoga class last week. After seeing Leena and Emma’s faces light up when they talked about it, I thought it just had to be a wonderful thing to try! I feel like Acro Yoga is like a jacked up version of some trust game you might play at the beginning of a company retreat or something. The trust that you need to put in the other person that is lifting you up into the air is incredible, and also the personal boundaries that are crossed when you let a stranger put their hands and feet on you and push you up is something else as well. But wait, I think I’m getting a little ahead of myself. You may still be wondering, what is Acro Yoga?Continue reading “Flight Club! aka Acro Yoga”