Dan Currie graduated from our 2021-22 Yoga Teacher Training Program, and wrote this blog post about wrist strengthening as part of the program. Check out his suggestions for building stronger wrists (and perhaps decreasing computer-related wrist pain) below! You can catch Dan teaching Sunrise Flow on Thursday mornings until the end of September.
When I started to learn how to do arm balances like crow pose, I had an unexpected benefit. I noticed I wasn’t feeling the same wrist pain after using the computer that I had been experiencing for years. The time spent doing different wrist activations and being in poses that loaded my wrists had built their strength and increased their capacity to support me.
Wrist pain isn’t always due to wrists not being strong, so learning arm balances or strengthening prep work for them might not reduce the pain you may experience in your wrist. If you do have wrist pain, you may want to consider seeking advice from your doctor or physio therapist before trying the wrist activations and poses that follow.
Exercise #1: Palm push-ups
Come to a table pose, but move your hands closer to your knees. Keeping your shoulders over your wrists, lift your thumbs, press into your fingertips and knuckles and peel the palm of your hand off the floor. If you can easily do more than 8-12 repetitions, place your hands a bit further away from your knees. Do 3 sets of 8-12 palm pushups a 2-3 times a week, to build the strength and capacity of your wrist. You’ll notice that as the weeks go by, you’ll have to place your hands further and further from your knees to stay in the 8-12 rep range. I’ve seen one person do palm push-ups from a toe plank. That takes a lot of strength and time to progress too. I can’t do that yet, but I hope to one day 🙂
Exercise # 2: Walk your hands on their different surfaces
Like the palm push-ups, start in table with hands placed close to your knees. Then, starting palm down rotate your hands so they point to the sides or towards your knees. Place the pinky edge of your hands on the floor and move your hands to point in different directions. Do the same thing on the thumb/index finger side of your hand and the back of your hand. Always start with your hands placed close to your knees, until you feel comfortable and strong to move them further away, because the further your hands are from your knees, the greater the load is on your hands.
Exercise #3: Plank Pose
My last recommendation to get you started building wrist strength is plank pose. Holding a plank (with knees up or down) for a minute will help get your hands/wrists used to supporting your weight for that period of time. You can progress this by holding the plank for longer periods of time (maybe increasing by 15-30 seconds every week) or by elevating your feet on a block or chair or using a wall to increase the load supported by your hands.
Once you build the strength of your wrist, holding all of those fun arm balancing will start to become easier and hopefully, like me, your wrists won’t hurt after using a computer all day!
Leena here, checking in about something important to me.
If the Branches could solve the youth mental health crisis – a crisis that the pandemic has only deepened – we would. We can’t, but we are changing our programming to try to make a difference.
In recent months, I’ve had countless conversations with friends who work in health care or counselling about how deeply kids, and especially teens, are struggling with anxiety, isolation, and disconnection right now. One pediatrician friend shared in desperation how staggering the volume of mental health related admissions is right now in his hospital. I’m not talking about a little bit of anxiety – I’m referring to situations like 9 year olds being admitted for suicidal ideation. It’s heartbreaking.
When I was struggling with anxiety, depression and chronic health issues toward the end of high school and in university, yoga practice was a lifeline.
My journey with yoga began at age 13 when I saw a poster at the local YWCA. With only a vague idea of what yoga was, I had a feeling it might offer me some kind of help and healing that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I was the only person under 40 in the class, but I immediately felt at home: I loved the non-competitive vibe, the attention to breathing, the rhythmic movements, and learning to relax at the end of class.
As I continued to explore the practice throughout my teens – taking classes off and on at the Y, and fumbling along at home to Rodney Yee tapes and library books – my yoga asana practice became a foundational support to my mental and physical wellbeing and my body image.
Now in my 30s, with my own young kids, the decades I’ve practiced are integrated into my being in ways that I could have never imagined when I was 13. I credit my practice to helping me experience deep presence during the births of my 3 kids, and helping me pause for a slow breath when my 3-year-old twins are tantruming. My practice is still a huge support for my mental health, more than ever in these tumultuous times.
Unlike when I was 13, now there are the added challenges of social media and the aftermath of years of isolation weighing on our youth. Collectively, we need to do more to ensure that our kids have tools and resources to thrive in this challenging world. The Branches hopes to play a part. This fall we’re launching a whole range of programming that shares embodiment, mindfulness, connection and fun with younger people, and supports families.
My most sincere hope is for yoga to be a lifeline to some 13-year-old out there like it was for me. Can you do me a favour and share about these programs to your friends, co-workers, and families? Send along this blog post and spread the word that all our programming has sliding-scale pricing. Details are all below.
Both courses will:be taught by Branches instructor Lisa Beraldo, a graduate of our YTT with a degree in Child & Youth Counselling, a minor in Family Studies, and experience working with families in schools, private centres and homes. Your kid or teen will be in amazing hands. These courses run at the same time as drop-in programming for adults, so parents can carve out time to practice for yourself as well.
Leena here! As Yoga in the Park wraps up for the summer, I’m thinking back to what I love about this sweet outdoor class. My favourite thing is the weird mishmash of people who end up practicing together at this free event.
In the front you’ve got the retired folks who want to make sure they can hear my instructions.
Off to the side are the mom friends with toddlers who might need to bail for the playground halfway through.
In the middle are a few teenagers who just want to lay on their mats and work on their tans.
Somewhere near the back is a dude in jeans who was biking by and decided to join in spontaneously.
It is a merry, motley crowd, and to me it often feels like one of the most authentic expressions of Yoga. Despite who I see at Yoga in the Park, so many people still think yoga isn’t for them because online they just see images of acrobatics and tight pants. This couldn’t be further from the point of Yoga.
It’s been an uphill battle to counter the mainstream narratives of who belongs, but Yoga in the Park helps change the conversation. Yoga postures, or asanas, are just one small tributary in the ocean of Yoga. To me, the whole of yoga is about connection to all parts of ourselves and to something greater than ourselves. Yoga’s many paths offer us ways to integrate body, mind and spirit. And, most significantly in this world of increasing isolation, to connect more wholeheartedly into community with other humans and nature.
Our city parks are such refreshingly integrated spaces in our segmented society. I often spend the evening with my 3 kiddos at the playground in Victoria Park. I heardat least a dozen different languages, and my kids make fast friends with families of many different backgrounds.
Bringing Yoga into the park, and as a free event, expresses the true meaning of yoga as unity and invites more equity of access to yoga practice.
The Branches has been honoured to partner with the City of Kitchener in this effort. After a two-year pause during the pandemic, we’re so grateful these classes came back this year, and we were thrilled to have expanded into two of our city parks this summer.
See you next summer for more outdoor, motley adventures!
You know the type of life lesson you have to learn over and over again to really make it stick? Last summer, I (Leslie) think I might have learned one for good. I want to explain why the Branches shut down for two weeks at the start of August, but I’d like to tell you a story first.
In June 2021, I had what people used to call a nervous breakdown. Mysterious pain with no other symptoms had me sleepless and writhing on the floor for three days straight. Telehealth sent me to the ER, where lots of tests revealed nothing. But deep down, I knew what was going on.
Daily life had ground down into a reduction of work and basic physical maintenance. At the time, Ontario was still in a version of lockdown that disconnected me from my Yoga and climbing communities. It didn’t help that I was three of what would become ten weeks of having to live out of a suitcase in four different homes. On the surface I’d been keeping it together quite well, but my body had kept score of the stress.
It’s obvious now that I was lacking any joy or true rest. Those three solid days of suffering were a clear mandate to pause and find something to make me smile. I barely got myself to do that, starting with simple pleasures: fancy butter on fresh bread and a swim at the local pool. Help from friends boosted me up, and I came back to life by the end of summer, capped off with a dance party in a field.
The lesson? A human being cannot be sustained on an all hustle, no play diet.
Much difficulty can be endured with the right amount of joy or meaning to balance or enrich it. Epic feats of work can be achieved if there is ample rest to recharge.
If you’re saying to yourself, “Duh, Leslie,” then I sincerely congratulate you on your wisdom, or, urge you to recognize the privilege of never having burned out. If you’re thinking that this is a lesson you too may struggle to learn, let’s remind each other to keep fighting for rest and play, for ourselves, and for everyone.
So, to live a little bit of life for the sheer joy of it, The Branches was shut down for the first two weeks of August. It’s a bold move we’ve admired other small businesses making (Golden Hearth, we’re looking at you), and a small boundary meant to protect our spirits.
Many of us visited family out-of-province, spent more time with the kids, read books, took naps. Shutting down also gave us an opportunity to touch up the studio: we wrapped up a few indoor renovation projects, got the new front garden well established, and did some deep cleaning.
We wish you the rest and joy you need this summer, and now that we’re open again we’re excited to see you!
With warmth, Leslie
P.P.S. Taking a break is a privilege not everyone in our society can enjoy. If you’re able, please give generously to a community organization that supports housing and food as human rights so that all people may have a chance at dignity and wellbeing. Tiny Home TakeOut / A Better Tent City / 97 Victoria
Emma here. I recently wrote a lineage acknowledgement for The Branches, because there are many ways in which we have participated in the cultural appropriation and exploitation of Yoga. Much like a land acknowledgement, a lineage acknowledgement is a first step towards recognizing the harm done and committing to doing better.
Read that first sentence again. …there are many ways in which we, The Branches, have participated in the cultural appropriation and exploitation of Yoga.
If you’re getting defensive, for me or The Branches, or on your own behalf, I encourage you to pause, take a breath, and keep reading. I’m not saying we are bad and wrong for doing this. I’m saying that we have learned more and are now committed to doing better.
Goat yoga, for example. We did goat yoga a few years ago, and while it was cute to see some goats running around in a field, it also had the effect of trivializing the purpose of the practice. Goats are great, and we can go hang out with them if we want. But we don’t need to mash together goats and Yoga. Because Yoga is more than poses; it is a holistic Indigenous wisdom tradition, and it is our job to hold that with more integrity.
I invite you to read our Lineage Acknowledgement below to get a sense of context and history, and how we are now approaching Yoga.
We hope these efforts resonate with you and invite you more deeply into the practice of Yoga.
With care, Emma
Lineage Acknowledgement for The Branches
Offering Historical Context
This lineage acknowledgement is one small step towards recognizing the impacts and working towards reparations for the harm caused to the people and wisdom traditions of India by the violent and exploitative means of colonization, capitalism and white supremacy. It is an attempt to provide some context for the yoga that we practice at The Branches, and the ways we are working to relearn and more deeply understand our relationship to yoga. Any attempts to summarize history will always leave out large swaths of context and information, so please read the following summary with an awareness of that.
Yogic practices began to emerge on the subcontinent of India from 800 BCE – 200 CE, as part of a cultural shift towards an individual exploration of spirituality and fate. Texts from that time period include Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, which share different approaches to yoga practices and paths. These texts do not detail physical poses, but outline ethics, meditative or devotional practices. Some of the physical poses of yoga that we might see in contemporary yoga classes today began to emerge after 1100 CE, when systemization of a number of yogic practices (including fasting, cleansing, mudras, chanting, meditation on the subtle body, and physical poses) began to be recorded and codified. Many of these practices were actively suppressed during the violent and destructive British colonization of India, in an attempt to destroy Indigenous wisdom and culture.
A number of yogic practices were revived by Indian Independence activists in the 1930s, who were hoping to reconnect Indians with their cultural heritage. The physical poses, often known as hatha yoga, began to be taught more widely across India and around the world, in some places fusing with other physical fitness trends. Hatha yoga (with a focus on asana, or physical postures) has since developed into a multi-billion dollar aspect of the fitness industry, however most of the industry is in large part extracted from its original cultural context(s) and wisdom traditions.
The North American yoga industry primarily focuses on one aspect of yoga; asana; a Sanskrit word which can be translated as “seat”. Asanas were originally the seated poses for meditation, but later evolved to include more complex physical shapes. Asana is one of eight limbs of Yoga as outlined in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the other 7 limbs spanning ethics, breath practices, and deepening levels of concentration and meditative contemplation. It should be noted that there are many texts and traditions that outline other limbs or systems of yoga, but Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is the most widely known text in North American contexts.
What We Practice at The Branches
At The Branches our tagline is “Yoga & movement, rooted in community”. We included the word “movement” intentionally, as not all of the movement we teach is yoga asana. Some of it is strength or mobility training, some comes from other modalities like the Tensegrity Repair Series or the Axis Syllabus, and some of it is from the creative minds of our teachers. We include these other modalities as we find them helpful explorations alongside the practice of yoga asana.
The yoga we focus on in our drop-in classes is yoga asana, the physical postures of yoga. We aim to empower people to feel stronger, more comfortable and more at ease in their bodies as a result of a yoga asana and movement practice. We know that asana is not the whole of yoga and we believe that it is a helpful practice for our disembodied culture to re-connect with the intricacies of the body, on the way to re-connecting with the intricacies of the mind and heart.
We consider the other limbs of yoga to be beyond the scope of a 60-75 minute drop-in class, and believe that these other limbs require different learning containers; courses or workshops and longer term relationships with teachers or lineage holders. We explore the history, philosophy and other limbs of yoga in our 250-hour YTT, and encourage our graduates to pursue a lifelong relationship with the many forms of Yoga.
Most of our teachers learned yoga from white, North American teachers. We are currently working on re-learning and re-understanding Yoga through the lens of decolonizing and reparations, and are working to include a wider range of voices and perspectives in our studio and YTT teaching staff.
We believe that the process of yoga is lifelong, and its aim is to decrease or relieve suffering. To that end, we connect our practice of yoga with our larger values of social justice. We believe that this commitment to social justice is at the root of much of Yoga; Ishvara Pranidhana is one of the niyamas in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which can be understood as devotion to the ethical ideal of a person. We dedicate ourselves to ethical action for the greater good and hold this as a piece of our yoga practice.
Connections & Continued Learning
We’d like to introduce you to some of the wonderful South Asian, Desi, and South Asian Diaspora teachers we have worked with in the past or are currently learning from. We invite you to learn from them too:
Jyoti Solanki-Davie is a Kitchener-local who is a Registered Massage Therapist, Yoga practitioner and author. She was a guest speaker in our 2019 and 2021 YTT programs. We are grateful to have learned a great deal through conversations with Jyoti. We have her to credit for inspiring us to create this page – thank you Jyoti for calling us in to better contextualize our relationship to the whole of yoga and share that on our website. Jyoti has an awesome Ayurveda and Yoga Colouring Workbook that can be found on her website here.
Shwetha & Manu Subramanya are guest faculty in our 2019, 2021 and 2022 Yoga Teacher Trainings. Both of Shwetha and Manu were immersed into a culture of shlokas and mantras from their childhoods in India. They formally studied Sanskrit from high school. Their specific interest in Sanskrit are in subhashitas (proverbs), hymns and the ancient texts of science. In our YTT, they teach intro to Sanskrit together, and Shwetha teaches yoga philosophy and yoga asana. Shwetha has also taught a course for the general public through The Branches, sharing the Ashtangas of yoga, and we hope to have her teach more courses in the future.
Tejal Patel (she/her/hers) is a first-generation Indian American yoga teacher, writer, podcaster, and community organizer. We first learned from Tejal in her Om & Namaste workshop and from her podcast, and we are thrilled that she is a new guest faculty in our 2022 YTT. Tejal advocates for yoga through a social justice lens and educates and empowers individuals and groups around the world to do the same. You can learn more from Tejal at:
Tejal Yoga where virtual yoga & meditation classes are led by South Asian teachers who honor and embody the authentic roots of yoga.
Yoga is Dead where they bring critical conversations about race, power, privilege, body politics, harassment, fair pay, veganism, ahimsa, and gatekeeping to the forefront through our podcast and signature training on cultural appropriation: Act Against Appropropriation, and now through our e-book out now The Original Godmothers of Yoga.
@abcdyogi, an inclusive community that facilitates healing and connection through storytelling, conversation, performance, art, song, dance, writing, and retreat led by South Asian community offered to a global audience.
Rabia Meghaniis an Ayurvedic Practitioner, Yoga Therapist and Researcher. She is a new guest faculty in our 2022 YTT sharing ayurveda from a decolonizing lens. Rabia’s formal education is in public health and epidemiology. Merging her knowledge of disease and the ancient science of Yoga and Ayurveda, Rabia aims to modernize eastern healing teachings and make them accessible to the masses while honoring the roots of the science. Her passion lies in harmonizing western medicine with eastern healing methodologies.
Indu Vashist is a historian, yoga teacher and the executive director of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre in Toronto. Indu will be joining us as a guest faculty for our 2022 YTT program sharing about the history of yoga both on the Indian continent and as it has evolved in North America. We highly recommend this podcast with Indu on Mindful Strength.
Susanna Barkataki’s work and activism uplifting yoga and social justice has deeply influenced our approach at The Branches. We read her book Embrace Yoga’s Roots in our book club and it is a key text in our YTT.
This blog post is written by TBY co-director Leslie Stokman, who is a Certified TRE Provider (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises). She’s a big fan of rock climbing, even though it can be scary and stressful. In this post, she shares about her own journey with athleticism, climbing, and some amazing background info on TRE. (8 minute read)
A little ways into my regular TRE practice, I began noticing some positive changes in my climbing. I realized that TRE changed me for the better, and as a result, my sport performance and experiences with exercise improved. Now as a provider, I love sharing TRE with sporty folks as a strategy for increased vitality and mindful recovery.
TRE offers huge benefits to those who engage in any intense sports or style of exercise with elements of risk and stress. The therapeutic benefit of a TRE practice aids in recovering after a strong session, increasing flexibility, healing injuries, and staying or returning to calm after stressful moments. If your goal is to perform well and feel good in your body, TRE can help.
Softening Body Tension
If flexibility is limiting your performance, you’re not alone! Stretching, mobility work, and full-range strength training can definitely make a difference, but speaking from experience, sometimes you just hit a wall. For years, I felt like I was fighting my body to increase my range of motion. My hips and hamstrings wouldn’t give me any more reach; they felt locked up and unwilling to move in ways that would help me get the most out of my existing strength and climbing technique.
Because of postural habits (like sitting a lot or repetitive movements at work), or because of past injuries and experiences, there can be parts of our bodies that really feel and act stuck. Our nervous systems have made the decision that a given body part should not move a certain way or be that flexible. This is a protective strategy meant to keep us safe from injury, and for that we can be grateful. However, sometimes this attempt at protection is no longer necessary. TRE works in cooperation with our nervous systems to allow our bodies to release this excess tension.
Rhythmic Repatterning
To nerd out for a moment, part of what goes on during TRE practice is communication between our brain stems and the rest of our bodies. At first, many people will experience tremoring localized to their legs, hips and pelvis (originating with the psoas muscle). With consistent long-term practice (and for some people, sooner), these tremors can travel to all body parts by way of self-contained neurological networks in the spinal cord called Central Pattern Generators.
In addition to spreading tremors throughout the body, these CPGs create rhythmic or harmonized patterns of shaking along the spine and lines of myofascial tissue (muscles and fascia) described by Tom Myers’ Anatomy Trains model. This process can be independent of our cognition, and is an intrinsic way of reorganizing the body. The potential results of tremoring and connecting to these networks? Increased flexibility, mobility, circulation, pain reduction from injury, better communication between the musculoskeletal and nervous systems, and injury healing rates. It sometimes also just feels really good!
Soothing Psychological Stress
It’s also our nervous system that runs the show when it comes to staying or losing our cool in moments of high risk (for the climbers reading: sketchy top-outs, near-falls, or making a risky clip). Our nervous systems are very skilled at detecting danger or threat, and it turns out that clinging to a cliff face, hurtling downhill on a mountain bike or snowboard, or running a marathon are all perceived by your body as kind of dangerous, or at least pretty stressful. Some people are attracted to intense sports for the adrenaline rush it provides, but that rush is partly coming from your body doing everything it can to save your life!
In those moments of intensity (including stress and panic), each person is able to get through in a few different ways: you might meet the challenge and feel super accomplished, you might decide to back off and try again another day, or you might fail to meet the challenge. Some people have learned to keep cool with a top-down approach: they might use breathing techniques or rehearse positive self-talk. Others have learned to dissociate from their feelings of fear, and simply push through. Still others might express their overwhelm through tears, and there’s no shame in that. I’ve certainly been there!
Short & Long-Term Recovery
In every case, each time you climb hard (or whatever it is for you), your whole system is processing a pretty good deal of stress physically, but potentially also emotionally and neurologically. Every time you practice TRE, it helps your body to complete cycles of the stress-response activation. This can make it great to practice later in the day or directly after your activity. A long-term TRE practice also teaches your nervous system what it feels like to be calm, gives it more resilience, and builds your ability to bounce back from stress and return to homeostasis more dynamically. It is in that homeostatic state – our most relaxed and restful state – that our bodies actually heal and repair themselves.
When we tap into the tremor mechanism, we’re giving our bodies a chance to loosen up, rebalance tension, and heal. Alongside sleep, hydration and nutrition, I consider TRE to be the final key in my recovery. It’s been my mission to share the gifts of TRE with both my local yoga community, and my local climbing community. Next time we see each other around the gym or the studio, don’t hesitate to ask me about TRE.
Curious about how TRE might impact your body and mind? Leslie will be leading a 4-week course called TRE for Athletes on Mondays 5:30-7:00pm starting June 6.
In January of 2021 when we moved into our new building at 9 Samuel Street, we had high hopes for making our new space fully accessible by installing a ramp or chair lift. We planned our bathroom to have an accessible sink and toilet, and had a few fundraisers (community classes in the summer of 2021, and selling some of our jade plants in the winter) towards our accessibility efforts.
We are sorely disappointed to let the community know that after many months of research, we are not able to make our building fully accessible at this time.
There are several factors that we can explain below, but the main point of this update is to express our disappointment in this outcome and express our regret to community members who may have been hoping for a different outcome.
There are several realities we’ve had to reconcile with, one of which is the size of the front of our property. The size of the front yard doesn’t allow enough space to meet the requirements of the length of a ramp needed to access our front door. A chair lift would fit, but the cost of a ramp or chair lift, and the maintenance included brought up the next reality, that of our financial limitations as a small business. As a small business still recovering from very lean times during the pandemic, we don’t have the resources to afford either option without additional help. Many federal accessibility grants that might have made this project possible are no longer available, and we weren’t able to find any other funding that we qualified for.
In the end our fundraising efforts raised about $1500, which in the end would be about 2% of what it would cost to make our building fully accessible.
We’ve decided to put the funds raised towards improving the safety of the front walkway and eliminating one of the steps so that those with some mobility challenges will be able to access our front steps more easily. Our front entryway will still include five steps to get into the front door. We will continue offering ground floor programming like Chair Yoga and Adaptive Yoga for those that are able to use the entry stairs, and we will continue to offer virtual options for others to join from home.
We are also hopeful that grants may become available again in the future, so we are holding the possibility that becoming fully accessible may be possible at some point.
In terms of accessible programming, we think the way forward is to partner with community organizations and spaces that are already fully accessible, to offer classes in spaces other than our Samuel Street location. Here’s where you come in! If you’re passionate about this issue, and know of community organizations or spaces where we might bring The Branches vibe, get in touch with us and let’s see where things go! In order for classes like these to be successful, we need dedicated community members ready to promote and advocate for these classes alongside us. So let us know if you’ve got energy to start an initiative with us.
We’re also looking forward to one of our more accessible offerings coming up this summer; Yoga in the Park! We’ll be offering free classes in two downtown parks this summer. Go here for all the details. We’re glad to be partnering with the City of Kitchener to put on these free, all-ages events.
Are you looking for tools to navigate our challenging and complex world?
We see the need for guidance and practices for our collective mental health at this juncture of the pandemic. Things have “gone back to normal” but many of us are still struggling to decide how to act and how to care for ourselves in the wake of all that we’ve lost.
One way we can offer guidance is with getting accustomed to peaceful confusion (a term we learned from Dare Sohei and Larissa Kaul). This could mean making peace with the fact that we may never have the answers or solutions we desire, and yet want to and must carry on living with ourselves and one another as best we can.
To rest in peaceful confusion, we can try to be with the present moment in way that intentionally includes all of the things we both do and don’t like about it.
With this goal in mind, we’ve planned a few courses for the spring; Mindful Movement & Meditation starting May 10 and Mind-Body Yoga for Teens starting May 19. We hope that if you know a young person who is looking for tools to bolster their mental health, that you pass along the information to them, including the fact that we offer sliding scale pricing.
Both of these courses are taught by Danette, if we can make a blanket suggestion, you should really try a practice with.
To get you started in that process, we’ve picked out a really great video of Danette leading a meditation and are sharing it for free here. You’ll need 14 minutes and a place to sit. It’s a sweet little guided meditation that surprised all of us with how powerful it is despite being so simple.
Certain stereotypes hold true for many of us at the Branches, including that we gravitate towards things that are “natural.” Yeah, we make our own kombucha, wear barefoot shoes and love us some coconut oil. But beyond the cliches, what makes something “natural” anyway?”
Folks often make a distinction between human-made and naturally-occuring, but humans are in fact a part of Nature. Does that mean that everything we do is natural, too? Maybe. And maybe the culturally inherited belief that we are separate from Nature (or worse, meant to tame or exploit it) is part of why reintegrating humanity into the sphere of Nature feels so important.
One thing that makes it clear we aredefinitely animals is our autonomic nervous system. This is the branch of the human nervous system that governs all the stuff our bodies do without our conscious input, like breathing, blood flow, digestion, sneezing, arousal, sweating, crying – you get the picture. These are all things we can consciously influence, but the urge or impetus is just… natural, inherent, innate.
Another autonomic function we all share is tremoring. Sometimes it shows up as a shiver when we’re cold, or wobbly knees when we’re nervous, or a full-body tremble when we’re trying really hard to hold a steady boat pose.
Did you know that we can take a therapeutic approach to the ways that our bodies shake? There is deep potential for cultivating well being with mindful engagement with our neurogenic tremor. If your curiosity is piqued, you should check out Leslie’s course, Integrating Stress & Tension with TRE, starting on April 25.
We encourage you to find ways to embrace being natural in whatever ways bring you a sense of joy and freedom. Lots of TRE (Tension Release Exercise) programming with Leslie is coming up over the Spring, so keep your eyes peeled for news of more opportunities to learn and practice.
Some of you might not know this, but I (Leslie) used to be an elementary school teacher. Yes, for a good few years, I taught a lot of grade 7 and 8 (I like living on the edge, what can I say) in a few different schools in KW. One thing that was heavily emphasized during my time in teachers’ college, and as a new teacher, was community.
I heard a lot of talk in the school systemabout coming together as a family. But at the one critical point when I found myself in a troubling and very challenging classroom situation, the support I needed was sorely missing. All that talk felt like empty lip service.
This lack was made particularly poignant because at the same time that my faith in that life was deteriorating, I was being shown the true meaning of community in another context. At what was then called Queen Street Yoga, I was volunteering, taking class, and all the while, observing the action behind the scenes of Leena & Emma’s first yoga teacher training.
For a few years, I got to witness (and benefit from) so much genuine care put into building and holding a real community in the shape of a long-term learning container. There were a lot of hugs in the staff room, endless carefully worded emailing, generous accommodations, plenty of extra help, and sharing food, clothes, childcare and studio space as it was needed.
This spirit of connection underpins everything, and it reliably seeps into the whole group. Here are a few of this year’s students talking about what it’s been like to access community (even when we had to pivot to a completely online weekend this past January due to Omicron).
Our next 250-hour teacher training will run October 2022 through June 2023. Curious about what it might be like? Come out to our Info Session on Thursday, April 21 at 7:15pm. Just like the program, you can choose online or in-studio. When you sign up, you also get a free drop-in class to enjoy. I’ll be teaching the Slow Flow at 6:00pm just prior to the info session, and I’m gonna make it a special one.
The Branches 