Let’s get inspirational!
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Everything I feel I want to share with you will be in this space.
Anything that you can use, learn, experiment yourself, or identify with.
Feel free to interact with me, ask questions and bring your comments!
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Experience
& Knowledge
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Preparing to teach a yoga class requires some preparation. You choose a theme or peak pose and then you start thinking, you write it down and draw the poses and also write a few hints of what you want to convey during your class.
If you stop at this stage, once you get in front of your practitioners you will soon realize that you forgot to add that backbend to prepare for the next posture, or you had not realized that in that posture you needed to activate that muscle…
Oh yes! You need to practice yourself the whole class before you can teach it!
In other words, no matter how well you know about all the ingredients of your recipe, if you do not live and experiment from inside, for real, and it is even more relevant for yoga. You should feel your class from beginning to end.
And obviously, that’s what happens in everyday life. It is essential that you experiment, feel, live, smell, touch and absorb knowledge otherwise it is like water on a glass window it flows on it but nothing is left.
That is the beauty of teaching, and more particularly yoga, the mission is to find the words to make them feel the experience, to make them live the moment, to make them understand that it is not only about the body but most of all about what is already alive within yourself.
Imperfection
as the new perfection
We are all perfect human beings.
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Last year, I made another trip to India, and this time I spent one month in an Ashram doing therapeutic teacher training. During one of our silent days, it struck me that nothing was perfect in this place, only 2 washing machines for 50 or more people, power cuts, paint falling off the walls, rust, dust, bugs, but at the end of the day, I was having probably the best time of my life in the middle of imperfection and some kind of chaos from a Westerner’s point of view.
Our perception of India is very chaotic, dirty, smelly, and disorganized because we have created a “perfect world” in the West. Our concept of happiness has to meet perfection. We want green well-designed lawns, gorgeous perfect people on billboards, squeaky clean environments, and so on and so on.
The same thing happens when it comes to doing yoga. All you see on social media and yoga brand advertisement is the perfect Cirque du Soleil contortionist pose.
Where is simplicity, where is authenticity, why don’t we back up a little and say:
“I am not perfect and I like it”
“Look at me with all my imperfections”
Nothing compares to the beauty and perfection of each human body and mind, we are a miracle of Nature, all of us on this planet, perfection exists within ourselves the rest is the conversation.
How can we use what we learn,
experiment or do on a yoga mat?
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Yoga can teach you a lot about yourself and about others. The yoga poses are meant to open or close currents of energy in your body and mind that will be directed differently and will make you realize things about you and your thinking patterns. It can really be a life-changing experience.
When doing a yoga class, you learn a lot about your muscles, your body, and the way your brain reacts according to the different poses that are suggested to you. Each pose has been designed for you to experience a different feeling or sensation that most of the time you can translate into everyday situations.
how can we use what we learn, experiment, or do on a yoga mat?
The very first teaching that you receive when doing a posture is to feel grounded. Everything starts from here. If you do not have your two feet or all fours firmly grounded the rest of the posture will not follow and most of all if you want to perform balance postures the grounding and the focusing is even more important.
In everyday life, it is exactly the same.
You need grounding to be able to perform. Grounding can be your family, your friends, your job, your health, anything or anyone who gives you a structure on which to count in order to be able to stand straight on your two feet, or hands or hips.
On another perspective what you learn from an inversion posture is huge:
To lift up your feet in the air and see the world from a different angle.
First, you think:I will never be able to do that, it will never happen to me, I am so scared
Then you try: You try placing your hand and lift your hips closer and closer to the wall and all of a sudden you realize that you can lift one leg almost automatically and then you become more curious and try lifting your second leg. Maybe at this point, you will need the teacher’s help to lift both legs and in no time you will find yourself feet against the wall head over heels!
You will probably have mixed feelings at that point: I am scared and I am happy
But then when you get out of the inversion and place your feet on the ground, you will be so proud of yourself that you did it that you will have forgotten the scary part!!
How does that translate into real life, off the mat situations:
This will make you understand that in real life perhaps you will think that you are not fit for a job or a task.
It will teach you that at least you need to try, you need to experiment, be curious, be daring, you need to let go of all your fears, and also be trusting the people that are here to help and support you.
Do not be scared and it will happen, you are the one who makes things happen, no one else!!!
Once you realize that you just did something you had never imagined you would ever do even in your wildest dreams then the world is yours! You open the door to endless possibilities.
Never think that you are not fit, that the other is better than you, that you are not enough.
Why eat properly?
"You are the food that you eat"
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We have no idea of the impact of food on ourselves! It is huge! It determines how we live, how we sleep, how we think, how we function.
Most of all, it determines our health.
Did you know that diseases like arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, auto-immune diseases, cancer can be triggered by the food that we eat. Even in some cases depressions.
It is crucial to our health that we eat properly, according to our profile and according to the seasons.
Ayurveda is a wonderful way of finding what we need to eat and drink in order to stay healthy.
More to come in the blog section next month
Contact Us
Marie Francoise Mariette
If you wish to bring more balance into your everyday routine, contact me.
I can set up some yoga therapy protocols, yoga postures, breathwork, meditation practices together with Ayurveda tips for a healthier more balanced lifestyle that will change your perspective
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