I had the unexpected joy of spending a part of my day with a 2-1/2 year old girl. She was dressed in her leggings and pink tulle skirt, for “dress shopping” with her mom and my sister and friend. She had on this cute t-shirt that said, “Mommy’s Little Monkey.”  I marveled at her trying to assist with straightening out the wedding dress trains for my sister. How new and shimmering and sparkling the bridal shop must have been for her!  Even when we had lunch, I couldn’t help but be amazed at her creativity in dipping her cantaloupe slice into some ranch dressing. So much of her life is made up of brand new experiences every day. Why not jump in feet first?

Then, even when my own life can seem discouraging or dismal at times, here is my sister with a fresh, new, exciting beginning ahead of her. Seeing her in a beautiful diamond white wedding dress for the first time, took my breath away in more ways than one. A bright new beginning to a new life with someone you love, what could bring more optimism and joy than that? Even the dreary, cloudy and cool weather could not dampen the joyful spirits we felt in that bridal shop today.

Finally, there’s the new beginning of teenage children transitioning into adulthood. Certainly, it is full of endings and goodbyes to things such as the jungle gym in the backyard.  Seeing them succeeding, growing and embarking on new adventures, reminds me of when everything was new and exciting to me too. I was their age once. This day was full of endings, but it is the beginnings I am very grateful to have experienced.

I feel these changes lately, in my own breathing, as I suffer through another hay fever season. It certainly is better than in years past, but it is worse on the days that I allow stress to come in. That is when I really notice how much life’s daily stresses can affect my breathing if I allow it. So many changes have taken place in the past few weeks as the summer draws to a close. I realized that I need to do more yoga and restorative work to help get me through these transitions peacefully. I have felt great sadness at some losses and great joy at happy moments such as my parents’ 50th anniversary, and other exciting news. Staying calm and centered has been a challenge with all the ups and downs. At times, my breathing has felt a bit strained when I was upset, and at other times it even felt as though my heart hurt when I shed a tear, as if that tear could take my breath away. Other days I feel like I am being stretched in a thousand different directions…

“The diaphragm, according to yogic science, is the seat of the intelligence of the heart, and the window to the soul. During stressful situations, however, when you inhale and exhale, the diaphragm becomes too taut to alter its shape. Yogic exercises address this problem by developing elasticity in the diaphragm, so that, when stretched, it can handle any amount of stress, whether intellectual, emotional, or physical.

The practice of asanas and pranayama helps integrate the body, breath, mind, and intellect. Slow, effortless exhalation during the practice of asana brings serenity to the body cells, relaxes the facial muscles, and releases all tension from the organs of perception, the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin…”  B.K.S. Iyengar

After years of practice I begin to notice how yoga is helps me stretch myself with getting tighter and more stressed. I am only now just beginning to allow the exhalation to teach me about serenity. I still find myself succumbing to the stress at times, however, I have tools to let go of it again and as the muscles of my diaphragm soften, so does the stress begin to melt away.

It’s a good thing too, because I have two seniors in high school this year, my last year of being a home school mom. Here it is, the first day of September, and I am ready to face the challenges and rewards of my final home school year. Time to EXHALE….

Like most everyone, I have made my own personal list of resolutions for the New Year, and I have created a list of favorite things, and of course this includes resources related to health and fitness, art, and storytelling. These are all things and people I feel passionate about and that are helping me get off to a great start this January.

Eischens Yoga

especially my teachers Lynn Shuck

and Kari Tomashik

Storytime Yoga - Sydney Solis!

Arbonne Shakes (great for nutrition and weight loss)

Arbonne Detox Tea

Arbonne Natural Hormones

Skechers Shape ups (exercise shoes) – they have been great for my knees and help me use the whole back of my body…calves, hamstrings, etc.

Alternative Medicine Solutions

Health and Healing Chiropractic -  in Rochester

North Oakland Family YMCA – a great place to work out!

Auburn Hills Community Center - a great place to work out!

Woolynns – fiber artist Lynn Shuck…beautiful scarves

Beyond Barbie – beautiful, figurative work by a beautiful artist

Please note, these are all resources that I have had a great experience with, your mileage may vary!

Just like the seasons that have passed since I last wrote, life has been filled with many changes as well.  Some of the old things pass, while there are always new opportunities in the air.

Today I am looking forward to some new opportunities to learn and to grow. My teacher, Kari Tomashik is coming to town this weekend, and as always I look forward to meeting with her to check in with myself, and what I am doing not just as a teacher, but as a student of yoga.

This very afternoon, I went to my first-ever Rochester Chamber meeting, and it was very uplifting, and enlightening. To know there is a wonderful, enthusiastic group of women out there, and that I can be a part of that kind of energy, is pretty amazing. I was really happy to be there, and to be a part of all of this. I hope to meet new students and to gain new opportunities.

I am looking forward to this time of year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year, not very far ahead of us!

Happy Fall!

This New Year, 2009, has brought about many changes in my schedule and activities.  Every day seems to bring a new opportunity or idea.  I am most excited about a month-long series of Storytime Yoga workshops that I will be teaching in Ferndale, for a home school group of gifted children.  These are called Fill in the Blank Workshops; what a cool and creative idea!  I am very excited about this prospect and will begin teaching on February 11th.

I am now teaching two senior (age 50+) yoga classes at the North Oakland YMCA, held on Monday and Wednesday, and I truly enjoy working with my new students.  I truly enjoy their insight, enthusiasm, and joy at learning yoga, and I love seeing the positive changes taking place in each of my students.  One of my senior yoga students just gave me a beautiful hand-knit scarf as a gift, and she even noticed how I love hot pink, and this is the color scarf she knit for me.  I love it and have worn it every day since.

Beginning this week, I now teach two yoga classes at the Auburn Hills Community Center on Monday nights, at 6pm and 7pm.  I love teaching in the community center; the students are friendly and appreciative; the staff is very friendly and helpful.  The building supervisor even helps me carry my gear to my car!  I love being around positive, helpful co-workers.

I am most excited about my beautiful birthday gift that I am going to very much enjoy playing, and that is my new mandolin!  I thoroughly enjoy being artistic, and this is another way for me to dive deeper into my creative side.  I am looking forward to learning to play, and I plan to play my mandolin during my Storytime Yoga classes!  I can’t wait.

I will post more often, as I adjust to my new teaching schedule.  I also plan to include more of my artwork on my site.  My latest work involves sunflowers!

Happy Birthday to me and to my brother, who shares my birthday with me!

Lisa

It has only been about a week, but a month of ups and downs, leaving old things behind and finding new. Old friends reappearing and some newer friends disappearing. These changes bring with them both joy and sadness. But today, the warm sun melted away any sadness, and I felt as though I could begin anew. There are SO many new opportunities each day when I awaken.

I am back to painting window murals at the North Oakland YMCA, a project that doesn’t pay anything but satisfaction. Sometimes for me, meeting the challenge and having it turn out the way I want is the best payment there is. I can only hope the work I did has been a great advertisement for our upcoming YMCA Halloween events! We will see! Today I also began painting aliens on the windows at the Y, with more alien invaders on their way…fun! Our theme for HAY (Halloween at the Y) this year is Alien Invasion! Any day that I get to make art, is a wonderfully satisfying day for me.

The best part of my day was spending at least a good portion of it with my girls. I know they enjoy being with people their own age, but today we seemed more like girlfriends and it was fun. We met at the Y after my volunteer work (and their volunteer work) was finished, and we went and had an early dinner. We came home and did some much-needed work around the house and the yard. Then we all went on a bike ride which turned into a real adventure (for me). For some reason they took me on this adventure into a world I didn’t know existed, until now, and it was cool. Also, it was a nice workout! We also saw deer galloping all around us, rabbits, birds, and many wonderful autumn colors. The weather was perfect and the afternoon felt perfect. We laughed together and I wanted to write it all down, or paint it in a picture.

At last we came home and worked on our Halloween decorations. We had a nice time doing that as well, as our Golden Retrievers, Comet and Chili, supervised our work. Then, we had to go to Van Huessen Farm, where the girls had volunteered today, to see the jack-o-lantern display there in the evening. They had carved a pumpkin as well, so we got to see it on display with the others. There were hundreds of glowing jack-o-lanterns lighting up the dark night. It was breathtaking. We walked around looking at the pumpkins, and waited until 9pm had passed so we could take their jack-o-lantern home. It was so much fun. I loved seeing how children and adults had created their beautiful and expressive art on pumpkins! SO many creative ideas.

The funniest part of our evening was our trip to Party City to look for witch capes for the girls. There were these two young guys working there who were dressed up in these outrageous costumes and they followed us around the store, flirting with with the girls the entire time. The one guy had a skirt on, and was asking us if skirts were always this uncomfortable to wear. What a perspective you get shopping with your teenage daughters when there are young men around. So funny. Halloween seems to bring out the creativity and adventurous feelings in people. I love Halloween!

Speaking of Halloween, I am looking forward to telling/singing the poem, The Skeletons’ Ball, translated from Spanish by my teacher, Sydney Solis! I will begin practicing it and my plan is to tell it at the HAY event, Halloween at the Y! I received it this weekend, and it sounds great!

I am now teaching Storytime Yoga in our North Oakland YMCA Child Watch, three times per week. I love it. These are children who are at the perfect age to realize there’s more to life than watching cartoons on TV. I love the time we spend together, and I look forward to it each week. I do leave exhausted, but it is worth it! The kids need to feel that they are WORTH spending time with! Learning should be fun. Adults should enjoy them and nourish them rather than tolerate them or babysit them. I am excited this week because I am bringing in my magic wand which I believe they will LOVE. I will give them each some Storytime Yoga Magic with my magic wand before I leave. I believe they will get a lot of joy from it!

On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I am really enjoying my longer Storytime/After School/Tweens Yoga at the Auburn Hills Community Center. I have a nice group of children. Together we are sharing so much. What I love is how they are opening up to me and sharing things that are not always easy to share. We also made our own journals to keep and use for our classes. I think that will be something they will always enjoy having. We are learning some wisdom stories, we are learning some challenging poses such as L-handstands, and we are also learning about poetry. I am going to post our art projects/journal projects in the Art Ideas section so that anyone reading this blog can get some ideas on how to do the great activities we are doing in class. So stay tuned!

Another great love of mine is working with Senior Citizens. I adore seniors as much as I love kids. They are another wonderful part of our society that, like kids, we don’t spend enough time nurturing them and loving them. I love my time with my seniors. I now teach a class that is called Golden Yoga, at the North Oakland YMCA. It has become so popular that they want me to teach a second one beginning in winter. I love that I am finally able to spend time with this wonderful group of individuals. It is so much fun.

So the fall continues, and Halloween is coming. I am hoping to bring many more art ideas to my blog here, to inspire yoga, art and story in your lives too!

Lisa

Lots of new experiences to share, for sure! First, about Eischens Yoga! This past weekend, my teacher, Kari Tomashik was in town, and I went to her workshops on Saturday in Ferndale. What an amazing experience I had! It was awesome to learn so many new things, and to leave there feeling light as a feather, yet grounded and peaceful. I learned how working in the standing poses and getting my legs working really helped me to feel more comfortable when seated. I actually did not have to use my neck and shoulders to hold me up when seated! I also learned some things about myself, how I try to use my neck muscles to make my legs work in downward dog. Currently those two parts of my body are connected. I began to learn to allow the muscles in my neck to relax. It is a process. It is about me getting out of my head.

Equally rewarding was seeing several of my students who were able to attend Kari’s workshops as well! It was wonderful to share the experience with them, and to see how it supported and nourished their own practice.

More new experiences. I began teaching kids classes again this week, after several weeks off. I love the time I spend with kids of all ages! My newest job is at the Auburn Hills Community Center. What a beautiful facility it is and I get to teach in a really warm and beautiful studio. I loved the kids who came to my first class yesterday. It is a small class right now, but I believe it will only continue to grow. Storytime Yoga
is a wonderful method for sharing the beauty of yoga, story and art. I am finding these techniques continue to become more of a resource to me. I am looking forward to sharing this with more children, their parents, their caregivers.

This week I began with my favorite story, The Peddler’s Dream. What a fun and lively tale it is to tell! In my class at Auburn Hills, we also created books to record our own dreams, our favorite yoga poses, whatever we wish! Already one of the older girls in the class was recording her favorite pose. It made me feel great!

This morning I taught in ChildWatch at the North Oakland YMCA. I currently do half hour classes there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The kids are much younger than I usually get a chance to work with. They are preschool, but most are very young. Today they looked as if they did not want me to leave!

On my art project ideas pages, I will share with you the projects we do in my classes for the next 6 weeks! It should be a LOT of fun! Many adventures to be had!

Happy Autumn!

Lisa

Lisa with Sunflower Mask

I just returned from a magical week of Storytime/Mythic Yoga training with Sydney Solis, in Boulder, CO. It was much more than training, it was a beautiful life experience.

Each day was filled with the most delightful people, stories, yoga, nature, and experiences that I could ever imagined possible. I also came face-to-face with some personal challenges, working through a complex story, experiencing the ups and downs of a challenging mask-making project, and dealing with altitude sickness! Sydney is an amazing and inspiring woman and teacher, a gifted story-teller, yoga teacher, and artist, as well as a wonderful mom and friend. To have an opportunity like this was something I will always cherish. The other women who studied with me were beautiful, brave and amazing women who are now my friends.

I created a mask that at first did not seem like the thing I wanted to create. I battled with the image, wanting instead to do a cute animal or bird, and finally I surrendered to the Sun idea, which turned into a Sun that was also a Sunflower. At one point in the process I felt like giving up or even throwing it away, but with Wendy Rochman’s guidance and encouragement, I stuck it out and finished my art. Later on, I was happy with it, even though it didn’t match up with what I’d thought it would be. In some ways, it was even better than my idea because it was more of an expression of what I was experiencing in my life and my practice.

When I returned home from Colorado yesterday, the first thing I saw was a long-awaited package of Ukrainian books sitting on my bed. I had ordered them a month ago, and now here they were, sitting on my bed. As I opened the package and took out the first book, I fell in love with its beautiful purple cover. I opened the book and on the very FIRST page was the Ukrainian legend, “The Sunflower.” I could hardly believe my eyes. And the story seemed to be the very same thing that happened to me, with my life, my art, the mask…the sunflower was the son of the Sun, it came from the Sun.

Here is the story of The Sunflower:

The Sunflower (from A Garland of Legends and Folk Tales from Ukraine – adapted and retold in English by Oleksandra Stratiy)

In the beginning, none of the plants on the Earth had flowers. Can you imagine? All the plants were just green. One day, the plants decided to make a request to the Sun, their god, and to ask him for flowers of different colors. But the Sun, high in the sky, replied, “I take good care of you, I think. I give you light. I give you warmth. You can live without flowers. Anyway, I am too busy. I have the entire solar system to worry about.”

Their conversation was overheard by the Sun’s son, a golden-haired Prince. He was eager to be of help. “May I go, Father, and do this job? I would be glad to travel to Earth and assist the plants,” said he.

“No, it’s a very long way from the sky to the Earth, and it is dangerous. You may never come back home,” was his father’s answer. Some days passed. The Prince came back to his Father with the same request. This time, the Sun sighed and shook his head sadly, but he agreed to let his son go.

To the Earth flew the son of the Sun. He roamed around the world. Nature trembled in anticipation of the most beautiful miracle. Wherever the Prince went, the Earth bloomed. Beautiful flowers appeared in the jungles and in the deserts, in the forests and in the meadows, in the mountains and on the waters.

Soon, beautiful, colorful flowers of every size and shape covered the planet. On seeing the results of his work, the Prince beamed with satisfaction. He was so proud of himself, so excited to share his happiness with his Father! He was ready to go home.

The Prince rotated his great wings and struggled to rise from the Earth to the sky. But he could not! He had given his power and energy to the Earth. He could no longer fly. He could not return to his Father, the Sun. The weak Prince fell on the ground, weeping bitter tears. His Father cried in the sky.

At dawn, the Prince managed only to raise his head to look at the Sun. He became the Sunflower. Ever since that time, a golden-headed flower raises his head to gaze at the Sun. His Father promised him homecoming in the next life.

My Sunflower Mask:

The Sunflower