The food you eat – or don’t.   The lifestyle you choose to enrich and cleanse your body and your mind.  A new realization of how natural elements affect your mood, your body, and even your relationships.

For natural elements, consider the qualities of wind, cold and warmth, sun and moon, extreme changes in barometric pressure, humidity.  Ayurveda increases your awareness and sensitivity to the effects of these elements of the world around you every day.

While you learn new ways, new attitudes, you adopt new values that help you to go with the flow. You are likely to acknowledge factors you cannot change without a lot of struggle.  Part of the process is learning how to approach  your everyday routines with an understanding of how they can bring balance or else they bring dis-ease to your body or mind.

Ayurveda gives you a new way to examine the choices you take for yourself in most arenas of your life, including your relationships.  One Ayurveda student started her study by bringing her significant other to a similar basics workshop. They heard about it early in their courtship and about the time they decided they would give their relationship a go by living together.  She and He both say this knowledge has given them a certain vocabulary for communication that is blameless and brings neutrality when argument threatens to spoil the day.

Many times a partner is slow to adopt yoga but is interested in meditation, food, and everyday harmony.  This workshop is good for anyone in your circle of friends, relatives, co-workers, family.

Yoga and Meditation

The end goal of classical Yoga is Meditation and the quiet mind, a spiritual practice. In the Victorian age when India was all the rage,  the Western world discovered, expanded and adapted the few asanas in the yogic history, designed for relaxation of the body to quiet the mind.  Yoga came to America in the late 19th century and eventually was dominated by a gymnastic or athletic practice. Today, yogis who are by now adept at the athletics, seek the quiet mind.

Ayurveda uses Yoga as a therapy for all of these purposes:  relaxation of the body, focus of the mind, alignment and balance for physical, mental, emotional, practical needs appropriate to the individual.

Nature

Ayurveda shows us how to balance our constitution with harmony for nature. We can’t stop a snowfall or chill the sunshine. But we can consider our own tendencies to overreact to certain weather patterns or seasons. 

Stop to think what makes you happy or grouchy:           Is it windy? Is it cold? A hot summer day? Is the ground frozen?

Consider the time of day:  Is the sun burning high  in the sky?  Is the cool moon streaming clear light?  Is it dusk and a transition to quiet activities and soothing routines?

How can we de-stress body and mind?

These are a few of the tools that we examine in this workshop. First we will look at our yoga practice from the context of Ayurvedic principles. Then we will test our tendencies by asking:  What are the life patterns?  What are patterns of behavior that are paramount this day or this year?

We’ll take time for that discussion before we move on to the Ayurvedic tools  we can use to prevent the discomforts of imbalance.

For the most part, Ayurveda is best thought of as a Mindfulness practice.  The first steps are to be aware of who we are and what patterns determine our balance, our happiness, our ease of well being.

We will be offering additional workshops throughout the next year. For specifics please contact us through the form below.