Mind Body Whole Wellness celebrates 5 years today!
Whether you are friend, family, student, teacher, client or follower you probably know a little bit about where the last 5 years have taken me. Since I accepted the dare to apply to “yoga school”, life has been a full blown transformation that brought so much change.
November of 2015 I created the idea of Mind Body Whole Wellness as my “yoga business”. What I would learn over the years of teacher training was that literally all of life is Yoga. Yoga is a lifestyle. It is a becoming. It is a lifetime journey of finding more and more Freedom in all the layers of Self; body, breath, head and heart. It takes self-responsibility and a readiness to create space for yourself. Willingness to get uncomfortable, to study yourself, to still the external noise and go inward. Yoga is the science of self-mastery; learning to connect well with yourself & others.
Yoga is Freedom through Connection
Enter 2020. Global change. Challenge to humanity as a collective. A not so subtle invitation to go inside. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have had the tools of Yoga this year! If you don’t know, there are many steps in the traditional path to learning these tools. The first 2 have very little to do with movement of the body. They are the guiding principles to connecting well in this temporary human experiment. 10 philosophical concepts that bring awareness and self-study to how to best connect to yourself and the world around you. This is the starting point. Willingness to give yourself space to notice. The realization that you and only you can create the life you want. It is the transition from thinking life happens to you versus being an active participant in shaping your life.
This pandemic has changed the way we do life. It has also given us the perspective to see what was and wasn’t working, as well as the opportunity to choose how we move forward in more constructive ways. We are not all in the same boat. We may be in the same storm together, but people have vastly different boats as well as tool sets with which to weather that storm. The gift of doing this work now, has become accessibility to do it from home and the ability to work with anyone regardless of distance.
For the rest of this year, and as of this morning, head on into winter, I will continue to work solely from home, offering Yoga Therapy in an online format. An exciting addition for MBWW has been to work more and more with my school, Yoga North International Somatic Institute. Yoga North in Duluth is one of the schools globally that is certified in teaching Yoga to the Therapist level. I have the absolute honor of working with therapy students in a mentorship role as well as leading discussion around the philosophy of the principles of connection.
Ayurveda, (Yoga’s sister science of self-healing), talks about winter as a time to hibernate, to slow down our movement and schedules, to bring in more warmth, in food, clothes, and ways we care for ourselves. I am following this invitation and will use this next season to create, to write, and to take time to integrate all the changes that this year has brought.
If you would like to work together this winter, feel free to reach out. I will continue to book sessions Monday to Thursday, 10am to 4pm with a flat rate of $100hr. Additionally, if you are a Yoga Therapy student, mentoring sessions can be booked through Yoga North at a discounted rate.
I would like to add one caveat. I love working with people who are ready. Ready to make time for themselves. Yoga, (becoming Free), takes a willingness to connect to yourself. Self-study requires a mindset shift from being “worked on”, to taking responsibility to “work-in” yourself. It is not my job to have all the answers, to fix, save or heal. If you need hand holding or ass kicking, I am not the teacher for you. I have lost students because of this and I am okay with that. This is not about me. My responsibility is to create a safe environment for you to be, to experience your internal world, and to grow in the areas that challenge you. I give you the tools, the choice to use them is yours. We work together, but you have to be ready to do that work.
Freedom is on the other side of the fear. Are you ready?
Mind Body Whole Wellness 