Need some support with a health-oriented New Years resolution? Check out this webinar with Thrive Founder Katie Engels featuring strategies and tools to support sustainable behavior change.

Visit the MGH Division of Internal Medicine Healthy Lifestyle Program website to learn more about this webinars series and other initiatives. 

Watch Thrive Founder Katie Engels discuss her Health & Wellness Coaching Program at Mass General Hospital as part of the MGH Healthy Lifestyle Program’s “Think Outside the Pill” Stoeckle Center Seminar Presentation. As an introduction, she shared "it is so inspiring to be part of this team and today featured many opportunities to promote broader access to Health & Wellness Coaching throughout the Department of Internal Medicine." 

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We miss our in-person yoga community at Thrive Wellness Coaching, so we are taking our practice online this Fall. Check out these resources to begin a home yoga practice, starting from any level. 

THE 15 BEST ONLINE YOGA WEBSITES IN 2020

Most of our Thrive Wellness Coaching clients have recently been weighing their responsibility to shelter and distance, and their need to connect with nature and experience open space. This is particularly tricky, but very important, for those that live in smaller spaces in more densely populated areas. Below are suggestions from the National Park Service on how to recreate safely and responsibility. 

"Avoid high-risk outdoor activities, practice social distancing, stay in your local area and follow leave no trace principles. If you do head out, follow CDC guidance to prevent the spread of infectious diseases: maintain a distance of at least six feet from others, cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze, and stay home if you feel sick.

Check with your local national park for the latest information on service and operations available. Updates about the NPS response to the coronavirus will be posted at www.nps.gov/coronavirus.

Connect with national parks online through digital opportunities and activities to do in your own home. To learn more, visit find your virtual park."

#SlowTheSpread #RecreateResponsibly

Set the mood for some home yoga practice as you shelter with this 60 minute flow playlist, featuring mellow vibes, gradual wind down tunes from the peak pose to some supported last shapes, and chimes and rain at the end to frame your savasana. 

According to Dr Zali Yager, a researcher at the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University, an expert in body image, and the Director at Well Researched, "decades of research has indicated that, even brief exposure to ‘idealised’ images in the media and advertising has a negative effect on body image and mood. Recent research has also confirmed that viewing fitspiration leads to increases in body dissatisfaction, and is worse for body image than viewing idealised thin images. In some studies, participants reported that fitspiration inspired them to exercise, but this did not translate into increases in exercise behaviour.

In contrast, viewing images of average-sized models has been found to enhance body appreciation, or positive body image. Evaluations of media campaigns that use real women of all sizes, such as This Girl Can, and #jointhemovement found that these campaigns increased appearance satisfaction, and intentions to exercise."

Schedule a free thrive coaching session to learn about developing authentic and inspiring personalized fitness goals. 

Work on your future with a personal Thrive Wellness Coach. The grass is greener where you water it. 

"Researchers at Yale and Oxford say exercise is more important to your mental health than your economic status. The scientists found that while people who exercise regularly tend to feel bad for 35 days a year, nonactive participants felt bad for 18 days more. The team also found that certain sports that involve socializing can have more of a positive effect on your mental health than others."

​Read more at Business Insider. 

Thank you to everyone that joined us for yoga today. Below are the class readings shared related to pursuing wholeness and authenticity to improve quality of life. 

"There is a little voice in all of us that is just a whisper. A tiny whisper. When you go into nature, into the wilds, especially alone, the whisper can come out and talk more. When you are in the city, you always have a list of things to do and think about. You can’t listen to the whisper. But when you are outside, you have much less to distract you. Inside each of us is the spirit that whispers. This little voice is our true self. If we can listen, it will start to get louder. Eventually, that whisper will be our normal voice. That’s when I really live. That is when dreams become reality. When I live from that deep intuitive place."

From Walden by Henry David Thoreau


The Spirit of Wholism

"Just as we need to claim our wholeness and right relationship with ourselves a physical, mental, and spiritual beings, we also need to claim our rightful place in the world as a unique part of a greater whole. This awareness is all but lost in modern technological life. Once our ancestors lived in tune with Nature. They knew who they were because they recognized their intimate relationship to the big, consistent cycles that brought seed in Spring, growth in Summer, bounty in Fall. We Westerners, however, live as though we can conquer and dominate Nature with no detrimental effects. Our technological prowess has led us to believe that we are in no way dependent upon or connected with the great cycles of birth and growth by which our ancestors lived and died. But we are part of Nature, and Nature lives within us. We cannot prosper and remain separate from the natural world, for to do so is to remain severed from our own true natures. If we are to claim our power to heal, we must reclaim our awareness of ‘whole-ism.’ As these fundamental changes in awareness filter down through our lives, we begin to change the way we think. As we become whole, we will begin to question many of our previous assumptions. 

Just as we must acknowledge our need to be good stewards of our physical life-force, we cannot ignore the effect of our emotional life on our health. We can’t expect to be healthy in body, mind, and spirit if we don’t pay attention to each of them. We must give our bodies good fuel and regular exercise. We maintain our mental health by exercising (in other words, acknowledging and releasing) our emotions, and stimulating our minds. We nurture our spirits with music, meditation, or spiritual practice. However we choose to live our lives, we cannot remind ourselves often enough that these three elements - body, mind, and spirit - are inseparable elements of the whole human being."

From Maximum Healing: Your East-West Guide to Natural Health by Mark Dana Mincolla, Ph.D.

Thank you to everyone who joined our yoga practice this weekend where we reflected on the relative nature of good and bad.
 
The more we commit to our yoga practice, the more we come to understand the value of working to move beyond our mind’s automatic habit of quickly labeling things, people and experiences as "good" or "bad," (or other such judgmental adjectives). We all see the world through tinted glasses based on our values and past experiences. When we cultivate the ability to realize this limiting behavior through meditation, mindfulness or yoga, we get closer to seeing things the way they really are.
 
This 2,000-year old Taoist parable beautifully illustrates this concept, and invites us to reframe our thinking to consider the big picture when it comes to our lives.
 
"An old Chinese farmer lost his best stallion one day and his neighbor came around to express his regrets, but the farmer just said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The next day the stallion returned bringing with him 3 wild mares. The neighbor rushed back to celebrate with the farmer, but the old farmer simply said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The following day, the farmer’s son fell from one of the wild mares while trying to break her in and broke his arm and injured his leg. The neighbor came by to check on the son and give his condolences, but the old farmer just said, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad.’ The next day the army came to the farm to conscript the farmer’s son for the war, but found him invalid and left him with his father. The neighbor thought to himself, ‘Who knows what is good and what is bad." (Parable language quoted from the Secular Buddhist Blog.)
 
As Kent Moreno explains, "The Taoist prefers to look at life events without judgment or interpretation. According to Taoism, the true significance of events can never be understood as they are occurring, for in every event there are elements of both good and bad. Furthermore, each event has no specific beginning or end and may influence future events for years or even centuries to come."
 
As Moreno touches upon, events in life will always involve good and bad. The great achievement is often accompanied by many sacrifices. The turn of bad luck usually comes with a silver lining. And from the wider-angle perspective, something "bad," but small in scope, may happen that prevents a major calamity down the road.
 
If these ideas resonate with you, a great way to practice application of the philosophy is to begin with asanas (the physical practice of yoga). Work for a while with the intention to accept yourself exactly as you are each time you come to the mat. Make your yoga practice a no judgment zone. Ignore what the teacher and other students look like in identical poses. If your energy level is low, modify and observe child’s pose when needed, instead of pushing yourself to replicate yesterday’s practice. Use your flow to practice radical acceptance of the self. And above all – drop any notions of what “should” be happening! Once you find your way on the mat, begin to think about how these concepts can be extended into other parts of your life.
 
As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, "give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome, which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking, and disliking."
 
The more involved with yoga and yoga philosophy you get, the more you will learn that these ideas are fundamental to the tradition. Buddha describes yoga as "the journey of the self, through the self, to the self." Yoga is not a competitive sport (as much as Instagram may sometimes suggest that). It is not a place where we should be thinking along the lines of good, bad or most especially, should. It is an avenue to living a self-accepting, and therefore authentic, life. 

Thank you to everyone that attended yoga today where we focused on cultivating non-judgement on and off the mat. Today's class reading are included below. 
 
Reading from Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
 
"It doesn’t take long in [yoga] to discover that part of our mind is constantly evaluating our experiences, comparing them with other experiences or holding them up against expectations and standards that we create, often out of fear. Fear that I’m not good enough, that bad things will happen, that good things won’t last, that other people might hurt me, that I won’t get my way, that only I know anything, that I’m the only one who doesn’t know anything. We tend to see things through tinted glasses: through the lens of whether something is good for me or bad for me or whether or not it conforms to my beliefs or philosophy. If it is good, I like it. If it is bad, I don’t like it. If it is neither, I have no feelings about it one way or the other, and may hardly notice it at all.
 
When you dwell in stillness, the judging mind can come through like a foghorn. I don’t like the sensation in my knee…. This is boring…. I like this feeling; I had a good [yoga practice] yesterday, but today I’m having a bad [yoga practice]. …It’s not working for me. I’m no good at this. I’m no good period. This type of thinking dominates the mind and weighs it down. It’s like carrying around a suitcase full of rocks on your head. It feels good to put it down. Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as "good" or "bad." This would be true stillness, a true liberation.
 
[Yoga is a practice] of cultivating a non-judging attitude towards what comes up in the mind, come what may. That doesn’t mean judging won’t be going on. Of course it will, because it is in the very nature of the mind to compare and judge and evaluate. When it occurs, we don’t try to stop it or ignore it, any more than we would try to stop any other thoughts that might come through our mind.
 
The tack we take in [yoga] is simply to witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it, knowing that our judgments are unavoidable and necessarily limiting thoughts about experience. What we are interested in [with yoga] is direct contact with the experience itself – whether it is of an inbreath, an outbreath, a sensation or feeling, a sound, an impulse, a thought, a perception, or a judgment. [In this way] we can act with much greater clarity in our [practice, without immersion] in a stream of unconscious liking and disliking, which screens us from the world and from the basic purity of our own being."
 
Beginning from "Where We Are" from The Heart of Yoga
 
"When we go into a posture or carry out a movement that feels tense, it is difficult to notice anything else besides that tension. Perhaps when we sit in a cross-legged position our only thought is for the pain in our strained ankles. In doing this we are not really in the asana we are striving for – we are obviously not yet ready for this particular position. Rather, we should first practice something easier. This simple idea is the foundation for our whole yoga practice. Practicing the postures progressively, we gradually achieve more steadiness, alertness, and overall comfort.
 
If we want to make this principle of asana practice a reality, we have to accept ourselves just as we are.
 
If we have a stiff back we have to acknowledge this fact. It may be that we are very supple but our breath is very short, or perhaps our breathing is all right but our body gives us certain problems. It is also possible to feel comfortable in an asana while the mind is somewhere completely different. That is not asana either. It is only possible to find the qualities that are essential to asana if we recognize our own starting point and learn to accept it."
 
This quote from Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh, speaks more abstractly to our theme, allowing us to think about non-judgment as an enlightened frame of mind.
 
"Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn to practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times."
 
CLOSING DHARMA QUOTE
 
Cultivating Non-judgment Quote by Rumi
 
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."

The late grand master of modern yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar was born in Belur, India, on December 14, 1918. When he was 14, his brother-in-law, T. Krishnamacharya, introduced him to a yoga practice, which improved his tuberculosis. Iyengar pioneered the use of props to make poses accessible to a wide array of students. He has written a number of books, including Light on Yoga, which many practitioners esteem as the bible of yoga. 

Iyengar himself described his variation of yoga as follows, "I just try to get the physical body in line with the mental body, the mental body with the intellectual body, and the intellectual body with the spiritual body, so they are balanced. Each asana has an optimum line or position. From the head to the foot, from the front to the back, from the right to the left—without deviation, without distortion."

To learn more about B.K.S. Iyengar and Iyengar Yoga, visit the official website at
http://bksiyengar.com.

"In the breath, the soul finds an opportunity to speak."

From “Breath” by Danna Faulds

You may have noticed that all yoga classes, no matter the style, begin and reinforce an emphasis on intentional breathing. Teachers that weave Sanskrit (the ancient language of India in which classical yoga texts are written) into their classes will refer to this focus as Pranayama breathing. 

Pranayama is defined as the regulation of the breath through certain techniques and exercises. In Sanskrit it is derived from prāṇa "breath" + āyāma "restraint."

Another similar translation of the concept describes prana as the life force or breath sustaining the body; with ayama translating to “extend or draw out." Together two mean breath extension or control.

"In many ways, the cosmic energy that is Prana corresponds to that of modern nuclear physics, which regards all matter as energy ‘organized’ in different ways. This is Prana with a capital P. It is Prana that knows no boundaries. Its source is the energy of the universe, that which is unchanging within you, your very soul, and it feeds your energy body, what the ancient texts call the pranamayakosha. Prana (small p) refers to the energy in the atmosphere – oxygen-rich air. This prana, also known as vaya, feeds the physical body, what the ancient Yogis called the annamayakosha.

What does knowing how to breathe look like? It is breathing that moves like a wave through your body, originating in the diaphragm rather than the thoracic region of the chest. It is full and deep and calm. To breathe this way, the body must be relaxed. When we consciously tense the muscles and hold the breath, there is a relaxed feeling that accompanies the release. So the simplest way to relax is by contracting the muscles while holding the breath, then letting the muscles and breath release completely."

Amy Weintraub

If you are a beginner to pranayama techniques, check out this in-depth Breathing Lessons article online that includes instructions for several variations on breathing exercises you can include with your home yoga practice. 

​Shiva Rea has been practicing yoga since the tender age of 14, and is one of the leading yoga instructors of our times. First driven to explore the enlightening world of yoga to understand her birth name, Shiva’s goals have since progressed to include sharing her knowledge with any and all comers. Shiva believes that yoga enables everyone to realize their true potential. She focuses on Vinyasa (roughly translated, “breath-synchronized movement”), and enjoys worldwide fame as a teacher of Prana Flow Yoga and Yoga Trance Dance. Shiva Rea’s expertise in the Krishnamacharya lineage of yoga as well as Tantra, Ayurveda, Bhakti, Kalaripayattu, world dance, somatic arts, and yogic arts has led her to be invited to many important conferences and festivals in the yoga world, including Chant 4 Change, Yoga Journal Conferences, the Telluride Yoga Festival and special events at Kripalu and Omego. 

She has participated in pro-environmental events, and led retreats and pilgramages all over the world. During these retreats, Shiva helps students experience transformational yoga, healing, and sacred sanctuaries to supplement and freshen their yoga knowledge. Her teacher training programs merge Tantra, Yoga, and Ayurveda to prepare teachers for meditation, advanced asanas, and service in the world. 

Shiva’s fame extends to the world of media as well. She has been featured in a variety of yoga and fitness publications, and produced award-winning yoga DVDs and CDs. These products have helped revolutionize the in-home practice of yoga. Shiva Rea’s unique blend of traditional and revolutionary yoga, fitness, and music has enabled her to attract both novice as well as long time practitioners. Shiva Rea currently lives in Pacific Palisades, California. 

Thank you to everyone that joined us today for yoga where we closed our practice with this beautiful poem by Tomlinson to reflect on the power of pausing to observe stillness. 

Farewell to Van Gogh

The quiet deepens. You will not persuade 
One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darling 
Chestnut-tower to displace itself
With more of violence than the air supplies
When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly 
And we must be content with stillness.

Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes 
Into their central calm. Stone by stone
Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth 
Becomes once more the earth, the leaves
A sharp partition against cooling blue.

Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy 
Gratitude. The world does not end tonight
And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow 
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.

Charles Tomlinson 1960

Thank you to everyone that joined us for yoga today. Check out this fabulous infographic describing the benefits of cultivating a regular practice both in the short and longterm. Namaste!