What Yoga is to me…
Every body is different and every body will reflect Yoga differently. My goal is not to create a pose standard that students are trying to achieve but rather develop a skillfulness that helps guide students into their version of each pose. To expect each body to create or “get-to” an ideal standard, puts a limitation on our focus and does not allow us to expand our feeling awareness of who and how we are undefined by our expectations to be different or push further.
Yoga teaches us how to grow our feeling awareness within and through out our body.
Yoga teaches us how to grow our body’s feeling intelligence, which is quite different than our mental intelligence. Our feeling intelligence lives within our cells of mechanoreception, proprioception, and intero-reception(gut-feelings). Strengthening our feeling intelligence helps us to respond better to our body’s and life’s messages.
Yoga becomes a tool for internal listening and checking in with our body. An opportunity to feel our tight spots, our injuries, our organs, our emotions. Feeling the needs of these areas of ourselves is both overwhelming and powerful. When we begin to feel into our body, we start to feel many of its unanswered needs. This can be overwhelming. Each time we recognize a single need, acknowledge it, and give attention and action to it’s fulfillment we are empowered. Yoga teaches us discernment of what is life-enhancing or energy depleting, physically, emotionally, & mentally.
Yoga is a means of giving yourself a relationship to yourself, whereby each time you practice you get to know yourself and how you feel on that day. It not only gives you a relationship to how you are feeling, it gives you the means to enhance your well-being. For example, Yoga is great for when you feel down, and depressed.
A key in developing this relationship and skillfulness in enhancing our wellness is to learn how to make every Yoga asana, or posture, work for you. Every asana has an adaptation ready for you. A good strategy is to create an internal environment inside of each pose where you can still access and maintain deep breathing. Each time you practice your enhanced body’s intelligence will guide you towards new adaptations and ways of feeling and breathing in each pose. So will a good Yoga teacher.
This wisdom of learning how to feel inside and adapting each pose to work for you is what makes an advanced student in yoga. More so, than an ability to put your foot behind your head or balance on your hands.
Forrest Yoga
I came to Forrest Yoga in 2002, as a Bodyworker on a referral from my mentor Dr. Vincent Medici. He told me Ana Forrest had honed a form of Yoga that was healing on Physical, Emotional, & Mental levels simultaneously. I took one class at her studio in Santa Monica, felt something resonate inside, and enrolled in her 8-week Foundational Teacher Training that was starting the next week! This experience shook my core and changed my life! It empowered my Bodywork and everything I believed possible about hands-on work, and gave me super strong tools to hone my own skill as an Structural Healer. Starting one month after I finished that training I began teaching Forrest Yoga. I have continued to teach Forrest Yoga classes every week since that day over 20 years ago.
Ana Forrest asked me to be a Guardian teacher in 2007 and to make a Life-Pledge of support to the Hoop of the Teachers. I am honored and thrilled to be a part of this modern “Mystery School” of Healing and Transformation.