Patterns

"Before you make a pattern, you gotta break a pattern.” -Gray Cook

Your story.

All yoga postures are there to help us notice how we are as we act and we can use the practice to change from working/feeling/responding from our own histories to creating new, more helpful patterns, which ultimately gives you choice.

"If we take yoga seriously we will practice it alot. It makes sense, then, that what we practice has a positive effect on the body.

We repeat patterns not to limit us in life, but as the musician practices their scales, we practice basic patterns so we can move freely in life. Working with fundamental patterns in yoga helps to clarify how we move and what habits we have built up.

We need to learn to distribute patterns evenly throughout our bodies. Poorly distributed forces create stresses and strains at joins, which invariably lead to pain of discomfort and increased likelihood of layering protective patterns over causative ones. When we take this approach, yoga becomes an inquiry into the way we engage through our bodies. It helps us to notice when we do unhelpful things, and, once noticed, we can gently set about letting them go." --Peter Blackaby

Working with your own narrative is essential. That is where solutions are. YOUR solutions.
Now take the rest of your life and practice.

"It’s impossible," said pride.
"It’s risky," said experience.
"It’s pointless," said reason.
"Give it a try," whispered the heart.

--Author Unknown

(Source: pureblyss)

Source: cariga 

The bodies that orbit you

Gemini: This week the world’s going to move in loops and repetitions. This week, the world’s going to waken memories buried deep inside of you, thoughts that you haven’t seen in a long time. This week is going to be about charting your path, and the orbit you move in, and the bodies that orbit you. This week is for dealing with the patterns and the recurring dreams and the ideas that just won’t leave you alone. Be as brave as you can. Plant flowers that will come back, year after year.

-- Madame Clairvoyant 

Source: kanaes

Dillan Marsh

“A good teacher can never be fixed in a routine. Each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting. A teacher must never impose his students to fit his favorite pattern. A good teacher protects his students from his own influence. A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. I am not teaching you anything. I just help you to explore yourself.” 

– Bruce Lee

"We repeat patterns not to limit us in life, but as a musician practices their scales, we practice basic patterns so we can move freely in life."

--Peter Blackaby

Making

Along side teaching yoga I am an artist, print making and photography being my primary means of expression...although i'll try my hand at most things, ceramics is my current obsession!

The disciplines I have trained in and favor always involve lengthy processes (I think I like the process of making more then the final product!) and it is the repetitive functional movements involved in the making that keeps me present in what i'm doing. The print making and ceramics particularly require strength, an intelligent use of the body and ease-full breath to get the job done.  When it dawned on me that the physicality of the body was such a large component of what I do I became really interested in the different ways we train the body for tasks like this. I love watching musicians and artists of all kinds work. I find the movement patterns fascinating.

Print of my Grandma and polaroid's taken in Iceland and Norway.
See more work here and my inspirations here. 

breaking patterns

"your past
should not be a map
to your future,
merely
a guide."

— Della Hicks-Wilson

Sit. Stay. Heal.

 “The sad part is that all we’re trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

Someone once sent me a bone-shaped dog tag that you could wear on a cord around your neck. Instead of a dog’s name, it said, ‘Sit. Stay. Heal.’ We can heal ourselves and the world by training in this way.

Once you see what you do, how you get hooked, and how you get swept away, it’s hard to be arrogant. This honest recognition softens you up, humbles you in the best sense. It also begins to give you confidence in your basic goodness. When we are not blinded by the intensity of our emotions, when we allow a bit of space, a chance for a gap, when we pause, we naturally know what to do. We begin, due to our own wisdom, to move toward letting go and fearlessness. Due to our own wisdom, we gradually stop strengthening habits that only bring more pain to the world.”

 Taken from Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chödrön
Found via the beautiful Gold Lion Yoga .

Patterns

"If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again. 

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more. 

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me. 

 Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t."

 -- Christopher Alexander

Patterns

If we take yoga seriously we will practice it alot. It makes sense, then, that what we practice has a positive effect on the body.

We repeat patterns not to limit us in life, but as the musician practices their scales, we practice basic patterns so we can move freely in life. Working with fundamental patterns in yoga helps to clarify how we move and what habits we have built up.

We need to learn to distribute patterns evenly throughout our bodies. Poorly distributed forces create stresses and strains at joins, which invariably lead to pain of discomfort and increased likelihood of layering protective patterns over causative ones. When we take this approach, yoga becomes an inquiry into the way we engage through our bodies. It helps us to notice when we do unhelpful things, and, once noticed, we can gently set about letting them go.