COURTNEY ROHAN YOGA

On Facebook recently, one of my friends posted: “Drop a busted picture of yourself.” How cute, I thought. I want to drop one, and then I looked through my photo reel and found none. I realized: I don’t keep the busted pictures. I delete them immediately. The perfection of a yoga picture, of any picture, is only one interpretation of the whole. The practice is long, or maybe the experience is.  Sometimes, it is hard. And, thank The Divine there are times when the pictures show ease, but the practice is more than all of this.  The experience of life is more than what we capture in a moment. Yet, as we practice, tooling through a sequence or holding poses to a complete stretch, to union with the spirit, this is perfect, though it might not always look so.  This is one of the reasons why people practice and share their journey. There is growth through the poses, through your stance each time you go there, and no matter the extent to which they try to share...

Do you have a yoga mat? Good, if you do; fine, if you don’t. Do you have a room, a space, green grass, a park? Good. The hardest part of a yoga practice is not having props or room to do the practice, it is what we tell ourselves.  We tell ourselves we need certain specific things in order to do the practice, when this is far from the truth. Showing up daily to a yoga practice, or whatever practice may be for you, is one of the challenges that we all face. Everyone has days when they do not want to go there, but the professional verses the amateur shows up anyway. Lisa Dietz, "Wheelchair Yoga"  www.arts.state.mn.us I do not mean amateur because you might not be able to do advanced poses; that is not always what a yoga practice looks like anyway. Pictures of people doing yoga are not a clear representation of what goes on before or after on that mat. A wheelchair bound yogi or a bedridden one’s practice is unique to their need. If you have an injury, your prac...

As a 7 th  grade English teacher, I work with and am one of those people who aims to control. I would not say I am what many have coined a “control freak,” but some days I come close. In a classroom setting, teachers are told, they must have control of their class. This can look lots of ways, but most importantly, when teachers do not have the students’ attention, they are not really teaching anything at all. And it appears that what they have to say is not worth the listen, though in most cases, this is very far from the truth. There really is no way to control another being, to make someone listen or do what you say. We can influence, but we can not control. Even in the penal system, control of the inmates is not really that. It is an influencing, if the listener decides that the speaker has something that is needed. Still, the listener may not do what is being asked, but the seed was planted. This is the case with most things: People speak; we listen or not. We speak; peo...

“It’s just like water. I ain’t felt this way in years.” - Lauryn Hill, Just Like Water The body is made up of more water than anything else, which clearly opens the door to introspection on how we address the water aspects of ourselves. This means that we could literally see ourselves as water and mimic the ways that it moves or stills to deal with our continence. Water like spirit is necessary for life. But the glory of its presence is natural until we are no longer in the body or can no longer take in enough water to sustain its functioning. We can live without food, but we can not live without water.  Though I do not believe that water ends, as presence does not end, water may not be flowing through the body, but as we have it in the body, it is the symbol of presence. When we are done with it, it will be used again. It will still be present. It is interesting to consider this idea in areas of the world where water is scare. People have traditionally lived to av...