Author: Katherine

Is bravery required to live the best version of your life? What does being brave even mean anyway? Do personal practices that provide insight, like meditation, bring us home to who we really are? And does this allow us to make the brave choices we must make if we want to grow and live our lives with open arms and hearts?

I am part of a writing group and our prompt for this week was to choose a quality and write about it as if it were a person. I chose the word bravery. Here’s what I submitted:

Bravery lives in a house she built herself. Her neighbour, Insight, lives to the East. Fear, is her neighbour to the West.

Bravery’s skin is positively luminous when she speaks to Insight over the fence. Insight is the neighbour who gives the best advice. Bravery basks in her wisdom from the inside out.

When I visit, Bravery is patient with my childish assumptions about Fear. I imagine she flirts with Fear relentlessly. He’s dangerously attractive, knows what to do about everything and could help her to be taken seriously beyond her property lines. I imagine marriage between them someday as an honourable privilege since he is already a decorated war hero. I imagine him smiling seductively one night after the sun has set, whispering, ‘How ‘bout you feel the fear and do it anyway, baby?’

I am getting to know Bravery a little better all the time though. She’s a grownup. I bet she would laugh (a big, beautiful, honest laugh), if she knew what I really thought went on between her and Fear.

The truth is, Bravery doesn’t trust Fear when Insight isn’t home. She locks the doors and pulls the blinds. I’ve seen it happen.

“Fear is a useful neighbour,” she tells me gently one day. “He warns if there are intruders and other dangers but he sure knows how to suck the joy out of everything with his intimidation tactics.”

“No, the only flirting I’ve done,” she adds, “is with the idea of taking down my fences on both sides.”

What would it be like to welcome insight into your life and to use fear’s guidance instead of allowing fear to use you? Let me know what you think. Enjoy your week 🙂

Much love, Katherine

Lately I feel like I am turning into a tomato. I am living, breathing and dreaming tomatoes. We have made tomato-everything at our house and still our tomato plants keep producing ripened fruit that requires fairly immediate attention. Yesterday, I had to get rid of some pretty gross tomatoes before I promptly started to make more tomato sauce with the good ones. I was thrown into action.

This ripening-abundance of early fall will also seemly come to a screeching halt after a good frost if we don’t pick the partially ripe and unripened fruit left on the plants. It’s all a choice.

Our minds are just like this.

Experiences can be like the fruits piling up in the bowl. If the ripened fruits are left unobserved we will fail to respond and they will be missed opportunities; they will rot.

Any experience…a brand new one or something so familiar to you that you could do it in your sleep, can be experienced in a fresh way if you are willing to observe and respond: pick the single fruit as it’s ready and eat it off the vine, or pick a bunch of tomatoes at once and make salsa, tomato sauce, gazpacho. You can choose to watch things as they are and then respond this way today and that way tomorrow, dependent upon the depth of your observation. You can choose to live the life that’s at your door.

Likewise, when the frost comes, you can choose to forget you have a garden altogether or you can harvest what’s left and figure out where to go from there…Why not ripen tomatoes indoors? Or try recipes that call for green tomatoes?

Practices like yoga and meditation cultivate moment-to-moment awareness which in-turn cultivates an embodied life; one that you live as it happens no matter the circumstances of the season or the well-worn paths of cravings and aversions in your mind.

And that…is just a little food for thought 🙂

Happy Monday!

It was a fresh morning today.

I was up early so I had time to meditate and to do a few inversions before leaving the house at 5:45 to teach an early morning yoga class.

I am mourning the loss of warm mornings lately and feeling a strong pull to stay under the covers, to wear warm sweaters, socks, and drink tea. We haven’t turned on our furnace so the floors are chilly when I wake up and I have been meditating wearing a shawl again.

This morning though simply felt fresh. It wasn’t cold (a teensy shift in consciousness I was open to upon waking). I was naturally awake at 4AM because my face was cool from the open window. I enjoyed my drive to my class playing music and singing on the way, I welcomed asana practice with the lovely women who joined me today…the practice was also fresh and lively. When I returned home I felt like having a morning shake that was fresh too so this is what I threw in my blender:

1 cup of coconut water
1/4 of an avocado
A bunch of fresh strawberries
two handfuls of spinach

Enjoy this beautiful day wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Find what is fresh and alive. Be grateful for all of it.

Much love, Katherine

Peace, derived through self-love, is a much misunderstood and underrated brand of activism. This idea has really been on my mind lately; specifically the effects of inner peace in regard to interactions with others and the broader world.

We all must begin with loving ourselves if we want to be part of a bigger peaceful solution. Our strivings are too great otherwise to be kept up with any kind of continuity. When peace is an outside job, it becomes something we do, instead of being something we are. Don’t we all eventually burn out from doing? Don’t we all thrive and shine bright from being?

Self-development isn’t self-indulgent. Self-love isn’t narcissism which is rooted in fear. Starting where you are is the only place anyone can begin.

Listen to the persistent call inside your own heart – that is an act of love. Keep listening. Keep answering. Keep loving yourself as a practice so you ready your heart to love others and the planet. It is the truest way to be part of a lasting peaceful solution for the world. Self-love is the greatest act of love and the only true gift to the world you can ever give; the one gift that allows all others to be authentic. To be peace, you must love yourself.

As poet, Mary Oliver expresses so beautifully, “Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”

This week I started back as a yoga instructor after almost five months of being away from the place I primarily teach. I have returned to a very different landscape compared to the one I left in March when the facility was closed due to Covid19.

I taught each day this week starting with an early 6:15 am class on Monday morning. I went in, masked and feeling uncertain. Class sizes have been significantly reduced with all participants required to reserve the coveted spots. There are check points to pass through at the front door and again at the yoga studio door. Along the way are gleaming floors and freshly disinfected everything, as well as, hand sanitation stations. There is no lounging or loitering encouraged. Your reserved spot is for the designated hour-long class. Everyone is accounted for in the building including staff. Inside the studio, mat orientation is predesignated with stickers. There is new signage, seemingly endless protocol. It all felt very different.

My first couple of classes I was in my head more than my body and still the practice unwound me. Students visibly unwound along with me. My voice was different from my intro compared to final savasana. Bodies in the room looked different from rigid start to ease-filled finish. Likewise, my Monday class was very different from the class I taught on Friday.

Yoga practice works.

This declaration isn’t a surprise of course. There is over 5,000 years of history behind yoga asana with stress reduction often sited as a prime benefit. Still, the transformative power of yoga practice this week was so tangible. I felt very lucky to both experience and witness it.

I also had the privilege to be part of the conscious sharing of physical space with others during a time in our history where ‘social distance’ has become part of our vernacular. My final class for the week in particular brought this sharply into focus. Sharing space with others who also chose to share space with me and other students was the most beautiful gift. We need each other. We are woven together in infinite ways beyond our understanding. We are part of a macrocosm of interconnectedness with our greater environment. Covid19 has pushed us away from each other and yet, in countless ways, brought us so much closer to one another.

Thank you, with all my heart, to my yoga community this week.

Much love, Katherine

Each summer my family and I go portaging. I know I enjoy it and am a very willing participant. Here is the interesting thing I notice, every single time. My mind likes to hang onto perceived comforts. If I allow my mind chatter to be who I perceive to be ‘Katherine’, I would likely let the things I tell myself talk me out of ever going.

Here’s an example. The preparation to go means my regular schedule that I really enjoy is disrupted.

My normal morning routine lately goes something like this:
Wake
Lemon Water
Meditate
Yoga
Smoothie (recipe at the end of my post 🙂
Walk
The rest of my day begins

Before leaving on a big trip, my day goes something like this:
Meditate
Smoothie
Last minute packing like a maniac
Fly out the door at the last moment or later than we planned
The rest of my day begins

Doesn’t the first one sound more peaceful?

My mind also wants stuff even once we are officially in nature. Usually it kicks in when I realize I have no connectivity. I am not a big tech person. I usually forget to even turn my ringer on on a regular basis but even so, when I know I can’t just check something with my phone I feel a bit uncomfortable. I usually at some point miss access to books and podcasts and I am not crazy about the inevitable shift from fresh veggies over to dehydrated food we prepped. On and on my mind will list the things it wants. It will give me examples of things I could be doing that would be far more effective in the reduction of my to-do list.

You can probably guess what happens next? My clingy mind starts to recognize it could continue to cling or could drop into the ‘now’ of the nature-loving experience. I, Katherine, have a choice. I don’t have to stay at home with my mind. I am not my mind. I can choose to be where I am.

Nature is a tough opponent anyway and I predictably move into a different mental space where the sound of my paddle in the water is the best sound in the world. Physical challenge makes me feel alive. Everything I eat tastes amazing even though I would never choose dehydrated foods on a regular basis. I don’t mind that I smell like a campfire before bed and I fully wake up in the morning after jumping into the lake.

The crazy part of all this is that I know what will happen once I am camping far away from everything. I know I will enjoy it. I have even enjoyed trips when the conditions were far from perfect. And still, my mind is a powerful negotiator despite knowing my own pattern. The whole point I guess that I am trying to make is that we all have a choice to listen to the clinging or move into the freedom of what is. Sometimes we will feel strong enough to recognize the chatter for what it is and other times we will stay at home with our fresh food and make delicious morning smoothies 🙂

Here’s my recipe for my favourite smoothie this summer with a tropical fruit variation if you want or need fruit with your greens. Enjoy!

1 cup coconut water or water
half a lemon, peeled
a chunk of ginger, peeled
two big handfuls of spinach
1/4-1/2 an avocado depending on size
1 cup of mango and/or pineapple (optional)

Blend until smooth.

The title of this post makes me imagine something requiring a loin cloth and fire dancing. For better or worse, that is not what is about to follow.

There is something about yoga asana that has the potential to move each of us deeply. There is the physical movement, of course, in transitions to poses and within a pose. There is movement through the breath. And movement of the busy mind that might settle down enough to move within the practice from awareness to hands here, strength there and length in another place in the body. There is movement into stillness and recognition of the choice to stay or move away from.

And then there is actual being-ness.

On those days that presence shimmers, a coming home to ourselves is no longer illusive. Isn’t that what we all seek? Alone or in a room full of people practising together in presence, some days you can almost hear the crackle of magic. It is so tangible, so beautifully real. It is within ‘being-ness’, fully occupied, that all else drops away…that ‘being at one with’ simply is.

Ritual and intention can help us embody being-ness. Here are ideas to consider:

1. Set an intention for your practice. This could be as simple as connecting in with your breath; with hand on belly and upper chest, notice how it feels to breath and decide to take this breath awareness into the rest of your practice.
2. Light a candle when practicing indoors especially when light is low in the early morning, evening, on a cloudy day or…
3. Take your practice outside. Expanding the time we spend in nature is incredibly healing. (I really enjoyed this book: Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life by Richard Louv.)
4. Place flowers nearby (bring the natural world indoors).
5. Place a picture of a person you want to offer up the energy you create to or have a picture of someone or picture/symbol of something that inspires qualities you wish to manifest in your own life.
6. Create a place that you feel good to be in; face a window, clear visual clutter, sweep the floor, create a pleasantly scented environment with natural essential oils if that is something you enjoy, open a window.

Happy Summer Solstice…it won’t be official where I live until it is 5:43 p.m. but I was greeted this morning by the most beautiful sunshine and warmth. It feels like summer has been with us off and on all month. My daughter and I went for a walk and although the temperature was in the low twenties when we started out, we could feel the heat of the day building as we walked. I love summer. Below is a poem I also love. It is one (amongst many) of my favourite poems by Mary Oliver. Enjoy it and enjoy this official shift into a new season.

P.S. Check back soon for a brand new post too on yoga and the power of ritual.

The Summer’s Day
~ by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Happy sunshiny day 🙂

I have a new 6-minute video for you to try. It is embedded at the end of this post. If you don’t feel like reading to the end then just jump there (that’s right, permission granted to scroll away). For context, at least read the teensy paragraph about the heart chakra just before you get to the video.

Do you believe that wherever you are and whenever you are reading this, your day holds the potential for happiness? Do you think that regardless of the weather, your day can feel like it is full of sunshine?

There is certainly a case to be made about how to stack the odds in your favour of happiness regardless of what you believe. I recently completed a course about the brain and one of my favourite modules was about happiness and the brain. Yogi-friendly practices are central to increasing your experience of happiness. Practice gratitude, acts of kindness, meaningful social connections, stress management, meditation, regular exercise, and focusing on the present moment. There is considerable (and impressive) research worth investigating if this topic interests you. Check out the ted talks with Shawn Achor for a sample of what science has to say in the area of current happiness research or listen to the podcast the Science of Happiness produced by the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley.

Working with the chakra system, or energy centres in your body, is an ancient system geared toward addressing circumstances that appear to be your roadblocks to happiness and fulfillment in day-to-day living. It may sound kind of ‘out there’ but think of the seven main centres (that run from the base of your spine to the crown) as your spiritual nervous system. Each chakra governs particular physical areas in your body, as well as, the excesses and deficiencies in your nature that determine how you respond to life’s challenges.

The best way to ‘get it’ is to explore. Use music to feel your way through them. First you need to understand the physical location of the chakra and the basic issue associated with each. Listen to a song that speaks to that issue and pay attention to how it feels in that area of your body. (I’ve provided a chakra chart below). Connect in a tangible way to what age-old yogic wisdom professes to be true to the human experience through this system. Or simply start by using the practice at the end of this post that is focused on the heart chakra.

A note about the heart chakra: Think about the anatomical space at the upper centre chest through your body to the back between your shoulder blades. This is the seat of emotional consciousness. Imagine you can illuminate and open to the free flowing energy of this space with every breath. What does it feel like in the area of this chakra when you give and receive love, feel peace, joy and laughter? How does it feel to be shutdown or closed in this space when you refuse love and experience jealousy, resentment, and hostility? Cultivate openness with the practice below. (Why not pair this new practice with the loving-kindness audio meditation posted with the other media files a couple of weeks ago?) Have fun and share your thoughts with me, I love hearing from you.