Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

Who is ready for a boost of energy into the new year? It’s time to wipe the slate clean and inject all your enthusiasm for life and growth potential into moving forward with a positive mindset. A new year is a milestone for all of us to not simply pause and reflect on the past but to commit to living our best life. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting from Square One or you just need some simple tweaks to feel your best, yoga can help!

The Sagittarius full moon fuels our philosophical fantasies and launches us into a stratospheric search for wisdom and meaning. Nothing tickles the great archer’s fancy like higher pursuits in education, travel and religion or philosophy. As a centaur, Sagittarius loves to take aim at something that others find impossible, in order to shoot for the stars. Often overextending himself, the centaur can find himself spread thin. Our goal in this new moon is to aim high, but stay focused while keeping our energy levels up and engaging in self care.

You are not one big backbend away from enlightenment. I hate to break it to you, but it is really the unglamorous work of getting up a bit earlier to do a daily practice, most of which probably isn’t instagram-worthy, that will keep you sane and healthy. It’s the accumulation of consistent practice over months and years that puts you on a path towards joy and freedom and not just one rockin’ class with a Coldplay soundtrack. If the experience of subtle energetics is part of your practice, then of course big poses have the possibility to connect you to transcendental states. But they can equally throw you off balance and out of the continual practice of balancing the energies that compose your physical, emotional, and spiritual states.

A few years ago I visited a girlfriend in Southern California. I was preparing for my Yogic Lore Flow workshop on the Hindu goddesses and spent the week in her lush backyard garden meditating on Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, beauty, and grace. I came to understand Lakshmi’s power of bestowing beauty, abundance, and grace is directly attributed to her ability to recognize the exquisiteness of every moment, every flower, every day, and every smile.