Good evening students and friends of CLHA. I wanted to mention how happy I am to see your commitment to attending classes regularly. The new location is much easer to access and I am glad to see you making it in. I decided to add another class to the schedule. Monday morning at 8:30am beginning 1/23.

I will be away from the studio Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st. Amy Jendro will be teaching all 4 classes and I hope you make it in to work with her. Amy has been a student of CLHA since its inception and understands well the foundation of our studio.

Daniel Rohr accepted a studio key today and I am looking forward to hot coffee upon arrival some mornings

Julie Guth, a certified Tai Chi instructor, will be offering a 10 week seminar in April for people living with arthritis. I will let you know more as we get closer.

Facetime and Skype are ready. Find me on Skype yogamatthew and Facetime yogamatthew@me.com or call me at 218-232-5156 for details. (past or current students only please)

Change is not something that we should fear. Rather, it is something that we should welcome. For without change, nothing in this world would ever grow or blossom, and no one in this world would ever move forward to become the person they’re meant to be.
anon

Renew your commitment and steady your focus in practice with us this year. We are all on this journey to better wellness, less tension, and a deeper understanding of all things. Thank you for sharing the gift of yoga with others. This new year will be beautiful as we continue growing. We are happy to offer students a new instructor. Help me welcome Maureen to the staff at CLHA! She will be teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:00am. Check the class schedule for current class hours. Share your wants and needs in 2012 with staff and make CLHA your place of learning, creating, cultivating, and sowing. Namaste

Be always at War with your vices,
at peace with your neighbors,
and let each New Year find you
a better person.
Benjamin Franklin

The new space on 371 is beautiful and functional. We are happy and proud to be working out of it.

Over the past month or so, some of you have seen a man in blue scrubs walking around. His name is Nathan Welliver and he did a massage therapy internship with us. He couldn’t have arrived at a better time. He was a fantastic help during the move and I enjoyed working with him. Good luck to him as he graduates this week.

So many of you have supported the growth of CLHA and I have you all to thank. Special thanks to Amy and Matt Jendro for helping out with paint and beautifying the space. Amy is finishing up her certification this month. Congratulations to Amy!

Our new location has made other opportunities available. Please help me welcome Maureen Farnsworth to the teaching staff of CLHA. She begins in January. Bio and schedule coming soon!

We now accept all major credit cards in the studio. In January we will be launching remote yoga through facetime or skype. More details to follow. Also, look in the near future for yoga products and clothing.

Don’t forget the gift of Yoga and Bodywork for loved ones. Gift certificates available online or in studio. Contact staff or email clharts@gmail.com

Peace

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe – to match your nature with Nature.”
Joseph Campbell

On Monday October 31st we will be opening in our new location at the old school house 17070 Hwy 371. The location is 1 mile North of the lights on Hwy 371 and CR77/CR49.

Franklin Arts Center  tenants and friends will be missed. The growth of CLHA has been wonderful and we are excited for the new location and look forward to seeing you there! Thank you to all who have supported CLHA and our efforts to share  the practice of healing a restoration of the body through yoga and massage. You are all appreciated.

We hope you find the building a place of peace- Join us!

We will post the new location hours soon. Next week will be the same schedule as it has been this fall.

CLHA would like to offer a special price for all Yoga Fusion and Fusion Flow classes for the month of October.  Students can recieve a five class punch card for $50.  You can register for the special online or at the studio.  We are excited to share this offer with you!

Come join us on Monday night from 6:30-7:30 to move our bodies in Fusion Flow with Amy Jendro.

Fusion Flow is a sequencing of postures to strive for balance in the body, working all the major areas in all directions. Typical class will follow the general sequence of centering, warm up, standing poses, abdominal strengthening, seated, prone, supine poses, backward bends, forward bends, twists, inverted poses and relaxation. Class is for all students who have an understanding of how stay within their limits or for students who would like to know more about what ‘staying in your limits’ means.

Post by Amy Jendro

 Let us get straight to the point, NO!  There is not a ‘perfect’ posture, although we may think there is.  Why? Because perfection in the body does not exist! Each of us have experienced our own traumas (falling out of a tree, slipping on ice), activities (baseball pitcher, cross country runner, golfer), repetitive motions (truck driver, computer worker, guitar player). We are a mixture of our lifestyle choices and daily habits that create patterns in our bodies that result in our own specific postural alignment.  For us to believe we can obtain a perfect posture and strive toward that goal will only bring frustration and discouragement.

 Instead, let us begin to change our perspective from attaining a ‘perfect’ posture to ‘moving into balance’. By moving into balance we begin to understand ourselves as we are and we can unravel the mysteries of how we hold our habit patterns and begin to break through. We discover what is going on in our own life that is creating an imbalance and we work towards making the changes required to make us feel better.

 There is a saying in the Yogic texts:

This is perfect,

That is perfect,

When perfection is taken away from perfect,

Perfect alone remains.

 You are perfect the way you are, most of us just do not know this yet or believe it to be true. It is those good old egos of ours that think we need to strive to perfection.  Perfection does not exist. Believe it!

 So how do we move towards balance?  Begin by taking a different approach in your yoga practice.  Try not to strive towards a destination, like hands to floor in forward bend. Instead, begin to feel how your body moves from beginning and end, from start to finish, and then back again. Discover, explore and get curious versus pushing, forcing and striving.  You may be surprised what you discover as well as find a sense of balance and well-being within.

 This webinar ‘How is your spine doing?” hosted by Lucas at YogaBody is a fantastic clip to help you understand your posture and finding your balance within.  It is approximately 58 minutes long but well worth the time:

http://www.yogabodynaturals.com/backcare-freebie1

 Enjoy your exploration! As always Central Lakes Healing Arts supports you and your practice; if you have any questions throughout your exploration, please let us know and we can try to assist you on your journey.

 Namaste.

Beginning next week, CLHA will begin a new series of classes - Yoga Fusion

Monday and Wednesday nights from 5:30-6:30 with Amy Jendro

Post by Amy Jendro

Since my training began last October, many folks asked what is it about yoga that you like so much? Which led me to explore that question for myself and thought it might be good to share.

My personality is of the type of independence and resistance. Nobody could tell me what to do. In fact, if someone told me what to do, I would do the opposite.  If I was told I could not do it, I would despite the fact if it was even was something I wanted to do.

As I grew older, my independence created many opportunities to expand in my environmental career, allowed me to gain great lengths in my athletic adventures, and led me to my husband who honors and understands that part of my personality.

However, my independence also brought separation and an attitude of the need to be better; constantly striving to be different and unique and pushing so hard to better myself at everything I did.  If I did not do this, I was nobody, a failure. This is how strong this part of my personality is.

Enter yoga. Of course, like most, my yoga practice began because my body was sore and very unhappy.  Long hours of running on pavement, created so much tension in my hips I would walk with a sight limp, my neck and shoulders where so tight I couldn’t look over my right or left shoulders.  At first, I thought yoga would provide me with the tools to keep pushing through, to be bigger, better and stronger, and it did.

Then my practice grew into something more. Sometime, somehow, somewhere during my mat practice, my perspective changed. I began to listen to myself.

The biggest change in my life came when my focus switched from self-improvement to self-discovery. I was perfect the way I was, no need to strive to be any other way, the problem was I just did not see it nor understand it.

Why yoga? What I love about yoga is it allows me to keep my independence. Nobody told me do this, do that; believe this, believe that; you are this; you are that. Instead yoga said ‘listen to your own experience’. It is your own direct experience through which you learn and develop your depth of character. Nobody, NOBODY, will ever have the same exact experiences as you. It is up to you to know yourself, to trust yourself, to know what is good and bad for you.

There is an opportunity to learn about your self in every moment of every day. The trick is to be present in the moment to be open to that experience. For example, how often do you find yourself missing out on part of a conversation because you began to get lost in your own thoughts, going off on a mental tangent? That is you not being present, missing out on that present experience.

So I do yoga, I allow myself to be present in my practice and it carries with me through the rest of the day. If you give yourself an opportunity to learn from each experience, then there will be no other option but to grow in depth and character, to really understand who you are, not who others perceive you to be.

Explore the experiment, the experiment of the self discovery of you. Let yoga be an opportunity to discover who you are, for your own self. Yoga will never tell you who you are, or what to believe in. It is only a tool, a tool to figure it out for yourself.  That is why I love yoga.

Namaste.

Namaste

The fall schedule brings more AM classes and changes to Tuesday and Thursday evening. Saturday starts  30 minutes earlier. See you at class!