Each month Yoga One chooses a theme to align our classes and programs around. These themes draw from our main sources of inspiration and education; Baptiste Yoga, Lightyear Leadership, and traditional yoga texts such as the Yoga Sutras.

This May, we are pulling from the Yoga Sutras, a collection of 196 Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga. Within these 196 bits of text are the Yamas and Niyamas, a collection of sutras that focus on how we relate with ourselves and with the world around us. They include statements on being non-violent (ahimsa), truthful (satya), disciplined (tapas), and studious (svadhyaya).

Aparigraha often translates to non-greed and non-attachment. In the physical world, it means to not be attached to possessions. Graha means "to grab," pari means "on all sides." Aparigraha teaches that we only use what resources we need, and we let go of it when it no longer serves us.

It's not just for the stuff in the cupboards!

This non-hoarding...

This month's studio focus comes from a body of work that has been instrumental in helping me develop my own leadership and create a life that I am happy to be a part of. Lightyear Leadership provides a framework for understanding the unseen forces that shape our personal legacy and unique tools for self-development.

Yoga One's March studio focus, The Body Is Innately Intelligent, comes from the principles of Personal Power and Wholeness. This principle is crucial to anyone wanting to better understand how their body communicates and how to create a balance between the many domains of our life.

It's important to learn how to care for and live in our bodies. It's our vehicle to getting things done on Earth and the home we reside in. How we relate to our body directly impacts how we experience the world that we are living in and how we move forward and achieve our goals.

The truth about this principle is that the body is ALWAYS communicating with you.

At any moment it is sending us...

Seek The Truth is Law of Transformation number one! It gets right to the heart of why we step onto our mat. Seeking the truth is the basis of all transformational journeys. When we hear the call to get real with ourselves and get real with our world, we're hearing the call to seek the truth.

To seek the truth is to be in action.

Getting curious and leaning into that curiosity is what creates the discernment between truth and story. When we slice through the cloud of stories that the mind generates, we can more clearly experience reality and take more empowered action.

Your yoga mat is a reflection of that process. It's where we not only ask the question - what's going on in there? - We also get the opportunity to look and find out! It's not just theoretical.

When you're taking your seat in a pose, are you going to your edge? Are you holding back? Are you even having a conversation about how you are being with yourself?

Getting to the truth about yourself, as you are right now,...

Your primary tool for aligning in your life is your body. It does the basics automatically. This way is down. This way is up. Here's forward and back.

It keeps us from running into furniture.

But that's just the very basic level and it's capable of much more fine-tuned, granular, alignment as well.

We can line our fingers up so precisely with little levers that it becomes music when we press them. We can move our bodies in patterns that tell a magnificent story.

Our bodies are innately intelligent, and it takes a certain level of clarity to really listen to and comprehend that intelligence.

We have to be able to listen through the static of our minds to what the body is really telling us. When you intentionally move the body, you clear out the mental debris as well. 

The body is always sending signals. We're either listening to those signals, suppressing them, or misinterpreting them because of all of the interference.

Written by Daniel McCall
Daniel has been...

Align To Your NORTH STAR

Sometimes it seems as if great people in the world are lucky, talented, or guided by a supernatural hand. They seem to get things right without a lot of effort and recover from setbacks with grace and ease. They are obviously cut from a different material, so to speak, right?

Not necessarily.

A great number of successful people have natural talents, are working in their wheelhouse, and may find some random fortune in their day-to-day lives, yet that's not always the path to success.

Our studio-wide theme this month is a way to know which things that matter most to you and which things deserve your precious attention throughout the year.

Finding Your Inner Compass

Aligning to your North Star is a way of clearing through the interference of all the information you're taking in every day. It's where you align yourself on all dimensions; physically, mentally, spiritually, and create a vision for the life that you want to be at cause for.

Ghandi said that...

Growing up with a mildly Catholic background, the general rule was “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right!”

If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right!

It wasn’t exactly that everyone around me wanted things in life to be difficult. It was simply that for generations my family lived under extreme pressure and it became the new normal. My father descended from the Irish immigrants escaping the potato blight and my mother’s mother grew up as a refugee in World War II Germany. My parents never had the perspective that life was easy, and that’s the story that was passed along to me growing up.

Combine the generations of laborious living with the high-speed, high-performance messaging of today’s world and you have a recipe for burn out and overwork.

Combine the generations of laborious living with the high-speed, high-performance messaging of today’s world and you have a recipe for burn out and overwork.

...

The value of stillness in a world that doesn’t stop moving is beyond measure.

This month the theme at Yoga One is

BE STILL AND KNOW

Stillness, oddly enough, is an ever moving target. If we stand still long enough we realize that we are actually rocking slightly to and fro, constantly adjusting our position to maintain balance.

This constant movement is even more obvious when we sit down to meditate. Not only does the body stay in perpetual motion, but the mind also flits and flies about in a constant state of flux.

This is what makes intentionally being still so valuable. It is a rare and precious thing.

Getting still isn’t about fighting the momentum of our body and mind. It’s about learning to relate to it in a new way. The theme isn’t simply to BE STILL. It's “be still AND know.”

The knowing comes from recognizing that when we get caught up in the constant fluctuations, we’re likely to miss something.

That something we miss is often...

I am not ___________ enough.

Good

Pretty

Thin

Rich

Smart

However you complete this sentence in you mind, there seems to be a global affliction of I AM NOT ENOUGH.

One of my dearest teachers, Dorothy Espiau, said that these thoughts of not enough are the modern day plagues that eat away at our humanity and cause much of our suffering.

Her diagnosis was that over-consumption leads to the feeling of not being enough. I’ve seen it in my own life running the rat race for money, keeping up with the latest gadget trends, and ever striving for the next best level of my own life.

When we consume more than we create, we tip into a fear response that keeps us consuming more and more and never feeling like we quite have enough.

Enough money, enough talent, enough shoes, enough knowledge.

Yet, there is a balance that can be had and it is not found by receiving it, it’s found by generating it.

Being of contribution, our March studio theme at Yoga One, is a state of generating...

When I was first asked to be a guest writer for the Yoga One blog and share how I experience the monthly teaching focus of Give Up What You Must, I was like “Oh yeah, I’m so down!” I was so excited because I have experience in this theme, I like to write, and have often thought about starting my own blog. I was ready. I sat down to write. I opened my laptop. I started to jot down all of my ideas and thoughts.

Then, it happened.

“I’m not good enough.”

“This isn’t right.”

“Not perfect. Not perfect. Not perfect.”

“You’re not a good writer.”

“Nobody cares what you have to say.”

“So and so’s blog will be better than yours.”

Oh yes. The tried and true negative self-talk. The perfectionist problems. The comparison curse. Fear. They came out to sabotage what I truly wanted.

I got so frustrated. I tried to force myself to get something on paper. The more I forced, the more...

In this life, I wear many hats.  I am a wife, mother of three, high school teacher, yoga teacher, graduate student and Zumba instructor.  I am a person who historically runs on connection, dreams big, and finds interest in basically everything.  I am constantly finding things that have value, interests that I want to explore, beautiful things, people to add to my life, and experiences to add to my bucket list.  

I rarely subscribe to the line of thinking that less is more because clearly, more is more.  The only thing that is less.. is time.

This is the reason that our focus of “give up what you must” has resonated so much with me this month.  There are so many things I want for my life, my husband’s life and the lives of our children. In some cases, these “things” can serve as motivation for me:  I grind harder, work longer and dream bigger because of the hopes that I have for my family. But if I am to be honest,...