Category: thoughts and musings

Posted on

Nourish & Feed – Eating 101.

Good nutrition is the basis for everything else. You can never hope to have a stable, strong, pain-free body if you don’t nourish its tissues correctly.

Nutrition is basically applied biochemistry. You have to think of processes when you choose your food. There are some tissues – like those of the central nervous system – that are given priority in the queue. There are some details like having enough Zinc for your digestive enzymes to function. There is connective tissue to consider, collagen both in and under the skin, and also in reticular membranes like those of the kidneys, the lymph nodes and the mitochondria. There is so much to know!

It is not necessary to understand all the biochem in order to make good dietary choices. I identify emotional eating, overuse of sugar, inability to withstand hunger and poor meal timing as the most important things to address, generally. So, here are some of my ideas.

Emotional Eating

Changes in diet are always emotional. Eating patterns are established in early childhood and are often a link to our past. Eating things that both nourish and satisfy us is a tricky path to tread. Sweet taste is associated with the Earth element in energy medicine. The first taste we taste after being born is sweet mothers milk. Holidays are defined often by the sweets that are eaten, so we remember times of connection and rest, and associate those feelings with the eating of sweet foods. The feeling of deprivation when you change your diet is a very tender emotion. That emptiness, hunger for something…very hard to sit through.

Tip for emotional eating: Mindful eating. If you must snack on sweets, savour them, feel whatever poignant or tender feelings you must, enjoy them, but eat little. Do yoga when hungry. Yoga should always be done on an empty stomach, anyway. If you can trigger feelings of pleasure and relaxation whilst hungry, then gradually you will stop getting those pesky negative emotional triggers. Try it and let me know, it is a failsafe tip. Even if it’s five minutes of long slow deep breathing, you will acquire and excellent self-care habit by doing this. (Try the 4-4-4-4 rhythm, counting 1-2-3-4 for each phase of the breath – inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4).

Sugar

The reason we need to reduce our dependence on sweet foods is because they rob the body of resources while giving it almost nothing. It helps, again, to think critically: Digestive enzymes, as I said before, often need the trace mineral Zinc. That means that when they do their enzyme magic (making chemical reactions occur, “catalysing”), our body uses up some of its supply of Zinc. So, if you are going to eat something – anything! – that uses a digestive enzyme, make sure that whatever you’re putting in has the nutritional punch to offset the biochemical work you’re giving it. Am I being clear? You can’t put in “empty” calories, depleted foods, and expect your body to just digest it and not care.

Tip for sugar: Substitute. Gradually wean yourself onto less sweet options. If you (gasp!) drink soda, then I don’t really have advice other than to stop it now. Sorry, I know it’s tough, but soda has no place in a healthy diet. For everything else, it’s using less sweet alternatives – honey, maple syrup, lucuma powder, coconut sugar – and reducing the amounts you use. If you eat out a lot, again, I just have to lay it on you: Unless you are going to a healthy/veg/organic restaurant, your food will be full of bad oils, salt and sugar. So, cook more, or get healthy meals delivered. But yes, sugar reduction is just being strict with yourself. Think of is as the sweetest self-love!!

Hunger

You have to learn to sit with hunger if you are going to find balance. Not only do we all need to stop being hangry, we need to be able to sit without nibbling between meals. Finally, we need to listen to our digestive systems when eating and STOP when we sense satiety. These three things together give us control over our eating because 1) we identify and control our irritability when running low and gradually accumulate personal power over our body’s insistent demands. Not for nothing does yoga advise fasting: fasting cleans the body and strengthens the will. When we stop being hangry, we are using our benevolent will to sit with our emotions. 2) When we stop nibbling between meals, we give the digestive system time to absorb the nutrients in the previous meal, give peristalsis a chance, keep our precious teeth clean, and also get used to a being a little hungry, which helps the whole hangry thing. 3) Satiety, or knowing when you’re full, is a beautiful and subtle feeling. It is wonderful to feel satisfied without being overstuffed.

Tips for hunger:

Drink yerba mate or green tea, without sugar. Both help keep hunger at bay and have interesting compounds in them. Mate seems more about fat burning while green tea is accepted to help prevent cancer. Both are bitter, a great thing for your gall bladder and small intestine.

When you eat meals, don’t put too much food on your plate. Eat mindfully, chewing properly and stop when you’re full. It is normal to want to finish your portion and wasting food is a sin, so avoid loading up then ploughing through. When you feel satiated, STOP eating! Just stop. Wait five minutes. Maybe you’ll want a little more, but usually not.

Timing

My Nutrition Professor used to say that the best general dietary advice is a “mostly vegan diet with a bit of fish“. This is great advice, memorise it. Not eliminating entire foods groups, but reducing your intake. Vegan and vegetarian junk food is available, but there is a better chance of getting your five-a-day-or-more if you choose plant based foods. Fish has some important stuff in it that our bodies seem to like. Fisheries are mostly unsustainable, so try to eat locally and low on the fish food chain, ok?

Another excellent tip is this: Protein for breakfast, a proper lunch, vegetable soup for supper. Time your feeds, get into a rhythm, it is really comforting.

Proteinacious breakfasts – I love hemp powder, peanut butter, bee pollen, eggs – get you out of the metabolic Nitrogen fast (you can recycle Nitrogen for about 8 hours, but after that, the body steals it from lean muscle by breaking down the amino acids for the Nitrogen). So, start your day with protein and sail through the morning!

A proper lunch, starting with salad and finishing with dessert if you’re so inclined, satisfies your need for yumminess, means you can eat with friends (often tricky for the healthy eater) and is the meal that you’re best equipped to digest properly. This should see you through to evening, when you can get into the habit of having a healthy vegetable soup, then see if you’re still hungry. I love vegetable barley soup with lots of ginger and tumeric. In fact, here is my here is my recipe. I will leave you with that, good health and good day.

–Rachel

Vegetable Barley Soup

Ingredients: 1 small onion, 2cm-piece of ginger root, 1 stick of celery, 2 carrots, 2 tomatoes, 2 big kale leaves, 1 teacup of pearl barley, tumeric, cumin powder, paprika, bay leaves, sprig of rosemary, butter or oil, hot water, sea salt.

Method: Wash barley and set aside. Sautée finely diced onion and ginger in butter or olive oil. Splash in some white wine, if you’re so inclined. Add chopped celery, carrot, tomatoes and kale stalks. Sautée on medium heat, don’t let it get too dry. As it dries up and the temperature rises, move the veg to the edge of the pot and add dry spices to the middle. Let them get nice and hot, until they release their fragrance. Then stir the veg into the spice. Add the barley and hot water and rosemary and bay leaf. Cover and let it get back up to temperature. Stir a little, but just make sure there’s enough water so it doesn’t get dry. The barley will absorb water, but the veg will release some. Cook about 20-30 minutes, until the barley is soft and the mixture thickens. Add the salt and stir well. Add the chiffonade kale leaves. Remove from heat and let stand about twenty minutes. Delicious!

Posted on

Yoga and the Blues

It is an open secret in the yoga world that most of us arrive here after trauma or trouble of one sort or another. In fact, I have heard said since my earliest days in this strange world of integral healing “people arrive at yoga when they are tired of suffering.”

I think it’s true. The suffering just goes on and on. As the Buddha observed, life is suffering. We suffer in our minds, our bodies and our spirits. Sometimes a little at a time, sometime all three at once.

So, the blues bring us to yoga. And yoga helps make the blues a little more manageable. But the blues don’t go away. They are there, we just learn how to deal with them better.

What are the blues, anyway, and where do they originate? The blues is emptiness. The blues is the sense that something is missing here, and we can’t quite work out what. The blues is the void. Each part of the body-mind-spirit construct may give cause for the blues. The body has appetites and desires. The mind never stops. The soul aggrieves with its absence.

Body

When we are young, maybe the body doesn’t suffer as much. At least, the aches and pains are fewer and easier to deal with. As we age, maybe our mind gets calmer, we find some wisdom. But the suffering is still there. The body asks loudly for food, shelter, comfort, touch, stimulation of the senses. We are constantly being dragged off by desire and appetite. It is the way of the body. The body is the lovely prison that we inhabit for a time, and its wants generally dominate our entire earthly life.

Mind

The mind is just as bad, if not worse. The mind wants distraction. It likes to be busy. It oscillates between fear of what is to come and remorse for what has been. Rarely does it sit quietly, without judging and in the present moment. Mental fluctuations, called vrittis in Sanskrit, cause us untold suffering. As we think, we feel, we have emotional/limbic responses to our thoughts. Our heart may race, or we feel choked and tearful, or hot and agitated. This somatisation of thought and emotion wreaks havoc in our lives. The mind is the construct through which our soul has to view the world. The mind requires much cleansing and polishing lest its distortions be mistaken for reality.

Soul

The soul, well, the soul suffers all this. Its voice is the quietest but the most insistent. It talks to us in the dead of the night. It whispers to us when things don’t “feel” right. It begs us to listen, but generally we don’t. And so, the soft restful peace of the soul is denied us. We suffer its absence.

What does all this have to do with yoga and the blues?

So, the other unspoken secret of the yoga world is that yoga teachers also get the blues. We are often, by nature, sensitive people. Yoga makes us more sensitive, but less vulnerable. How?

When you have become aware of and able to control the subtle energy (prana), you can control how much energy sticks to you, and how much of your own energy you allow to escape. You get a kind of protective bubble.

When the blues come knocking, instead of, as before, running out to find bodily comforts (alcohol, food, etc)…before plonking down on the sofa with binge watch a series…before succumbing to that empty soulless feeling…you just sit with it. You watch yourself having these feelings, you don’t detach from these feelings, you feel them, but you watch yourself feeling them. You watch where the breath moves, what parts of the body feel heavy or shaky, you watch yourself and you don’t do anything. Except normal, basic care. Healthy food, good rest, time with living being (pets, plants, trusted people) and you just…wait it out.

(For completeness, let’s remember that medically diagnosed depression is not the blues and probably needs professional intervention…)

Patience being a virtue and all, the blues soon pass if you just let them. Nothing ever gets resolved overnight. Hurts happen, disappointments bite, life is a bit shit sometimes. But yoga says : “sit still, watch, wait it out”. And you know what? It works. And it hurts hardly at all.

Posted on

April Full Moon in Scorpio – Pink Moon

Alteayoga logo

“If the highest form of Scorpio energy is unconditional love, then this Full Moon poses the question- what has to die for me to experience this? What do I need to let go of in my life in order to feel the unconditional love that resides within?

“Unconditional love” is a poor set of words to describe this energy and the love that we all are, perhaps it is Divine Love or Enlightened Love, but these words also seem to fall short.”

Read the full post here:  https://www.consciousreminder.com/2018/04/24/pink-full-moon-in-scorpio-29th-30th-april-a-major-turning-point-in-2018/

Posted on

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In the natural health world, we eschew medication as much as we can for many reasons. In fact, here are many people who take upwards of five pharmaceuticals per day.

Between 1988 and 2010 the median number of prescription medications used among adults aged 65 and older doubled from 2 to 4, and the proportion taking ≥5 medications tripled from 12.8% (95% confidence interval: 11.1, 14.8) to 39.0% (35.8, 42.3).

–https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573668/

Here is yet another reason why this can only end in tears:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/11/drug-waste-clogs-rivers-around-the-world-scientists-say

Diet, rest, gentle exercise, loving kinships, contact with nature and creative realisation go a long way to palliating the worst ravages of simply being human and existing in this crazy world. I don’t advocate for a complete avoidance of pharmaceuticals – I am a huge fan of good medical science. What I do advocate for, however, is a reduction in our dependence on such things. This will only come about when each individual adult realises that they hold the keys to their own health and must practice preventative medicine.

Some years ago, I made an independent study of the typical age of onset of various chronic diseases (atherosclerosis, Type-II diabetes, high blood pressure etc). It is much earlier than you think…you’re probably thinking 55? 60? Think again. In men, about 38-45 and in women about 45-55.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Yoga is  a complete system that offers advice on diet, exercise, rest, healthy human relationship, our place in the big scheme of things – the natural world – and how to realise your inner visions (creativity).  I can teach you some or most of that, depending on how long you stick with me, how often you turn up to class and whether you decide to have private as well as group classes.

It is a long journey, and I am not an easy yoga teacher.  I will needle you, I will make you think. But, I will teach you all that I know, and I never stop learning myself, so my teaching will always evolve.  Of that, you can be certain.   But, without makng any claim such as yoga can prevent cancer – because one cannot make such claims, ok? – I can guarantee that if you do get diagnosed with cancer, having a steady and established yoga practice will help you through it.  And this, a mean yoga teacher is nicer than a mean course of chemotherapy! And one more thing, yoga has been proven to help prevent both cardiovascular disease and diabetes.  So there.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Over and out, dear souls.  Today is a bright and lovely day.  You’re alive.  Be joyful, be joy.

AUM.

Posted on

Yoga makes me feel…old. What's up with that?

The lady who asked the question I blogged about last week, “Yoga is meant to calm me, so why do I feel so nervous?” asked another great question yesterday.  Gosh, I love students who give honest reflections and ask questions!  Thanks, honey bunch.
After class I noticed that her face wasn’t 100% bliss.  Quite the opposite.  So, unlike a YouTube video would, I sat next to her and asked her what’s up.  She said:

“I couldn’t do some of the simplest poses.  It made me feel old.”

Ouch.  And yes, yoga does that.  You see, if you give someone a workout routine like Crossfit or marathon training, it is very normal that they will find, at first, themselves not able to do it.  But because it is hard, challenging, perhaps unattainable, they are quite happy to just thrust away at it for a long time until they reach the goal.  To not do something hard on the first go is quite normal and acceptable for the ego.
But when we are asked to do something simple like lie on our backs and stretch one side of the body and breathe deeply, and find that there is pain, discomfort, we say “hold on a second…what is happening here?”
What is happening here is that our bodies have aged, have adopted fixed patterns, have held onto thoughts and emotions and stored them in our abdominal muscles, our hips, our necks, and we have become unable to make those muscles do our bidding.  We try to move the ribs with the breath, and we can’t.  Upon finding that we can’t do something so seemingly simple, we reflect on how, once upon a time, we could.  As children, we were all free and loose and easy.  But time, and life, and blows, and ailments, and all that, steals our childhood from us and we become adults, then middle-aged and then, if we are lucky, old.  The body ages but so does the mind.  We swap physical agility for mental wisdom.  Or that is the idea, anyway.  There is concept that I love in yoga that goes like this:

Why do we do âsana?  We do âsana to  keep the body strong and supple and youthful so that we can live a long time.  And why do we want to live a long time?  So that we can gain wisdom.

Doing yoga is like holding a mirror up to our true selves and being forced to look.  Mostly, we won’t like all that we see.  The mirror as a symbol is powerful and appears all over in the popular culture.  In Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Movie Orphée, the mirror is the portal between two worlds, the living and the dead.  And in fact, a very eerie reflection uttered is :

“Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la Mort va et vient. Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans une glace et vous verrez la Mort travailler commes les abeilles dans une ruche de verre.” (Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes and goes. You have only to look at yourself in the mirror every day and you will see Death at work there, like bees in a glass hive.)

Yes indeed.  When we look at the mirror every day, we look at the face of Death.  Our own death.  This is getting heavy, but the Yoga Sutras are very clear about all this, in the first 5-10 aphorisms of the very first Yoga Sutras book, Patanjali identifies the Kleshas, the mental patterns that cause the vrittis, the mental fluctuations that assail us all.  And right up there in spot number five is fear, abhinidvesa.  Principle fear? Death.
We are all aware of our mortality but none of us wants to admit it, to face it.  When we do, we cringe and shudder.  This is normal.  I love to ruminate on the human being’s awareness of the passage of time.  We are, I believe, the only animal that marks time with such precision.  We are time-obsessed species.  Why?  Because we are all unconsciously counting down the seconds of our lives.  And this is wildly uncomfortable.  Because what this forces us to do is to admit that our time is limited, that we must live fully in the present and create from our meagre and humble little lives the best and brightest creation that we can.  And any abstention from this duty, whether through fear, intransigence, obstinance or fakery, is a negation of our duty to grow and gain wisdom and be the best person we can be.
Uff. All that at 8 in the morning.  I think a lot.  That is why I do yoga.  So, I will leave you with a Joy Division song with footage from Orphée.  Enjoy it, and live this day fully.  And get on your  mats, and breathe deeply and feel the love.  It is there, all the time, and there is enough for everyone.

Posted on

The qualities of a yoga practice – Santosha and Ahimsa

I had a great group come along for class yesterday afternoon.  We did a practice designed for the legs and the âpana.  We all had a good go at some standing balances, with a transition between two postures. And mostly everyone fell out of the poses at least once.
Teaching a class is a dynamic, fluid thing.  I usually have drop-in groups, and of varying levels of experience.  The skill of a teacher depends on being able to tailor the practice to the group and make it enjoyable and useful for everyone, while never straying from the essence of the teachings.  This is called “pedagogy” and is the art of teaching.
I used the falling out of the poses to teach some yoga philosophy.  I used the Sanskrit words “Ahimsa” and “Santosha” to help people understand how to deal with things like falling out of poses.
Ahimsa means non-violence.  I use this word in the context of not allowing violent self-critiquing thoughts to arise.  It is common to sigh in frustration when we can’t do something, say to ourselves “I always fall” or “I will never get it” or “I am useless”.  We use ahimsa, which is one of the five Yamas of yoga, to practice peaceful, non-harming inner (and outer) dialogue.
Santhosha is one of the five Niyamas and of my favourite Sanskrit words.  It means contentment, enjoyment more or less. Fall out of a pose? hahahah!  Use Santosha to not want what others have, ie:  don’t compare yourself to others, and be content with what you are.
I say:

Some people believe that the Universe is a big game, that it is all a joke.  The archetype of the Trickster God is very common. Hermès, (AKA Mercury, my ruling planet) of the Greeks, was a trickster.  Krishna was a trickster.  The Raven of the Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples is aso a trickster.  When you start to think of checks and balances in life as jokes, as something to laugh at, it all gets a bit lighter. 

You see, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.  Fail and take it lightly, step wrong, then do a little shuffle and get back on the beat.  Use non-violent inner dialogue to correct yourself, but not castigate.  Use good humour to just take it as a little joke.  Don’t put that strenuous face on in yoga,  have fun.
Taint What you Do, It’s the Way That You Do It, as the old song goes.  Here is a delightful live version of that old song, recorded by Sedajazz just up the road in beautiful Valencia.

 
 

Posted on

On the roots of yoga, and giving thanks

I read this article today in The Independent:  Americans who practice yoga ‘contribute to white supremacy’, claims Michigan State University professor
The professor says that the way that yoga is practised in America today amounts to culture appropriation and an offshoot of colonial culture.  Ouch.
I don’t live in North America, but I have read a lot on the yoga blogosphere about how yoga over there is much divorced from its spiritual or its philosophical roots.  I am not the best one to comment on this.  The professor says:

They can be aware of the history, roots, and magnitude of the practice and give credit where credit is due. Humility, respect, and reverence go a long way.

I agree 100%.  Anyone who comes to my class knows that I will bore you all to death by closing the class giving thanks to my teachers, who taught me how to teach.  For the record, my teachers are Carmen Sánchez Segura, Claude Maréchal and TKV Desikachar (although I never received direct instruction from Desikachar.).
Enjoy yourself a little yoga mix over on mixcloud.  Get on your mat and breathe deeply.  When you find a sliver of light, a slice of joy within, share it, connect the joy that resides deep within you to the joy that resides deep within others.  Hey, they need it just as much as you do.

Love,
Rachel

Posted on

Up in the early morning


Up in the early morning on Saturday, I chanced to spy the alignment of the heavenly bodies. Sun, moon and star traced a straight line in the dawn sky, casting their reflections on the calm surface of the sea.  As the heavens sang their coloured glory and the birds their joyful chorus, I was given a reminder of my own insignificance.  It felt great.
When I see the planets align, feel the Earth turn upon its axis, watch the days break and then later fade away, I realise that I matter little, if at all.  I am a speck upon a speck, hurtling through space and time infinite.  
In childhood, we believe the world revolves around us. Much of our long-lasting angst arises in childhood when we somehow think that we are responsible for everything that happens around us.  Parents divorce, must be because I didn’t put my socks on that morning.  Vacuum cleaner broken, must be because I left that dirty little candy paper on the floor.   Etc etc ad nauseum.
Growth, maturity, is reached, I believe, when we lose our sense of self-importance.  When we realise that we won’t save the world, that our scope is limited, we see that our only duty is to be as good as we possibly can be within the tiny scope of our lives.  This is actually much easier, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not that difficult to decide to walk in the door of your house with a smile on your face despite your soul-destroying day at work, now is it?
We are all specks upon a speck, hurtling through space.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  Life is a huge mystery and probably none of it matters.
Yoga taught me all this.  Yoga taught me to be still, quiet, and find that quiet place within myself.  I often close my classes with a discourse that goes along the lines of “that stillness that you feel inside, right now, was always there.  It’s just that you didn’t know how to reach it.  Yoga gives us the tools to reach that still point, that quiet place, and to do so repeatedly and reliably.  That is what yoga is, a series of ancient and well-tested tools that help us find our true selves, our quiet, calm, detached peaceful centre.”
We are specks upon and speck, hurtling through space.  We probably matter not at all.  And that’s ok.
Happy Monday, dear souls.  Be joyful.
-Rachel

Posted on

The sun will come out, tomorrow….Yoga before the sea and the big blue sky


Yesterday morning dawned rainy and grey.  Around these parts, precipitation is a present, a gift.  The chill in the air was invigorating, and the light reflecting on the wet cobblestones a portend of danger, for they are slippery when wet.
Sophie and Laurence and I warmed up with a white tea before class, then ventured upstairs to el Cielo, which means “Heaven” in Spanish, for yoga class.
There was a chill in the room, so we doubled up the yoga mats, and distributed nice, warm, hot pink wool blankets.   When we reached the floor phase of the practice, I noticed that the chill was starting to bite.  Feeling protective of my students, I hoped and prayed for some warming rays.
As we began to practice dvipada-pitâm (“the two-legged table pose”), the sun burst through!  Suddenly our little greenhouse of a room warmed up!  Joy!  We finished the sequence with Dolphins and headstand prep…energies were moved, smiles dawned upon faces and yet again, yoga worked its magic.
Thanks to everyone who came to class, it is a honour and privilege to be allowed to teach even a little bit of this ancient system.  Thanks to all the yogis and sages who kept this oral tradition alive for us to employ now, in 2018.  Thanks to my teachers, Claude and Carmen, for dedicating your lives to teaching teachers.  Namasté.

Posted on

Authenticity in teaching yoga: Why it took me so long to teach.

authentically ok
authentically ok

The first time I ever practised yoga was in January, 1999.  That is 19 years ago.  How time flies.  I knew from the very first class that I wanted to teach yoga, that it was my path.  So, why did it take me so long to start teaching?  One word:  Authenticity.
I had for the longest time the feeling of being an imposter.  Imposter syndrome is the persistent feeling that you are a fraud.  In the five types that are listed there, I would say I am a Natural Genius and a Rugged Individualist.  Oh, with a bit of Perfectionist thrown in, for good measure.  It’s a high bar I have set for myself.
In yoga, the stakes are high.  You are not playing with people.  You are doing serious work.  And lest we forget, you can only teach what you know, so the most serious work you are actually doing is on yourself.
It is not easy to start off with the Yamas and Niyamas, the codes of ethics that underpin all serious yoga practice.  Non-harming, purity, self-study, contention…it is a long list, and very hard to adhere to 100% of the time.  Add that to six-days-a-week practice, and an evolving practice at that, not stagnating, bringing new things to the mat.  Phew.
It is easy to fall into the idea that you are never good enough to teach yoga.  Or rather, for me it is.  Evidently, for others it is not so difficult.  There are plenty of people out there who, a year after discovering yogâsana are on a 200-hr course and then teaching a few months later.  This is not a criticism of such people, it is a reflection on my inner process, my evolution.
I could not allow myself to do such a thing.  Maybe it is simple enough to say that my baggage was too heavy, my inner world too murky, my compass skewed.  Who was I to teach anyone how to live happily?
And yet, slowly, progressively, I oriented myself, I shed my baggage, I shone my light.  The interesting thing was discovering that we don’t have to be 100% perfect and clean.  But, we need to love our own flaws, our own pain.  When you learn to love your pain, you become whole and when you are whole you can hold space for your students to learn to love themselves, in their entirety.  When I got that,  I started to teach in earnest.  Now, it is my passion, my absolute passion!
A lot of marketing in the holistic world centres on authenticity.  How can we tell the real from the false.  I dunno, I don’t have a simple answer.  I think it’s intuition, I think it’s a feeling.  All I can say is that I think I am authentically ok now, I think I am.  I hope I am cos goddarn I am not going back to that place where I was before!   So, if you feel like checking out my classes, meeting me to ask about how I teach, having a conversation, you’re already here on the blog.  Take the next step and get in touch.
Love, Rachel