Review: yogAttitude cards

Tags

affirmation, attitude, bhava, Emotions, Feelings, intuitive, Nadine Fawell, review, spontaneity, Yoga, yoga in my pocket, yogAttitude cards

You guys! The brave and delightful Nadine Fawell has created something truly awesome: yogAttitude cards!!

And I feel like a total lucky duck for having the opportunity to test drive and review them for y’all.

Full disclosure: I was given a pre-release copy of the cards and workbook.

But holy-moly, I totally LOVE them and would buy them in a heart beat!

I’ve got a bunch of things to tell you about Nadine’s yogAttitude cards, so get ready for a walk-through of my test drive…

So what are yogAttitude cards anyway?

Well, there’s two kinds of cards in the box – those that show Nadine doing a yoga pose, and then all those Attitudes! All up, there’s 50 cards in the box – 25 poses and 25 Attitudes.

Adorably, they’re elegantly compact and come in a very cute wee box, so you can take them with you anywhere, including on holidays!

The cards are accompanied by a digital workbook (PDF format) which has bigger photos of all of the poses as well as beautiful descriptions of each Attitude (things like: accepting, nurturing, passionate, faithful etc).

How do you use them?

It doesn’t matter how experienced/inexperienced a yogi you are, yogAttitude cards can add a little magic to your practice!

In the workbook, Nadine lists some suggestions around how to use the cards. This is actually where the fun comes in!

Here’s a screen grab from the workbook of just a couple of Nadine’s suggestions:

Personally, I use them a bit like affirmation cards. As in, I make a pile of the pose cards and another one with the Attitudes. Then I intuitively choose an Attitude to go with 1-4 pose cards. Or however many I feel like.

Once I’ve gotten over the synchronicity (doh!) of whatever has turned up, I rearrange the cards into a sequence I like.

Then I repeat the process, so there are maybe three or four sets of cards, creating a group of sequences for me to practice.

I read what the workbook says about the Attitude and start practicing, all the while generating that bhava (feeling/attitude) towards myself and the particular pose I’m doing.

Why do I like them so much?

• I downright LOVE the idea of intuitively choosing a yoga pose in the way I might do with an affirmation or tarot card. It really speaks to the sense of “what do I need in my practice today”?
• People take yoga too seriously! In the classes I teach, I pay attention to the faces of my students. I’m always asking them to relax their face, to smile, to laugh… because too often their expression looks like they’re constipated! ;)
  Y’all, this is just NOT what we’re meant to be doing with yoga! Getting in touch with various attitudes and generating that feeling while in various poses is fantastic. Especially if it’s a pose you normally associate more closely with torture or swear words than say, kindness or wisdom.
• Because the selection of poses is so random, I might find myself practicing a sequence I don’t do often/wouldn’t have thought of myself.
  We all get stuck a bit in the way we’ve been trained or taught, right?
  For example: placing half-moon pose after triangle pose isn’t something I do all the time. So the cards are freeing up my idea of sequencing, yeah!
• Besides how easy it is to pop them in your bag, I love the size of the cards for another reason. In some cases, they only show parts of the pose Nadine is doing.
  So instead of very strict instructions about what a pose should/shouldn’t be, it’s left up to you to figure it out, all the while bringing FEELING into your practice.
• yogAttitude cards provide you with suggestions, but overall leave your practice up to you. Personally I sometimes find using yoga DVDs a little overwhelming. They aren’t working to my pace unless I get the remote out and hit pause. Plus, I don’t always want to follow the same sequence and the cards allow me to tailor my practice to suit how I’m feeling.
• I can choose to do a short practice or a longer one – it all depends on the number of cards I select.
• Change your mood and change your day – that’s basically it, isn’t it? I read something once that said simply the act of putting a smile on your face can affect your mood and brain chemistry. So, try practicing a little calmness or groundedness and see what happens…
• I don’t ever want my yoga practice to ever be something I do by rote, like a chore. Nadine’s cards are a light-handed reminder to keep life, feeling and spontaneity in my yoga. Hooray!

Yay, a discount!

yogAttitude cards are pretty darn affordable, but for a limited time, Nadine is offering a 10% discount.

Because she’s generous like that.

Just head over to her shop and use the code LAUNCHPARTY at checkout to get your very own inspirational pocket yoga practice.

It comes with peacock feathers on the box! ;)

Thank you

Oh, wise and gorgeous Nadine, many thanks for allowing me to review your yogAttitude cards.

I really and truly think they’re brilliant and I’ll probably end up buying them as a gift for a few people. In fact, they’d make an awesome Christmas/Yule or birthday present.

Now I can truly say I’ve got yoga in my pocket. Yay!

~ Svasti

xxx

The Workshop of Love – part 2

Tags

AC/DC, anahata, Asana, bandha, bhakti, bhava, Dinacharya, Hanuman, indifference, Intimacy, Krishnamacharya, Love, Mark Whitwell, Mudra, pranayama, strength receiving, sun salutations, Surrender, Valentine’s Day, Yoga

Photo liberated from Mark's Facebook profile :)

[Read part 1 first]

…You are a flower blooming in your own garden. Your first form arrived as one cell known as the heart. A spark of Life, initiated by male female, giving and receiving union of opposites, the catalyst of nurturing, your spirit took form and the source became seen…

Soft hands, suggests Mark as he levered apart my fierce anjali mudra. Soft like the heart, he smiles. His crinkly eyes smile at me, too. Whoah, that right there is a hit of the bhakti that envelopes Mark and all in his immediate vicinity!

We perform a series of sun salutations and the bhava is feeling, sensing, with no mention of strict ideas about alignment. Instead its – feel it, breathe it, and flow with the practice. Mark talks through the principals of Strength Receiving as we move and asks us to do our practice: Without drama or strain.

The end of the first day is full of anticipation of the next. The first six hours have already been so intense, but in a good way. A day of questions and answers, of movement and breath and most definitely, of heart openings. The kind that cause me to melt. This state of openness takes a little getting used to (every time) because my first reaction is always to protect myself. But here we are, ripping our chests open like Hanuman. On purpose. It’s both frightening and utterly glorious.

…For some of you this practice is too much, for others it’s not challenging enough. This is one of the problems with generic yoga classes. You need to find YOUR yoga – the yoga that’s right for you…

…According to the great “teacher’s teacher” T. Krishnamacharya, yoga must be adapted to the individual, not the individual adapted to the style of yoga. For your yoga practice to be most fruitful, it must be in harmony with your body type, age, health, and even cultural background…

Ideas to ruminate over.

I walk up to Mark to thank him for the last six hours but I’m almost speechless. He grins at me and envelopes me in a huge and long-lasting bear hug. ‘Nuff said!

That night on the other side of town, a few of us head out for dinner just down the road from Nadine’s apartment. But not Mark, who instead went with a friend to see AC/DC in concert. Yup, that’s right; he’s a rocker-yogi! Gotta love that!

Sunday afternoon – Valentine’s Day – we started the session with thoughts of a personalised practice, more questions and answers.

Having a yoga practice that is “mine”, and personalised to my body and needs is such an interesting concept. Especially when compared to the mass-market cookie-cutter approach of some of the stuff being sold as yoga out there.

I suspect that one of the reasons I was intimidated by yoga for a while there (many years ago now), is that I didn’t realise I could make it my own in this way, y’know? And then last year while doing yoga teacher training, I understood that on some level but still, no one ever said that explicitly and out loud!

But it makes so much sense! Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and with all levels of mobility. The idea that you need to be flexible or picture perfect, or doing advanced poses to do yoga, is false.

I mean, some people report that they look around a class and find their competitive nature flaring up. Which can cause an attitude of feeling less than other people, OR feeling superior. Both are out of balance. Or perhaps a person will push themselves beyond their current capabilities in competition with themselves, which can easily result in injury. And despite what Mr Choudry might say, competition is not yoga!

Mark spoke about the male/female imbalance prevalent in most yoga classes (and by extension, in our communities). There are so many women in yoga classes, but hardly any men! And how that has to change if we’re going to make positive changes in the world. Generally speaking, men need to work at being more open and receptive, and women need to acknowledge their own power. Yoga is very good at helping people regain their balance in these ways. The surrender of Strength Receiving is both internal (from our Self, to our Self), as well as to between our Self and other people in our day to day lives.

And now that I think about it, “surrender” is a big part of the experience of feeling anahata chakra cracking open. The only way to co-exist with that state is to surrender! Essentially, indifference is a disorder of the heart.

One of Mark’s key teachings is around intimacy – with your Self, your body, your breath and your mind. And coming to terms with this concept as a part of my experience of yoga was interesting. I mean, my entire family for generations on both sides have shown no skill with expressing intimacy. It’s a long held, DNA-deep pattern, so how do you get better at intimacy when your natural pattern is to not really let people in? The answer of course, is that you have to start with yourself. And you have to give it a red hot go!

In yoga there’s a bunch of ways to do this – asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha, dinacharya, food etc. Intimacy with the self involves developing a sensitivity and awareness internally and externally and is therefore, inherently physical and sensate.

True intimacy isn’t about getting naked – although there’s nothing wrong with that! Instead, it is a quality that allows us to see, feel, know and realise in a very tangible way that we are but one heart, one organism, interconnected even as we appear separate.

Intimacy really starts to make sense within the context of yoga, as you move through your practice and use the breath to stay completely aware, moment to moment. The trick is that to really understand that, you have to do your practice and keep doing it!

Then you can extend what you’ve learned about yourself to how you deal with others. At least that’s the theory I’m working with so far…

…The ancient wisdom of yoga teaches that Life is already given to you, you are completely loved, you are here now. It teaches that we are not separate, cannot be separate from nature, which sustains us in a vast interdependence with everything…

It is true that we don’t have to go anywhere, or seek anything outside of ourselves in order to realise we are one and the same as god. However, I do think that for many people this message is too simple to accept. I know that twenty years ago, perhaps even only ten years ago I would not have been okay with that. Sometimes I think it takes lots of searching in order to realise there’s nowhere to go…

[Read part 3]

~Svasti

P.S. Once again, all quotes are from Mark Whitwell – things he said, his book and/or his Facebook status updates.