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

Losing, letting go and surrender

Tags

Anger, Awareness, Emotions, Enlightenment, Lost things, Meditation, Road rage, Sadhakas, Spirituality, Surrender

The yogic spiritual path is really no different in a lot of ways to those on any other path. Stuff still happens, life goes on. Its the orientation to what happens and how you meet those things that is the difference.

People are prone to saying: “Oh, but you meditate. You should be so calm, never angry”. Well get this people – that state of calm that everyone imagines all people who meditate should have… isn’t that simple! That “everything’s zen” persona many people like to portray is usually bogus. Unless its not, in rare cases.

When I first jumped on this path some time ago now, I had this idea that having that floaty, happy calm feeling was the goal. That if I can induce that state (easy when around some of the great masters), then I was on the way. 😉

But guess what? This state, this sattvic (balanced) way of being can only be stablised 24/7 after a great deal of journeying – in some cases a life time. But always at least a good 10-20 years worth of practice for most people.

In the mean time, those moments where we experience that state (or something we imagine is that state) are precious and inspire us onwards. But then life gets in the way and we’re back at square 1!!

Not to mention, that sadhakas (spiritual practitioners) can and do undergo depression, sadness, anger and every other human emotion – in the process of purifying their karmas. However, the practices learned are meant to be applied to these states so that each time you do find yourself at square 1, its really not quite the same place. Instead of simply being reactive, there’s a process in place.

Remember this – its the birthright of every human being to eventually achieve enlightenment, even if its not in this lifetime.

And now to discuss “losing, letting go and surrender”. Yes I seem to lose a lot of stuff. My lunch – going from the bakery to my car. $15 in change whilst at a cafe. A button off a new top, a day after I thought I’d lost a button but really hadn’t. A prize of 4 movie tickets that I was awarded at my last job (whilst still in the building), between where the party was held and walking back to my desk. All crazy stuff right?

Over the years I’ve lost quite a few things I’ve had attachment to – great relationships, friends, pieces I jewelery I adored. And I have driven myself nuts fretting over those losses.

Then there’s my recent loss of pretty much everything that represented the “form” of my life. Those material things we all identify with. Kinda different to losing ‘stuff’ but not completely.

Right now as always, my spiritual path seems to be addressing this. Sometimes we just have to learn to relax and let go – surrender. Actually, its a little bit more like “struggle, struggle… surrender”.

OK, so I lost stuff I thought was important, I cared about or just bought/received. Each time I lose stuff now I’m noting my carelessness and how this could have been different if I’d had more considered awareness. And then I let go.

I still wish I hadn’t lost the stuff. But I’m saving myself from going crazy. And in three cases the ‘lost’ stuff I mentioned did eventually turned up. Like my lunch (down a space in my car), my button (inside the front door of my house – how lucky is that?) and my movie ticket prize (honest co-workers). But instead of spending the day thinking about what I’ve lost and draining my energy that way, I’ve thought about the pattern of what has happened. And that if stuff is meant to turn up, it will.

What can I say? It makes my day less stressful. And it makes me more aware of the little actions I take or don’t take.

Then there’s the common experience of struggling with traffic. We all do it. Get impatient, swear, shout, give dirty looks to someone we think is an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed on the road. Hmmm.

I started to notice the more I struggled with traffic, the more I was annoyed or tried to get around someone, the more strung out I was. Now I’m talking a pattern of days, weeks, months. I noticed that whenever I didn’t hold a vested interest in how fast the traffic was moving, things flowed better. Moment-to-moment stress about traffic is counter-productive and takes you away from what is – here I am in a car in traffic. OK. So its still something I have to work at but such a relief when I do just… relax…

Awareness, after all, is not just about meditation. Its about every darn thing in this world.

~Svasti