Category: Behind the Scenes

Nah, we’re not going to start offering “LSD & Yoga” classes at 8 Limbs, this isn’t that kind of April 1 email, but we do have our own take on Timothy Leary’s famous motto that we’re rolling with this month. Turn On In yoga, we are learning to turn on our awareness of habitual patterns of thought […]

Despite what many headlines imply, mindfulness doesn’t fix us. Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali term sati, to remember. It relates to a particular type of remembering, one that is compassionate, contactful and clear seeing. It calls us to drop beneath the stories we tell and look beyond conditioning that may have kept us […]

At the beginning of the month 8 Limbs owner Anne Phyfe Palmer opened her newsletter with two potent sentences – Money. It’s a sensitive topic! Behind the scenes at 8 Limbs, we’ve been diving into that sensitivity. In a recent admin meeting we reflected individually and as a group about our relationships with money. What and whom […]

Money. It’s a sensitive topic! But if you’ve been around 8 Limbs for very long, you’ll know that we are willing to put ourselves out there and inquire deeply through the lens of our Mission: a commitment to be supportive and welcoming place to learn and grow through the mind-body practices of yoga, and per our […]

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”  – Dalai Lama Whether we have an independent streak or not, each of us at our core is an interdependent being.  As Martin Luther King Jr. shared in a 1967 peace sermon, “Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on […]

“Yama,” the first limb of the eightfold path of yoga, is sometimes translated as “restraint.” (8 Limbs Owner/Director Anne Phyfe Palmer wrote about her relationship with Yama in her May and June blogs.) This first limb essentially shares what skillful restraint looks like in practice. And by practice in this context, I mean life – […]

I first learned of the acronym W.A.I.T. (Why Am I Talking?) from 8 Limbs Yoga Teacher Sally Carley. When she shared it’s meaning I laughed and paused. It’s a question most of us could benefit from pondering more often than we do. Why do we say the things we do? Why do we feel compelled […]

“Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Vicktor Frankl* Last month I wrote about sitting with discomfort. Earlier this month 8 Limbs Director Anne Phyfe Palmer wrote about taking space. Today I want to talk about a […]

In a letter that went out earlier this month, we said a lot of things. I’m going to focus on one of those things, a single sentence near the end – “Discomfort is not unsafe.” It’s a line I’ve been actively sitting with because it’s a statement I can experience as true and untrue. Discomfort […]

Dear Community, We are writing to address, or perhaps bring your awareness to, an incident that continues to reverberate through many hearts and minds within the Northwest yoga community. On February 22 at the Northwest Yoga Conference (NWYC), a problematic interaction transpired involving an Indian woman and a white woman who also happens to be […]