Category: Musings

This spring has been miraculous. The trees and flowers are literally exploding with fluffy scent-bombs! Many of us have been able to get out more, spreading our wings as the world opens up bit by bit. This change comes with challenges. There is still risk, a great deal of unknown, and the fact that we […]

Why We Can’t Talk About One Without Including the Other For the past 15 years I have been training yoga teachers, clinicians and other direct service providers to be “trauma informed.” This starts with educating people on the impact of unresolved trauma on individuals and communities.  This lens can help us understand why our students […]

Back in 2014 I decided to finally travel to India, the primary source of yogic teachings, to spend ten days meditating in a shrine to Sri Vidya, the Tantric lineage of my teachers. Sri means “most auspicious, beautiful, joyful”; vidya means “knowledge.” I didn’t really know at the time why exactly I was going, how I’d get there, […]

Attention. It’s a valuable resource. When we pay attention we are stretching toward the object of our attention. Whatever we pay attention to, be it an ideology, a social media post, or a person, we are spending (thus the term pay!) that resource. And as many of us have discovered, our modern lifestyles – often […]

Our senses – they are our link to the world outside of ourselves. They guide us, and they distract us. They lead us to what we like, and turn us from what we don’t. They keep us alive, and can also do quite the opposite. We continue our journey through the eight limbs of yoga […]

Ouch! We’ve all said it. We’ve all felt it. Hurting is part of being human. But that doesn’t mean any of us like it; in fact, we often do everything we can to avoid pain. It’s hardwired, part of our survival programming. But avoiding pain, or avoiding feeling or examining it, can cause more harm, to […]

I don’t know about you all, but in the summer I find it a bit tough to practice daily. I love to meditate in the early morning — in the dark, before the world wakes up — and that gets tough when the sun rises before 6am. The birds start earlier, the traffic noises start […]

Last month I wrote about how the concept of heat shows up in yoga philosophy. This month, let’s balance that with a little FUN! It’s summer in Seattle, for Pete’s sake, time to let it hang out! We have a few ideas for you, of course… FREE YOGA AT THE SCULPTURE PARK Once again 8 Limbs was […]

Since 2000, 8 Limbs has been a host of what we call “Visiting Teacher” workshops. Teachers who have expertise and knowledge that we believe will benefit our community are invited to “visit” from outside our studio (and usually outside our state). We have had the honor to host internationally known teachers such as Sarah Powers, […]

Stress. It’s having a moment. Stress is a word we use to describe an experience, or a feeling, of being strained or tense due to difficult or demanding circumstances. It may come from the French word estresse, which means narrowness or oppression. What I’d like us to consider is what stress actually feels like, when we […]