If only wishing could make it so, this yearning of a few for so many countless generations. I will be examining, for the new year, what I can do to diminish conflict in my own life–because that I can do.
Dear Friends,
If your inbox and your schedule has been anything like mine, you don’t need another email to read during this busy season, so I’m keeping it short.
Last gentle/therapeutic class of this session at Willow Street is Friday, December 14th. Make-ups and drop-ins, friends and family, warmly welcomed. We’ll do some strengthening and stretching and then stretch out into a series of restorative poses to honor the Willow Street tradition and to get ready for the holidays.
No William Penn House classes on either Christmas Day or New Year’s Day. Classes run through December 18th and start again on January 8th. As always, please don’t let means keep you away. The already favorable pricing for the class, with a portion of the proceeds from each student going to benefit the work of William Penn House, is just a suggested amount. The more the merrier.
Classes start again with me at all locations Wednesday, January 2nd. I’ll be offering the Friday night gentle/therapeutics again at Willow Street. First class of the year is January 4th as part of Willow Street’s new $5 preview class week. To buy your $5 passes on-line and to check out the whole preview week schedule, please visit the Willow Street website. Registration for the Winter/Spring session is now open for the Friday night class; the first night of the Winter/Spring session is January 11th.
Wishing you the best of holidays–may they be full of both joyous connection and sweet time for yourself. I look forward to seeing many of you in the New Year. If the outrageous pulsation and dance of being–whether challenging or fulfilling or both–is keeping you from class, do send me a line and be in touch.
Peace and light,
Elizabeth
I was contemplating today the Anusara yoga principle of “opening to grace,” one aspect of which I always understood to be seeking to pause and listen in and from a place of luminous spaciousness before acting or responding to what one does or encounters. Ideally, the intentional practice of yoga opens the possibility of doing all this simultaneously and immediately, but most of us need to reduce the speed at which we approach or take in things if we are to experience and engage the fullest and most nuanced relationship with the wild extraordinariness of what is in and around us.
If we move too quickly or push effortfully or immoderately past our limitations, we are at risk, as I have recently reminded myself in a rather clumsy way. When through our own actions or happenstance we are pushed past our healthy capacity, it is time to slow down, to pause, to reflect, to reinvite and reexplore the basics and seek a deeper level of understanding and capability if we are to expand our capacity to live with grace.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
What does it mean to be at home? To feel at home? Inside your body? Your embodied self in the world? In the place you name “home?”
Earlier in the day I took leave and walked over to the Capitol to bear witness.
