We're super excited to bring you workshops inviting big questions + deep intention around how we live!
Part of ongoing events with:
find love in grief on the yoga mat + in your journal
For anyone who has lost someone or something or knows someone who has lost someone.
A workshop to meet yourself on the mat in an experience where you embody movement through yoga, followed by journaling (writing and/or drawing) and optional conversation.
CHOOSE 1 or attend both:
Tuesday May 21, 2019
Morning workshop: 10am - 1.15pm
Evening workshop: 6pm - 9.15pm
in Park Slope, Brooklyn NY
(near 7th Ave F/G train stop)
Cost: $35 general admission
REGISTRATION CLOSED
curious about the next one?
Get on our email list:
How we'll be together:
PRACTICING YOGA
Feel free to dedicate your yoga practice to someone, practice finding lightness and love in your grief, or just show up and see what happens. Our relationships to those people, animals, places, and sometimes even things we’ve lost and loved are complex, with intertwining emotions. Our bodies often hold these emotions and other information, sometimes in the form of tension or tightness, relaxation or looseness and so many other ways. What can you notice in your body? What would happen if you released some of that tension?
ALL are invited. No experience necessary. Give your body a chance to take care of you. That might mean crying, laughing, humming, breathing deeply, sitting in stillness, or moving in intuitive ways. There’s no right way to grieve. Everything we guide in this class will be a suggestion, an invitation for what you might focus on or how you might move. Ultimately, you know your body best.
JOURNALING
Together we’ll hold space after yoga practice for individual reflection. We will provide guiding questions for writing and drawing. In our practice of writing and drawing, our pens and markers act as an extension of our bodies helping us to process internally while releasing - and whether we find ourselves expressing what we have to let go of or what we hope to hold on to, there is no right way to journal.
CONVERSATION
We’ll have an open conversation, inviting people to share a highlight of their experience if they so choose. (Listening is participating, too.) It’s often illuminating to hear stories of others’ experiences - in them we might find resonance, difference and even patterns that acknowledge our humanness.
WHAT TO BRING
Logistically, wear clothes that are comfortable to move in, bring a water bottle and yoga mat (let us know ahead of time if you need to borrow a mat). We will supply paper and pens for journaling but if you have a favorite journal or pen, feel free to bring it.
MEET YOUR FACILITATORS
amanda lyons: "Goodmorning!"
Lyons is a yoga teacher, artist, experiential educator + visual facilitator finding and refinding the art of love and letting go.
She invites people to practice yoga their way - to bring along their grey hair and wrinkles (or whatever they're excited about or not so excited about) to their yoga mat. Yoga, for Lyons, is about showing up in a moment. One philosophy she lives by is honoring ALL types of bodies and learning from what's fabulously similar and curiously different. Society suggests we make these moments awkward - Lyons doesn't believe in awkward!
Spending time with yoga and other humans in order to explore ways to deal with those crazy feelings and sensations before, during and after endings of all kinds, including death, is top of mind lately. "All yoga for me is yoga before I die - whether my body feels flexible and strong or aches with pain, I'm in. Yoga helps me feel free and alive through breath and movement - movement which can be small or big.'
On the mat, Lyons has learned to listen for the silence between loud moments of chaos, to let tears flow, curiosity wander and watch sensations come and go, even smiling for seemingly no reason at times. Off the mat she find ways to facilitate creative exploration for others with workshops big and small, near and far that have been taken by neighbors, community groups, small and big and Fortune 500 companies alike. Lyons holds degrees in studio art & english as well as organization development and strategic human resources. Yada yada yada... (more via bio).
Let’s integrate yoga into our lives before we die to feel alive, laugh, love and follow our curiosity!
alex knowlden: "Hello there!"
Knowlden is a creative thinker, courageous listener, yoga teacher and soon to be psychotherapist who loves to volunteer her time serving people and animals in need of kindness.
"Where do we find safe places to grieve in western society? How does society treat grief? Is one's grieving process hindered by western society?"
Inspired by these questions, Knowlden is training as a Transpersonal Psychotherapist. She sought help with her own grief through talk therapy, yet through her non-conventional training, which uses body work and other techniques, she started to realize the power of the body and the breath.
"My training invited me to connect to my emotions through my body in seated stillness. I became aware of things, emotions and more. I could then deal with these things, even literally feeling a shift at times. Some emotions don't have words and just need to be felt. Practicing yoga is my way to encourage these stuck things or emotions to flow again. That's the crux of it. My body has the knowledge. My body knows my truth."
When Alex lost her Mum, she experienced the loss as a physical pain in her heart and for a time there were no words, just sensation. Whilst it can never be said that there is a right or a wrong way to grieve, Alex observed that finding this connection to her own grief in her body made it easier for her to articulate her grief in verbal expression. Through yoga, Alex was and is able to find and maintain a physical connection to her grief, her Mum, and her life.
Knowlden spends lots of time on the mat these days, sometimes practising yoga alone and sometimes (when feeling more brave) allowing herself to express grief on her mat amongst friends. She has felt the healing capacity of grieving in community - of having her grief witnessed, held, and acknowledged by others - and whoa, there was an incredible sense of honouring who or what had been lost!
With a degree in Sociology and many past lives (in fashion as an artist producer, in the kitchen as a chef, in other's lives as a personal assistant), Alex has a breadth of knowledge and curiosity for the social dynamic that draws you in.
We can’t wait to meet you on the mat!
In grief and love,
Amanda + Alex
SENSE. KNOW. IMAGINE. WONDER. QUESTION. CRY. LAUGH. ASK. CONNECT. LOVE. REFLECT.
Previously this workshop has been taught at Sacred Brooklyn Yoga Studio, during Reimagine NYC's weeklong event. SHOUT OUT to these awesome studios and organizations for having us! Y'all rock!
If you have space or a community that could use this workshop, reach out by sending us an email or the contact form below!