Yoga to Awaken the Spirit Within

In the end, the longest and most important relationship any of us will ever have is with ourselves. Seeking ways to prioritize your health is crucial and even more important now. We lead increasingly busy lives and it can be easy to put yourself on the back burner. The saying is old, but rings true now than ever before: “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” When you look after yourself, the better you will feel, and the better you will be in all areas of your life. When you continuously fill your cup up, your cup will naturally overflow onto others around you and other key areas of your life, bringing more love, grace, and compassion into your life and around the world.

What better way to fill your cup back up than by beginning your day in a mindful way? Get your body moving, but equally taking the time to be quiet and still. A powerful way to do this is with a yoga practice, which can have profound effects on your mind, body, and soul. Starting your day off with healthy choices, like yoga, will get your blood moving and your mind more aware, which will help you feel your best.

As you connect with the body through yoga, you can connect to your senses. When you connect with your senses, you begin to wake up, literally and figuratively. Yoga is a profound discipline to support the body in becoming the most finely tuned and effective vehicle in which to experience what it is to be an awakened human being and achieve your greatest potential.

Releasing Energy Blocks Through a Yoga Flow

The building blocks of yoga include asanas, sometimes referred to as poses or postures, each of which enhance your strength, mobility, and breathing quality, particularly as you connect the asanas to create a flow. As you move through a flow and hold these different asanas, you transfer focus and attention to the body and breath. This not only helps to relieve physical tension, but also allows you to calm yourself down, especially before a busy day ahead.

Yoga asanas are effective for lubricating the major joint areas in the body, as well as for stretching, strengthening, and toning the major muscle groups so that your movement can be more fluid and stable. These asanas integrated through a yoga flow can generate powerful feelings. They were created to help you move through and release any energy blocks in your mind and body, places where stress or life experience has caused you to potentially tense up and armor yourself.

We Are Always Present, But the Question Is How?

In the yoga practice, pranayama or breathwork, in addition to asanas, is used to take your awareness into the realms within the space of your own body, mind, and spirit. Breathwork is an incredible tool to help soothe your way into a new day, by training you in letting go. Nothing is permanent—including your breath. Your breath is always changing; it’s always flowing, same with your thoughts. You can observe through your breath that your thoughts are coming and going as well. There are not there to stay. By focusing more on your breath, you can develop your mind, training it to be able to stay present to the impermanence of life. This can help you to feel more relaxed, more centered, more patient, and more compassionate going into your day.

However, now more than ever there are so many distractions throughout the day that too often pull our focus from the present moment. Fortunately, the breathing aspect of yoga helps to strengthen your mind, improving overall concentration and focus, in order to tackle these distractions and create a sense of mindfulness that permeates your entire body.

Keeping the Flow Alive Throughout the Day

Remember, you are the ultimate priority. Move your body, relax your mind, and continue to be empowered to feel your best. Dedicating yourself to the practice of yoga can extend to all areas beyond your mat. Yoga is a means of filling your cup back up, with self-care and self-love, with energizing the body, with calming the mind, and giving you the strength to take on your day. We all need to remember to take the time to unwind, to nourish ourselves, and to experience gratitude for the present moment that we are gifted with.

In the yoga tradition, the mind is said to begin in the heart. By dropping into the mind of your heart, you can move through your yoga flow with intent and utter clarity. From there, you can move into a still place where nothing else exists, possibly catching a glimpse of what true inner peace feels like.

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About the Author

You can find Katie teaching at Yoga Among Friends:

• Vinyasa Flow Mondays 8–9 am

• Vinyasa Flow
  Fridays 7–8 am.

Both classes are offered in-studio and virtually on Zoom. 

Katie Sayad discovered yoga in her early teenage years. With a background in dance, she was initially drawn to yoga for its discipline, movement, and overall grace. She grew more in love with the art of yoga through the years not only because she saw the physical benefits, but also because she realized how yoga had a profound impact on her emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. Yoga has gracefully grown into becoming a vital source of bringing more consciousness and compassion to Katie’s way of being.

She has studied, and continues to study from, various styles of yoga from yoga masters and teachers through the years. As a result, she has absorbed in the wisdom and art of these different approaches to yoga and has blended it into her own unique vinyasa flow style. Katie earned her 200-hour Yoga Teacher Certification from Yogaview in Wilmette, IL. She continues yoga as both a student and a teacher, where her love for the practice grows with each time on the mat.

Katie is also a certified Holistic Health & Wellness Coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Her mission is to continue to help improve the overall well-being of others by cleansing the body and mind for a powerful reset through nutrition and lifestyle changes. This approach is to help those uncover their healthiest, most authentic selves and propel them forward on a more clutter-free, conscious, and compassionate path. Katie shares and brings this light to others on (and off!) the mat.

You can learn more about Katie and her work at www.katiesayad.com. 

Michael Taylor, A Guiding Force Behind YAF

There are some people who come into your life for a moment and others for a lifetime. Some people come into your life and change your life forever. We seldom ever know that our lives are just a sequence of choices that forever move us in a direction for our highest good. I always remind myself to hold the future loosely but to honor the intention of an inner guide that is directing me if I only listen. I am forever grateful for listening to my heart when I met my dearest friend and fellow yoga teacher, Michael Taylor.

There is a quality to this “knowing” that is often ignored unless one can trust the experience of what I refer to as my “Truth Meter”. This inner GPS, which has been my best friend, arises as a visceral experience when my entire body is embodied with goosebumps. Some people call them angel bumps. When this happens, I have no choice except to surrender and welcome the mystery that something greater is arising in my soul.

Life is just a series of these remarkable moments guiding us as we journey through life. The effort is in trusting the inner voice. This takes a willingness to know the difference between the striving to get something and the surrounding into letting go of the outcome. 

J. Michael Taylor

This April marks the beginning of a new path without our beloved Michael. In 1995, I had the great pleasure of meeting Michael and Doris, his wife, when I had just arrived from CA without any idea of where to begin my teachings.

I had been a yoga teacher in LA for many years but came out here to find a wasteland of healing arts. I first began my teachings by offering yoga classes in a small chiropractic office in Lisle. From there, I rented space on Main Street in Downers Grove in what was an Hapkito Academy. I will forever be grateful for those moments of faith and the early friendships that inspired the seeds for YAF.

When I met Doris, she quickly shared that her husband was a yoga teacher as well. Michael then came to my classes and over the next couple of years, a valuable friendship was established. And when I wanted to open up a studio in 1997, Michael was on board. From the moment I signed that lease, I knew I had a loyal and trusted friend to share the adventure with. The bond that developed over the years is filled with unspoken love and gratitude. He has been the steady rock of this studio. I often think of him as my “yoga husband”.

Yes, nothing is ever done alone. His amazing humor, dedication, and incredible gifts as a teacher have been a guiding force behind our community. Sometimes we just know that destiny is playing her hand and we just need to respond. Yoga Among Friends has been that siren call from the soul. Sometimes, the truth meter sounds the bell that resonates for a lifetime.  

Today as we renew our intention, I want us to hold the space of vigil for his complete health to be restored. As we move into our next year, Michael will be on a huge spiritual and physical pilgrimage of his own as he undergoes his bone marrow transplant for a rare blood disorder. His yoga practice is a testament to his overall well-being, and we commit to keeping our studio active and vibrant as he takes the months away to nourish his new immune system. We are family, and as we take our next spin around the sun, let us continue to commit to our practice of mind and body through the yogic tools.

I am so grateful for all our teachers who serve in sharing these much-needed practices. Keep supporting our studio so we can continue to meet within our space for that essential hug. Let us also continue to chant for the world while we send courage and love to Michael and Doris.  

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
The beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening.
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

—JOHN O’DONOHUE

Blessings of the heart,

Laura Jane

“Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti" for the World

Exhaling, taking a moment to actually allow my heart to break open.

I am willing at this moment to cultivate the awareness of some small spark of light, a light in my soul for being absorbed in the quality of ease. This inner peaceful experience arises from my practice to go inward and breathe into my life force. I can remember that humanity is kindness and compassion even as my eyes and ears witness war raging right now in Ukraine.

War is such a disconnect from the essence of our true nature. We are living in the shadow of ourselves, and how painful it is to be living the horrors of turmoil caused by this aggressive display of false power. So many families are uprooted; so many people are fleeing the only home they know to escape the violence of war.

The heaviness of the situation is being lived in our own neighborhoods. We are all connected as one global humanity. People are dying, and we are all suffering. This battle being fought on Ukrainian soil is also being waged internally.

The teachings of yoga from the wisdom of the Mahabharata, in the Bhagavad Gita, illustrate the struggle and suffering caused by our own internal battle. The moral dilemma and despair about the violence and death against one’s own family. Today the landscape of Russia and Ukraine is this exact picture of the story of the Gita. Families have to take a side and fight their own kin, many with relatives living and existing in both lands. Just a week ago, most were living peacefully in these two nations, and they now are having to make the cruel choice of harming their own kin. The pain of this extends around the world.

The text offers tools for us to look into our inner landscape and acknowledge our own struggle with the opposites. To witness the battle between our identity and our soul. How can I maintain a quality of peace as the world is raging? The mind is seeking balance but it takes a willingness to come inward. How can we cultivate stillness and harmony when the outer world is spinning? I ask myself what is the right action now?

One tool is chanting. “Om shanti, shanti, shanti.” When chanting, sound becomes light, the light becomes space, and within this space, there is the possibility for the heart to open. The quality of peace is within us. The ripple moves out into the world and our presence can heal.

We chant shanti three times. Shanti is the vibration to bring about the ease of 3 different types of problems. First, adhidaivika are the problems that arise from the forces over which we have no control as in natural disasters from mother nature. The second problem, adhibhautika, arises from beings around us as in war or abuse of any kind. The third problem, adhyatmka, is caused by factors centered on ourselves such as our own worries, fears, and doubts. The mantra helps us to still the roaming mind and allow for freedom from agitation from these disturbances.

Chant “Shanti” three times. It is always done in threes. Each time becoming deeper. The first time for purifying the body, the second time for the mind, and the third time for the heightened spiritual experience of touching the soul of humanity. To chant is to pray for the peace of all beings in the world.

Let us all come together and use the mantra as an opportunity to practice our own peaceful ceasefire. As we can still the mind, we begin to move into the next right action. Here are a few organizations that I have researched that are providing ways to help:

• Ukraine’s Voices of Children Foundation & Longwood Care combine efforts to support children and families affected by the war with GoFundMe.

• Save the Children is raising money for the Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund. Save the Children has been operating in Ukraine since 2014, including in the conflict-impacted regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Currently, teams are working with Ukrainian migrants and asylum seekers in refugee camps in north-eastern Romania and assessing needs in Poland and Hungary. 7.5 million Ukrainian children and families are in mortal danger.

• CARE is raising money for its Ukraine Crisis Fund, which is aiming to reach 4 million with immediate aid and recovery, food, water, hygiene kits, psychosocial support, and cash assistance — prioritizing women and girls, families, and the elderly.

Please comment below if you know of other ways to help.

In love and light,

Laura Jane