Life . Yoga . Coach

09/17/2026

How you approach longevity matters 🙏🏻💗☀️

For most of its history, luxury travel meant exclusivity. It promised access to remarkable places, superb accommodation, and services that most people

08/31/2026

Svadhyaya, the practice of self study 🙏🏻💗☀️

As we close out August and our month of STUDY, we take a moment to reflect.

Svadhyaya, one of the five Niyamas, invites us into the practice of self-study, to observe ourselves with curiosity, honesty, and compassion.

And each of the Eight Limbs offers us another way to learn: through our relationships, our choices, our bodies, our breath, our attention, and our capacity to be present.

So before we move into a new month, take a little time to look back. What did you notice? What shifted? What challenged you? What did your practice reveal?

Let us know how the STUDY calendar went for you in the comments. 📚️

08/14/2026

ATTENTION 🙏🏻💗☀️❣️

Attention is the most powerful thing we have.

Where we place our attention shapes our lives.

When we bring fresh attention to the body, we awaken.

When we bring attention to our family, our feet, our breath, our walking, and this moment, we begin to live more fully.

Our lives become what we practice paying attention to.

What can you pay more attention to today? Let me know in the comments 👇

Jai!

07/30/2026

Self Care IS crucial to aid in Mental Wellness 🙏🏻💗☀️

A few years before she and her six children were tragically killed inside their Grand Haven-area home, Amanda "Mandy" Karolkiewicz had written a children's book about learning to see the good in oneself.

07/18/2026

Sympathetic vs parasympathetic 🙏🏻💗☀️

07/08/2026

Sacred Spaces 🙏🏻💗☀️

07/06/2026

Become focused while repeating Mantra and Mudra together 🙏🏻💗☀️

When your mind feels scattered, mantra gives it a place for your attention to settle.

Sā tā nā mā is a mantra often used in Kundalini Yoga and meditation to focus the mind through sound, rhythm, repetition, and touch.

Each syllable points to a phase in the cycle of creation:

Sā: infinity, or the beginning
Tā: life, existence, creativity
Nā: death, change, transformation
Mā: rebirth

Together, the mantra becomes a way to meditate on the natural rhythm of life: beginning, living, changing, and beginning again.

In practice, each syllable is paired with a finger-tapping mudra sequence: thumb to index, middle, ring, and pinky. This gives the mantra a physical rhythm, offering the mind something simple and tactile to follow when thoughts feel busy or hard to settle.

Try it now: chant it out loud, whisper it softly, or repeat it internally.

For a guided practice, join Sue Elkind for “Mantra Meditation for Clarity” on Yoga International.

Link to: https://yogainternational.com/meditation/mantra-meditation-for-clarity/

06/16/2026

Return to Self🙏🏻💗☀️

A Gentle Return to Self

If you are unhappy,

begin with yourself.

Not as a problem to solve, but as a garden that may have gone untended.

Offer it water, rest, sunlight.

Sometimes sorrow is simply exhaustion asking for care.

If you are restless,

begin with the hands.

Plant something.
Mend something.
Create something.

What cannot be solved by thought sometimes softens through the act of creating.

If you are lonely,

begin with connection.

A message.
A conversation.
A shared silence.

The heart rarely asks for much more than presence.

And if you do not know where to begin,

begin anywhere.

A meal.
A walk.
A page.
A call.

Life rarely changes all at once.

It turns quietly on small, faithful acts

until one day,

almost without noticing,

what felt like surviving

has become

living again.

~ 'A Gentle Return to Self' by Spirit of a Hippie

✍️ Mary Anne Byrne

~ Art by Drawsy Minimal

06/15/2026

Cultivate your thoughts 🙏🏻💗☀️

In the ‘Yoga Sūtra, Patanjali offers a practice called pratipakṣa-bhāvanā: cultivating the opposite thought.

When the mind moves into a familiar pattern, pratipakṣa-bhāvanā offers a compassionate next step: notice the thought, then cultivate the quality that can meet it.

Instead, it invites a gentle redirection.
Comparison can become contentment.
Criticism can become compassion.
Control can become trust.
Rushing can become presence.
Reactivity can become reflection.

This is one way yoga “inverts” ordinary life. Not by asking us to deny what we feel or force positivity, but by helping us consciously orient the mind toward what frees us.

Try it now:
Notice one pattern that’s been active for you today.
Name it simply.
Then ask: What quality would help turn my mind in another direction?

Let that quality become the practice.
Breathe with it.
Feel where it lands in your body.
Return to it as often as you need.

Save this as a simple practice for the next time your thoughts need a new direction.

Then read Georg Feuerstein’s full article, “Cultivating the Opposite Thought.”
https://yogainternational.com/article/view/cultivating-the-opposite-thought-the-most-challenging-inversion-in-your-pra/

06/11/2026

Cultivate Gratitude

6/11/26

Atlas of the Heart ~ Brené Brown

In her book, she writes, there is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically emotionally, and mentally there’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility, and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decrease blood pressure the list goes on. The research is persuasive, and I’ve read countless articles and books on gratitude, but I still struggle to understand exactly why it helps so much until I read this by Robert Emmons. Robert is the world‘s leading scientific expert on gratitude.

“Research and motion shows that positive emotions were off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long the new car, the new spouse, the new house – they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore.

But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted.

In fact, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things-movies, computer screens, sports – but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.”