The Forrest Experience: Two

Saturday February 2nd: Forrest Yoga 10-12 @ Root Yoga. The follow-up to experience number one.

As I said in post one about meditation and spirituality, it's all still pretty new to me. In class yesterday Cheryl wanted to start with a few minutes of meditation. I wasn't scared or threatened by this, but I also didn't know what it really meant. "As you sit tall in your sit and close your eyes, I just want you to be with whatever thoughts come into your mind. Try and avoid labeling those thoughts with 'good,' 'bad,' or anything like that, just start to notice what appears." Cool, I can do that.

As I sat there on my block listening to my thoughts, the first thing I started to do was judge them. I got frustrated for a brief moment, and then realized what I was doing, stopped, and just let them be what they were, whether I was labeling them negative or postitive. I just said, "that's ok." After a few minutes of silence, Cheryl begins speaking. "Yoga is sacred movement." It was those words that made me know class was going to be awesome.

"Yoga is sacred movement."

The theme around sacred movement: Befriending Your Body.

Cheryl has a way of speaking that has an incredibly calming affect, and to be honest, I wasn't quite sure what her theme meant until the end of class and we were in head to ankle pose. But I'll get to that later. My first thought when listening to what we were going to do to befriend our bodies was that it brought me back to the very beginning of Ana Forrest's Book Fierce Medicine, which I have written about before. In that first section she advices you feel what's happening in your body instead of feeling wrong about it, like we are cultured to feel. So in class, whatever came up for me through my asana practice I decided none of it was wrong. All the bullshit that we deal with in our every day lives with friends, lovers, school, work, whatever, starts to store in our bodies and makes it a hell of a lot harder to deal with later if we allow it to build. So I made the conscious decision to start clearing out all the stuff that was weighing me down. First step, along with being open, was to not feel wrong for my emotions.

Yoga does a lot for our bodies. It clears the mind of emotional junk, opens up space for something new, and physically rids the body of pain and suffering. Cheryl made a clear distinction in class that for me, helped me understand how to connect mind body and spirit. She said, "Yoga is different from exercise in the way that it connects with the mind, which is very different from the brain." That distinction is what cleared up the link between mind and body for me.

So back to yoga as sacred movement and befriending the body. Two very grounding concepts. As class was themed in the beginning, I wasn't sure how this was going to be accomplished, because I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. Cheryl cued the breath a lot throughout class as a way to befriend the body, but it wasn't until head to ankle pose that it made sense. Obviously I know how to breathe and get deep into poses, but it was more than that. It took a challenging and frustrating pose for me to realize that there was a lot of stuff I was holding on to. That pose was a direct reflection of what was going on in my personal life with my break up. I had been dumped and left in great confusion and heart ache. I've spent a lot of time being angry and frustrated with the situation, and even MORE time trying to figure out why. That is head to ankle pose for me. So I'm in this pose, and Cheryl says, "let your breathe facilitate communication with your body." Communication... that word was so strong. Communicate between your thoughts and your asana. I stopped struggling through the pose and I softened my mind, strengthened my breathe, and not only did the pose stop being frustrating, but I released a lot of anger that I had brought in off the mat. Essentially, I surrendered.

So I have decided that that will be my theme from here on out...

Surrender.

The moment you can surrender to what is happening in your mind, your practice, and in your life, you can start the let go and create space for something not only new, but serving.

At this point I have decided to be free of my last relationship, made a conscious decision to heal, and move forward with all the good things I have set out to do in my life.

Yoga helps me stay connected with what is present and true in my life, and Forrest Yoga gives me the tools to do that. I have a good friend, Brit, who is recently into Kriya Yoga and meditation and so it's something I am going to incorporate into my life... for the first time ever.

The Forrest Experience: One

Saturdays have started to look really similar week after week, not in the boring routine kind of way, but in the most interactive way a Saturday could be. I wake up, make my coffee, eat my protein pancakes (yum), and prepare for Forrest Yoga with Cheryl Deer from 10-12. They call it Yogi Playground. Sometimes if I am feeling ambitious I will take Lucinda's 8am at Core Power Yoga beforehand... on a good day. This past Saturday was an especially good yoga day. I'm trying to think back to my mood before I went into class and I cannot for the life of me remember how I was feeling. Your mindset always effects the quality of your practice. That is the very reason why I enjoy Forrest Yoga so much. The healing qualities of Forrest allow for an easy change to your mindset. To be completely honest about what is currently happening in my life, I recently lost somebody that I really cared about. You guessed it, a break up. When two people break up, a lot of negative emotions typically arise. Self-doubt, fear, sadness, shame, what have you. In this particular situation however, it has given me a lot of  strength to see my own true nature, and the true nature of other people. What I will put up with, what I won't, and the complete understanding that healing is a choice.


If you are somebody working on personal growth, or making the conscious decision to heal, the first step is to be open. Cheryl's class taught me so much about myself that I didn't know was possible. I have always rejected meditation as a way to connect with the mind, because I always just said, "it's not for me." Well, that actually doesn't make any sense. Meditation is available to everybody, if you want it. We started the practice last saturday with pranayama, breathing. It was a style of pranayama I had never done before. It's called bhramari breathing, or the humming yoga breath. The physical purpose of bhramari breathing is to reduce stress or fight/flight response. In the spiritual sense it clears the chakras in order to return to a balanced state. The word Bhramari comes from the sanskrit word bhramar or Humming Black Bee. Starting at the crown chakra, close your eyes, sip in air to the top, and then hum as you exhale. As you breathe in this exercise, focus your breathe to each chakra all the way down to your root chakra. It's a really calming pranayama and set the mood perfectly for class.

Last week Cheryl themed about connecting with spirit. As we breathe through our asana practice, and clear our energy, the more we can visualize our spirit and create wholeness. Let me just start by saying that spirituality is new to me. I say that because it is always something that has been there, but never really resonated with me... I am now understanding that it's because I haven't found something to resonate with. I grew up Episcopalian and went to church every week, and although it's something that my parents have chosen for themselves, it's not something that I have ever truly connected with. There is no bad or good in that, it's just personal. I have taken many Forrest classes with Cheryl, but this first introduction to connecting with spirit is what jumpstarted my own transformation to personal growth. I left that two hour class with this sense of deeper understanding for myself...almost like I really knew who I was and what I wanted/needed in life. I by no means think I am enlightened, but by allowing myself to be open to this new method, I can now work towards feeling whole and grounded. I can't take this blog post home yet and have it make sense to how I'm dealing with this break up until I write post number 2 of The Forrest Experience...being written....now.