Yoga with Melissa

Taking a Break

This video is going to explain a little bit more about the break that Tim and I are going to be taking from YouTube as well as what to expect in August of 2019.

The launch of short 10 minute breathing videos on the Yoga with Melissa channel have been incredibly successful and transformational, both in my life and yours. I want to talk a little bit about how this has impacted myself and my breathing buddy over the last month and say a little bit about the plan with these short breathing videos.

In July we also started the Attention Economy series which are yoga classes for overwhelm and anxiety in the attention economy. Your response to these classes have also been incredibly positive. Thank you, I am so glad you are enjoying them so far. I feel completely in my element in cultural studies and communications here and it feels so good to bring my expertise here to the yoga classroom.

Our members will be focusing on the five koshas and a beautiful series of videos that I filmed in the summer on a dock a number of years ago now. The five koshas are kind of like nesting Russian dolls, rather they are not separate, but interconnected. The outermost layer is the anomaya kosha or body of food, our physical body. Surrounding the physical sheath, interpenetrating it, transcending it are the three layers of the subtle body: Pranamaya Kosha (the vital energy sheath), manamaya kosha (mental sheath) and the vijnana kosha (or vital energy sheath). Deeper than all of these is the ananda maya kosha - the bliss sheath. This is our deepest Self, our True Nature, our Buddha Nature.

This month, if you would still like to explore something similar to the koshas but are not a member, you can do the Listening with Your Whole Body Series in August. It is a 7 class series with classes on listening with your breath, listening with your body, listening with your emotions, listening with your mind, listening with your spirit, listening to the life connections and then a review of the series

Membership: Click Here

Listening with Your Whole Body Series 

Breathing Videos

 

Hatha Yoga

This hatha yoga class with balancing flows and probably more joy than you realized was possible with yoga blocks is going to be the most fun you had all week, plus it will help develop unwavering focus. The yoga sequences will develop strength in your glute meds and glute max. This hatha yoga class is chocked full of stability and mobility movements for your shoulders and hips using the yoga block.

I have to give props to Jenni Rawlings @jenni_rawlings (on instagram) for her inspiration with the blocks, she loves to refer to her passion for block work as evil block work.

Also my friend Laura Goellner from Laura G. Yoga and @lauragyoga on instagram for the amazing half moon balancing sequence.

Check out Karen Copeland (a fellow Canadian, YAY!) @pilatesplaceyyc (on instagram), because she majorly inspired my cat pose variations this week.

Check our the amazing @caitlincasella Caitlin Casella on instagram for lots of great ideas too. I kind of ran out of room in this class to integrate some of the ideas of hers that I was going to use, but I still want to shout her out.

In this class I give a one minute dharma talk at the beginning about information overload in the attention economy and the premise that this causes our attention to diminish.

We live in a time that you can access any piece of information and contact anyone you like. We have instantaneous information and connection. When we live in an information abundant society we are trained for attention scarcity.

However, I would like to challenge that premise today.

Many of us have been practicing yoga and meditation for decades.

We may be trained for scarcity and poverty of attention in the attention economy with excess information, but the converse is true, when we practice yoga and meditation we are have continually been trained in developing our capacity for awareness, interoception, and to stay for awhile, to have deliberate absorption and immersion in a sustained activity for a prolonged period of time.

In this yoga class we will continue to develop our capacity for awareness in an economy that suffers from lack of attention. We will do this by focusing on our breath in long holds and balancing postures.

As practitioners of yoga and meditation, we have an abundance of awareness, focus and concentration from our practice of yoga and meditation and the dominant thinking in the attention economy is just another way that we are fed the deceit of scarcity and poverty in the age of information overwhelm.

Lower Belly Breathing

This breathing exercise for your lower belly to relieve anxiety will be preceded by a short yoga pose to release your low back. We will check in and notice how a yoga pose helps us to open up our lower belly. This week we will also focus on breathing towards the back of our lower belly a bit more.

Diaphragmatic breathing has been shown to help with back pain. For anxiety it can relieve tension, restlessness and nervousness.

We are going to do this breath lying down on our backs with our knees bent and feet flat on the floor. This will allow you to relax your belly for more ease of breath.

I am going to recommend that you do this breath practice everyday for the 10 minutes that we will practice it together.

Keep practicing with your friend and do this video with your breathing exercise friend until the part 4 comes out. Be sure to subscribe and press the bell so that you get the next video. Practice together and share with them what you notice about doing this breath practice. If you are a member, we are having a supportive forum with lively discussion about our breath practices in our membership community.

Members Practice This Video to Release Your Low Back this Week:

Member Lower Back Only 0 - 14 mins 

 

Yin Yoga

This Yin Yoga Class from the Attention Economy Series focuses on Intention and our Human Goals vs. the goals that technology and the social media platforms have for us. Intention setting in yin yoga aligns well with your gallbladder meridian which runs along your side body. Your gallbladder is responsible for decision making, judgment and courage. Your gallbladder is seen as a pivot organ and helps you with new beginnings and new stages in your life. It is about taking appropriate action based on the circumstances of your life.

It may seem that the technology we use from our laptops to smartphones to the social media platforms and software on them have come into our lives to fulfill all of our needs and desires. After all they are allowing us to connect right now. Maybe you are watching this yoga class on a tv, or on a laptop or a smartphone. This technology is allowing me to communicate a message and teachings to you. All of that is incredibly positive.

However, the premise of the attention economy is that we question, what are technology’s goals for you? Do they align with your human goals of spending more time with friends and family, of having closer relationships, of bettering your physical and emotional health, of having more energy and transforming your spiritual life? Or, if we are honest are the goals of technology and technology platforms simply engagement goals. In other words, asking us to maintain as much time as possible with their product. Are they simply designed to get us to keep clicking, tapping and scrolling? And if so, are those goals in alignment with our human goals of better relationships, improving our mental, emotional and physical health, more energy and transforming our spiritual life?

The yin yoga poses in this class will focus on your side body and hips with some of my most favourite yin yoga poses including bananasana, pigeon pose, shoelace pose with a side bend, figure four with a twist. We focus on the principles of yin and modifications are given especially for knee issues but also for SI joint issues in this class.

Resource: Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams

 

Lower Belly Breathing Part 2

This breathing exercise for your lower belly to relieve anxiety will be preceded by a short yoga pose to release your psoas. We will check in and notice how a yoga pose helps us to open up our lower belly. The first breathing exercise continues our exploration of lower belly breathing over the next several weeks.

This breathing is wonderful for relieving anxiety, it creates space away from thought so it is fantastic for reducing that racing monkey mind, it will reduce stress, calm you down so you can sleep, it will aid in your digestion, reduce your hormone cortisol in your body, lower your heart rate and blood pressure and slow your breathing rate so that you will expend less energy and have more energy.

We are going to do this breath lying down on our backs with our knees bent and feet flat on the floor. This will allow you to relax your belly for more ease of breath.

I am going to recommend that you do this breath practice everyday for the 10 minutes that we will practice it together.

Keep practicing with your friend and do this video with your breathing exercise friend until the part 3 comes out. Be sure to subscribe and press the bell so that you get the next video. Practice together and share with them what you notice about doing this breath practice. If you are a member, we are having a supportive forum with lively discussion about our breath practices in our membership community.

 

https://www.melissawest.com/membership/

Members Practice These Videos to Release Your Psoas this Week:

Member Foam Roller Psoas Release

Distraction Detox

This is a hatha yoga class that focuses on balancing postures and moving with breath to cultivate focus in our attention economy. Yoga has become a spectacle in the attention economy, where many yogis have joined in the endless algorhythm of getting you to look at them. Social networks need to keep us scrolling and clicking to collect revenue, so they show you everything they think will grab your attention. This is how the endless flow of rewarding stimulus keeps you coming back.

I think we can all agree that our that our attention has become increasingly fragmented even in the ̈spiritual ̈ world of yoga which have roots in discovering our True Nature not getting the best yoga selfie. When information is rich and options are endless many yoga channels and content creators are seeking to capture your attention in new, outlandish and misguided ways.

Today we are stepping away from the distractions and focusing on a yoga practice that is meaningful for you. It is a hatha yoga practice that will help you find focus and balance in a world that is constantly vying for your attention.

This class includes a lot of variations on classic hatha yoga poses to keep you focused: bridge pose variations, cat pose variations, gate pose variations, downward facing dog variations, Warrior one, Warrior two and Warrior three variations, and chair pose variations before I read you a poem about coming to your center.

Enjoy the class and let me know what you think.

Namaste, Melissa

 

Lower Belly Breathing

This is the first of many breathing exercise practices that we are going to do together here on Yoga with Melissa. The first breathing exercise that we are going to explore over the next several weeks is lower belly breathing. This breathing is wonderful for relieving anxiety, it creates space away from thought so it is fantastic for reducing that racing monkey mind, it will reduce stress, calm you down so you can sleep, it will aid in your digestion, reduce your hormone cortisol in your body, lower your heart rate and blood pressure and slow your breathing rate so that you will expend less energy and have more energy.

We are going to do this breath lying down on our backs with our knees bent and feet flat on the floor. This will allow you to relax your belly for more ease of breath.

I am going to recommend that you do this breath practice everyday for the 10 minutes that we will practice it together.

Find one friend that you can do this video with for the next week until part 2 comes out. Be sure to subscribe and press the bell so that you get the next video. Practice together and share with them what you notice about doing this breath practice. If you are a member, I am going to set up a section in our community that we can discuss the effects of our breath practice each day.

Members Practice These Videos to Release Your Lower Belly this Week:

Slo Mo Ball Lower Belly Release Members Click Here

Give yourself a thumbs up for a commitment to breath practice since one of the benefits is lowering the stress hormone cortisol in your body.

If you feel more calm, put I feel more calm in the comments. If you have any questions, leave them below and I can answer them in future videos.

Yin Yang Yoga

Highly sensitive people feel more and more deeply this includes emotions. When HSP walk into a room they can be aware of the mood, the friendships, the enemies and the personalities of the people working there. HSP are deeply affected by other people's moods and emotions which makes them empathic.

The heart protector meridian and triple warmer meridians run along the inside and outside of your arms respectively both of these meridians help to protect you and your emotional landscape in relationship.

If this ability to sense the emotional landscape has become overwhelming I would say it can be extraordinarily helpful to nurture the strength and integrity of your chi. When your chi is strong you will be calm and focused, you will be resilient and able to flow with all of life.

It is not a problem to be able to feel deeply, to feel your emotions and to be empathetic, to be open with compassion to the emotions of others when your chi is strong. If your chi is weak and lacks integrity, this can be exhausting and overwhelming.

Every breath you take can support you. Each inhalation you take in can draw in yin energy, nurturing and nourishing every cell of your body with oxygen. Every exhalation you let out can allow you to release toxins, tension, strong energy, aggression and strong emotions that do not belong to you.

 

The Future

This video is about the direction and vision of the Yoga with Melissa channel as we move into our 10 year anniversary on YouTube as well as the specifics for July 2019.

Don’t worry I’m still going to teach you yin yoga, restorative yoga, yin yang yoga and yoga nidra and sleep yoga. I am still going to teach yoga that you can do and yoga that is meaningful to your whole being, not just physical exercise, but something that is going to touch your mind, your emotional body, your energy body and your spiritual being.

I will be finishing the Yoga for Highly Sensitive People Series with a Yin Yang Yoga for the Heart Protector and Tripple Warmer Meridians. I know you have all loved that series, but I feel for now it is complete. Of course, because this is video, you can go back and to any of those classes at any time and I encourage you to do that.

September of 2019 marks my ten year anniversary on YouTube. As I approach the ten year anniversary of Yoga with Melissa on YouTube I have taken some time to pause and reflect on where I have been and where I am going.

I have always had a vision to teach real yoga for real people. That is yoga that people can do. Yoga that is meaningful beyond the exhibitionist shapes that might make a good Instagram photo. I want us to be healthy physically so that we are also whole mentally, emotionally, energetically and spiritually. I want to continue to do that for decades to come.

A lot of things about the way yoga is presented on YouTube and through social channels from Facebook to Instagram has greatly disheartened me in the last decade. To me, yoga is a deeply personal and interpersonal practice that cares for the human spirit, the planet and the well-being and happiness of all beings. The way yoga often gets performed to build one’s own sense of pride and vanity discourages me.

In addition the content-treadmill of YouTube that bullies content creators into keeping up or being left behind has also left me exhausted and burned out.

I say this to let you know that some things will be changing on Yoga with Melissa over the next few months as we enter our second decade on YouTube.

We will be doing less and we will be doing more.

Let’s start with the less. I am going to be taking planned time off. You may have noticed that I have taken a couple weeks off over the last month. Some of that was planned and some of that was not. The unplanned time was because of exhaustion that leads to illness. The planned time was because I believe no human being can keep going inexhaustibly and should not have to.

So, I will be taking at least two weeks off in the summer, in the autumn at thanksgiving, in the winter at Christmas and in the spring. There will be no pre-recorded content, it will just be time off with no videos. Tim and I are a solo partnership. Together we do all of the content planning, filming, editing, marketing and social media to keep this channel going. It is a lot of work for two people. Taking time off, is how I envision our relationship being sustainable in the next decade. This will give us time to recharge our batteries and be better human beings and also give us time to simply be as a married couple.

Now for the more. I am deeply committed to offering you meaningful yoga for your whole being: physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically and spiritually.

I am going to be adding a second short video to this channel each week focused on breath or pranayama. My intention with these videos is to move through various breath practices in a deep and focused way so that it is not just information but a practice that we can engage in together here. We will focus on breath for sleep,

Yoga Nidra for HSP

Yoga nidra or sleep yoga offers you guided verbal instructions will lead you to a state of consciousness that are somewhere between waking, dreaming and sleeping. It is a guided meditation that takes you to a place of relaxed, spacious awareness. You will be guided into a state of effortless non-doing that is beneficial for highly sensitive people. Through your experience of yoga nidra you will enter into a conscious sleep where your mind slows down and your thoughts move further and further away from you.

Elaine Aaron, research psychologist and foremost expert on highly sensitive people talks about the importance of rest in the form of transcendence for highly sensitive people. In other words rest that allows us to rise above it all in the form of meditation or contemplation. This is a kind of meditative rest that allows highly sensitive people to remove themselves from ordinary thinking into the pure consciousness of pure being. Elaine Aaron says it will give us a bigger and fresher perspective of life when we return.

I feel that this prescription of meditative rest and transcendence is the perfect description of yoga nidra. A way of resting within the pure awareness that exists within our waking, dreaming, deep sleep beyond all imagery and pure consciousness that is our Awareness of our True Self.

Each of the different states whether waking, dreaming, sleep or the pure consciousness of awareness offers our mind a different quality. Sometimes deep rest, sometimes a feeling of security, sometimes downtime for unwinding and allowing our minds to float and sometimes access to our deep inner resources.

In order to practice yoga nidra you want to be as comfortable as possible. You can practice it on a yoga mat, but you could also practice it in bed, on the couch or in a chair. You are going to be here for 20 minutes, so it is a good idea to have some padding underneath you and a blanket over top of you in case you get cool. You might want to have a pillow under your head so that your chin is slightly lower than your forehead. This will allow you to access your parasympathetic nervous system - your rest and digest. Using and eye pillow or covering your eyes will allow you to release over stimulation.