Yoga with Melissa

Stressful Day Relief

Did you ever have one of those stressful days? One where the weight of work and the problems of your personal life create so much tension and anxiety in your body that they could potentially affect your sleep that evening? This past week my daughter has been sick and I have family visiting from across the country. There has been a lot of extra care-taking and hosting responsibilities on my plate in addition to my regular work. When it came time to make a yoga class for you this week I thought, what would I want the most today? I would want a yin yoga class that I could do in the evenings to help me let go of the stressful day I have just experienced. A day of doctor appointments, feeling guilty for turning down social engagements and having to cancel work commitments.

This yin yoga class to help you let go of a stressful day we will focus on the large intestine meridian to help you let go. We will also focus on the spleen and stomach meridians to let go of the way we tend to worry and overthink things. Along those lines we will attend to the liver meridian to release frustration and anger, especially anger that is turned inwards. When the liver meridian is flowing smoothly we experience an overall free and easy energy. Finally we will make sure to stimulate the bladder meridian - the guardian of peace, for free flowing energy.

Related Classes:

Continue on after this class with Yoga Nidra/Sleep Yoga for Anxiety 

Yin Yoga Full Classes: Click here

7 Day Staycation

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Chakra Cleansing

This week's Chakra Cleansing Yoga Nidra for Inner Radiance comes to you by popular request. Of course our members get the audio download version that starts directly with the guided meditation, without any YouTube advertising or promotional preamble. This is one of the many benefits of being a member.

This full length 20 min chakra cleansing yoga nidra for inner radiance will cleanse the chakras or energy portals that receive, assimilate and store your life force energy. When we are healthy our life force energy flows smoothly, but it can get blocked and we can experience a lack of life force energy or a surge of life force energy that feels overwhelming. There is an ebb and flow to our life force energy that is natural. In the morning we will have more energy and this allows us to wake up and get on with our day. In the evenings we slow down which allows us to sleep through the night and restore our energy for the next day.

In this yoga nidra we will balance the life force energy that flows through the chakra energy system in your body providing you with a radiance and brilliance that allows you to glow from the inside out. Through this yoga nidra we will access the life force energy that runs from the base chakra to the crown chakra allowing us to release fixed patterns and emotions hard-wired into our tense body armouring. The seven chakras that we will cleanse in our guided yoga nidra energy meditation today are a powerful gateway into our inner psychology.

Member Chakra Cleansing Yoga Nidra for Inner Radiance - Link Here

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Our members are super looking forward to our August 2018 Challenge ¨I´m Not Busy: The Absolute Necessity of Doing Nothing”

What you will get with this Month Long Focus in our membership community:

* Live Classes *with 2 way video* Every Monday to support you in overcoming the cultural conditioning of being busy

* A Day of Silence to support you in doing nothing on Sunday August 18th

* A Live Yin Yoga Class on Sunday August 18th to support your day of silence

* Aspiration statements to change our ¨busy¨ mindsets

* Daily Yoga Practices to Support you in the Daily Yoga Connection

* Support for your Aspiration to do less in our Stick to Your Mat and On My Mat Today forums

* Support for your own Self Care in our Self Care Forum

* Prompts for Restorative Yoga Breaks from me

* A recipe to support doing nothing from Linda

* Support from our Bookclub, Moonstruck and Devotional forums as well.

It is not too late to join in!

Member Link: Click Here

Sign up here for 7 days to better sleep with yoga and I will send you 1 video a day for 7 days with the best of yoga, ayurveda, self massage and pranayama (or breath practices) to help you get the best night’s sleep.

Restorative Yoga

The ongoing aggressive depletion of our energy reserves has become familiar to the point that the experience of exhaustion is just part of our normal human experience in our day to day life.

Your presence here means that you are willing to become curious about your underlying attitude about your spiritual and energetic beliefs about your experience. Renewal and sustainability of your energy depends on spiritual awareness and an attitude of tenderness and compassionate responsibility first towards ourselves. In the rest of this class we are going to explore our longing to renew and sustain our energy reserves.

Healing begins when we are present to ourselves. First we must connect with our own sense of overwhelm and depletion. Clearly, kindly, honestly and gently open to your experience of exhaustion and burnout. We let go of judging the tiredness and deficiency in energy and we surrender to it with tenderness. In the same way that our body lets go into the props and the earth, our mind lets go of resisting the story that we should not be tired.

Next we recognize the value of all of life, including our own within the living unity of the entire ecosystem. We can re-evaluate our aspirations for what it means to be energetic within the web of our culture and imagine living a life that is harmony with the rhythms of the earth as a living whole, part of a culture that cares for our souls, honouring the ebb and flows of life, not one that continuously demands life lived in overdrive.

 

Yin Yang Yoga

Chronic tightness in your neck and shoulders can lead to shortened ligaments and a restricted range of motion, in short pain and stiffness in your neck and shoulders. In this yin yang yoga class for neck and shoulder pain we will start with yin yoga.

The yin yoga portion of this yoga class will revitalize the tissues of your and shoulders. Through the long held compression and tension of yin yoga postures, the tissues of your neck and shoulders are soaked in the same was as if you were soaking a stiff old sponge. As you settle and soften into a yin yoga pose, the subtle release that takes you deeper into your pose are your tissues hydrating and becoming more pliable.

The mindfulness part of this yin yoga portion of this class is paying attention and sensing into and feeling the way your tissues are squeezed and compressed. You will feel as though you have had a good massage for your neck and shoulders by the end of the yin yoga portion of this class.

Additionally, to release the stiffness of your neck and shoulders the layers of your connective tissue must be able to glide over each others. Things like your habitual daily postures, aging and injury can begin to bind your connective tissue together, creating adhesions and restricting the range of motion in your neck and shoulders. This creates the stiffness that you experiences and restricts the gliding movement between the sliding surfaces of the connective tissue. Think of it like a traffic jam.

The adhesions block the flow of nutrients and energy through your body causing you both pain and stiffness. When we gently soften into our yin yoga postures, we access the deeper layers of the connective tissues and this helps to break up the adhesions. Simply by applying mild stress to the joints and connective tissues alleviates pain and stiffness.

In the second half of this yoga class the yang portion, we will focus on natural, functional movement in our yoga sequencing and yoga postures. These natural movements combined with yoga postures or asanas help us to get our instinctual movement patterns back. They will help us to develop our proprioception and our sense of where and how our bodies are moving in space. We will spend a lot of time with our joints and knowing where they are in relationship to one another and our environment.

This is going to help your shoulders and neck feel a whole lot better, but it is also going to help your balance and your eyes and ears. It will also improve your equilibrium and the way you interact with yourself and your environment. The natural movement is huge for developing your kinesthetic sense and your interoception, that is your sense of movement, from the inside out. You will develop your sensory nerves throughout your entire body and especially your feet since we practice yoga barefoot.

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Oceanside Yin Yoga

Myofascial meridians are tracks of myofascial tissue that distribute, strain, facilitate movement and provide stability throughout your body, including your neck. These ¨meridians¨ are are a map that Tom Myers created of the fascial system.

When it comes to your neck there are a few myofascial meridians that affect your neck.

The superficial backline which runs along the backs of your legs, up either side of your spine, all the way up along your neck.

The superficial frontline which runs along the fronts of your legs, along your rectus abdominis, along either side of your of your sternum, and along the sternocleidomastoid. The deep front line also includes the quads, the fascia of the lower torso and the front of the neck.

The lateral line runs all the way along the side body just like the gallbladder meridian.

The spiral line loops across the body in spirals several times, across the torso, the hips and the legs and as you may have guessed it, the spiral line joins at the skull, so it is another line that affects and crosses over the the neck.

Throughout this class we will check in with the range of motion of your neck and assess your neck pain relief from 10 being extreme pain to 0 being no pain as we progress through the class.

Yin Yoga Sequence: Centering, Banasana, Half Butterfly, Cat Pulling its Tail, Savasana

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Yoga Nidra

This 25 min essential yoga nidra for insomnia will help you to fall asleep and takes you through a guided relaxation technique for deep sleep. This full yoga nidra guided meditation for sleep and insomnia will help to calm your mind and relax your body so that you can not only fall asleep, but also catch up on lost sleep if you are suffering from insomnia.

This essential Yoga nidra can help you recover from both long-term and short-term insomnia. It will both help your body to fall asleep easily and sleep deeply and it can also help you to make up for lost sleep from insomnia. Yoga nidra will increase the release of melatonin and slow down its release in your body. Melatonin is a hormone secreted by your pineal gland that helps to regulate your sleep.

Yoga nidra also slows your body down enough so that it relaxes and the production of cortisol turns off, reducing your stress, allowing your body to move into relaxation and then sleep. Sleep studies have shown that people who have insomnia with sleep disruption have elevated levels of nighttime cortisol. Yoga nidra helps to reduce the levels of cortisol in the body, allowing your body to deeply relax and effortlessly release into deep sleep.

Member Essential Yoga Nidra for Insomnia Audio Download 25 mins - Click Here

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Relax with Restorative Yoga

As a Ph. D. in communications and cultural studies, I am continually reflecting on the ways that the culture we live in is mediated by the communication systems through which we consume our lives and how that transforms our individual experiences, our everyday life and our relationships. The constant demands to produce and consume in a fast paced world mediated by our powerful tiny hand held computers and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook has a tremendous impact on our lives.

Engaging for almost a decade as a yoga therapist in offering a safe a supportive environment for our yoga community members, I have observed the effect of this fast pace of life on my own nervous system and also my yoga students’ minds and bodies. In short this pace asks us to move too fast causing us to be twired (tired and wired) and eventually leading to overwhelm.

Restorative yoga is a style of yoga that uses props such as blankets, bolsters, blocks, pillows, chair, sandbags, eye pillows to allow our body to deeply relax. By relaxing thoroughly into the support of our restorative yoga props we can elicit a relaxation response. This is a neurological response that tells our body that we are safe and pulls us out of the fight or flight mode. When we move out of fight or flight mode, we can turn on the rest and digest system, allowing our bodies to shift into long term growth and repair.

In a culture that pushes you to do more and be more, this is a radical act of resistance. Instead of conforming to the dominant culture’s pressure to produce and consume, you are joining a powerful subcultural movement to rest and renew. The intentions in a restorative yoga class are different from mainstream culture or even mainstream yoga. The restorative yoga movement offers you an aspiration to disconnect from the from the goals for the outer world and reconnect with your inner world.

The effort involved in a restorative yoga class is conscious relaxation as opposed to mindless relaxation. When you watching tv, youtube or are scrolling through social media you are mindlessly relaxing.

When we come into a restorative yoga pose, we recognize all the ways we hold tension in our bodies. In that way the effort involved in a restorative yoga class becomes about a willingness to look at how and where we are holding tension in our bodies and a willingness to allow the tension to soften into the props and ground.

How will we do that? With an impeccable standard of comfort. It is up to us to take the time to create the ultimate environment of comfort for our body, nervous system, skeletal system, muscular system, organ body, fluid system, breathing body, joints and cells. We can do this by taking the time to build our props to completely support our bodies throughout our restorative yoga class.

Restorative Yoga Sequence: Savasana, Supta Baddha Konasana, Raised Child´s Pose, Restorative Shoulderstand, Legs Up the Wall, Savasana

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No Stress Beginner Yoga

This complete beginner at home yoga routine is guaranteed to destress you in 30 minutes. It combines gentle full body yoga stretches for beginners designed for relaxation and flexibility. This beginner home yoga workout routine for complete beginners will open up your chest, allowing you to breathe more deeply and help you to release stress and anxiety. These basic yoga poses for beginners can be done easily at home to release tension from your body and are the perfect stress relief and way to de-stress.

When we sit hunched over our computers and cell phones all day we can get stuck in a cycle of stress. Our body learns to closes itself down protect itself through physical tension and shallow breathing. By opening our chest, deepening our breath and improving our posture we will destress in this beginner yoga class.

Complete Beginner Yoga Routine to De-stress: Bridge Pose or Setu Bandhasana, Cat Pose or Marjaryasana, Lunge Pose or Anjaneyasana, Warrior One or Virabhadrasana One, Warrior Two or Virabhadrasana Two, Side Angle Pose or Parsvakonasana, Legs up the Wall or Viparita Karani, Sphinx Pose or Salamba Bhujangasana, Matsyendrasana, Knees to Chest Pose, Savasana or Corpse Pose

60 min Yin Yang Yoga

This is the best yin yang yoga routine for mornings. In just an hour you will be able to wake up and take on your day better than a cup of coffee. Instead of starting our day scattering and draining our energy by sending it outwards, scrolling through social media, we are going to gather our energy so we have the vitality, strength and endurance for your day. In yoga we call energy prana or your vital life force energy. It is there to be cultivated and when it flows through your body smoothly and evenly, you will glisten and sparkle from the inside out. In this yin yang yoga class for mornings we will balance and harmonize your energy or prana so that you can function at your best today.

We will begin with a 30 min yin yoga sequence for flexibility and to focus on the meridian channels while your muscles are cool and stiff from sleeping all night. Starting with the gallbladder meridian, yin yoga poses to support the gallbladder meridian will help you plan your day and make decisions. Through yin yoga postures for the gallbladder meridian you will feel inspired, passionate and ready to take action. From there we will shift our focus to the most important reservoir of essential energy in your body, the kidneys. By nourishing kidney energy you will build courage and willpower. The yin yoga poses for your kidneys and kidney meridian will provide the strength and endurance to work hard through your whole day.

Following the yin yoga portion of the class we will move on to the yang portion of the class which will be even more energizing and faster paced. We will begin with cat pose to wake up your central nervous system and improve the communication between your body and your mind. Your spinal nerves carry signals to your mind, this simple pose will improve your focus and concentration for the day. Focusing on your core with boat pose will build your self-confidence and self-assurance for the day. Support and stability for your day will be created through standing postures as we continue to gather the prana and energy into your body. Balancing postures create further focus and concentration for your day. Backbends will help you open to new possibilities in your day.

7 Day Yoga Staycation! | 7 Days DIY Yoga Retreat at Home

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Yoga Nidra for Healing

This 20 minute yoga nidra for healing is a deeply healing and restorative guided meditation for when you need physical and emotional healing.

Deep rest is essential to our overall physical, mental and emotional well-being. When we take time to deeply rest, our bodies can be healed at a cellular level.

Our parasympathetic nervous system, lymphatic system and organs can do their natural work of repair.

When you are experiencing illness, pain and emotional depletion this guided meditation for deep inner healing will allow you to tap into your own body’s innate capacity for healing.

In this yoga nidra meditation for healing we will trace your awareness through the network of cells, tissues, and organs to improves the free flow of energy along the pathways for your body’s well being.

This meditative sleep yoga allows you to open your awareness into different parts of your body to mobilize your own innate healing power.

This free flow of energy will greatly assist your body’s innate healing capacity.

Member Yoga Nidra for Healing Audio Download 20 mins - Click Here

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Yoga Nidra Full Class

https://youtu.be/1cb-aRJTrDQ

Short Videos about Yoga Nidra

https://youtu.be/saPGPmxtoQ8

Sign up here for 7 days to better sleep with yoga and I will send you 1 video a day for 7 days with the best of yoga, ayurveda, self massage and pranayama (or breath practices) to help you get the best night’s sleep.