Couldn’t ask for a more inspiring day! The sun is shining, spring seems just around the corner, and we are unlocking the throat chakra in tonight’s class with deep vibrational harmonies, delicious shoulder stretches and Adham Pranayama.
6pm
SPIRITWIND ACADEMY 64 OXFORD AVE.
13$
Hello lovely arty yogis!
Happy 2013! It’s time to clean out the old creative cobwebs and take a new approach. Creativity can be as nourishing, enriching and enlivening and yoga, but many times, like yoga, our creative practice can be stale, stagnant or downright lazy. We are always creating something a bit different each time we sit at our easel or desk, even if it’s a minor variation on an ongoing theme: so why not take a new approach to how we go about supporting our creative practice. Do you always write late at night with a glass of wine, or need to clean the house before you can feel ready to paint? This year, challenge yourself to get up early to write your next chapter, or commit to your canvass irregardless of the state of your abode. What would come pouring out if you chose to scrap the old artist ‘you’ and break the mold? Probably the same thing as when you break your bad yoga habits and try something new: TRANSFORMATION.
In honor of transformation, and of tapping into your fullest creative potential, my ongoing Friday class will morph into an 8 week intensive on creativity, using asana, pranayama, mediation and journaling to discover your creative habits, those that help and those that hinder, your artistic output, and forge your own, new creative path for 2013.
Friday February 8th to Friday March 29th, 2013
At Spiritwind Academy (64 Oxford St., Toronto, Ontario M5T 1P1)
Yoga for Creativity
Pre-Registered Sliding Scale: 60$ – $80
Drop-in: $13
6pm to 7:15pm
Contact: mara.munro@gmail.com
* All art supplies are provided, but bring your personal journal if you have one.
Since approximately 60% of us are visual learners, it may be beneficial, and fun, to break out the art supplies and draw a map of your yoga body. In this way you can use colors, shapes, words, and even textures to record the results of your body scans. You can keep track of changes over time, noticing overlaps or repetition of sensations, new aches and pains, or changes in your existing trouble-spots.
To draw a map of your body, you can either make it life-size by having someone trace your outline by lying on a large sheet of drafting paper, or you can scale it down with a freehand drawing or tracing an image from your favorite yoga anatomy book. You can use just one image, or create numerous maps based on different areas of your body, such as one sketch for muscles and one sketch for organs.
Scan your body from head to toe, from the surface of your skin to your bone-marrow, and track everything you find by marking points on your yoga body map. From this, you will begin to create your unique body map — and a work of art!
I am on a mission for Plaid Magazine to find the coolest, creative yoga classes in Toronto.
Here is number one: Suspension Yoga
I like context.
Knowing where a painter was born, if they were left-handed, if they were avid readers, city mice or country hermits and what they ate for breakfast all help to deepen my perception and enjoyment of a painting.
In an art gallery, I enjoy the artist bios and quotes and the collection introductions stenciled up and down 15 feet of wall almost as much as I do the colors and brushstrokes.
Take for example this one I found in the AGO on my latest visit:
“But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”
- Frank Stella
Madinat as-Salam I
I also like parallels.
If we take Stella’s quote and think about the canvass as our body, and yoga as painting, we find a common goal between the two practices: space. The aim of yoga is to create space, mentally and physically through breath, compassionate awareness and asana. Sometimes I think of this process as a cracking open of sorts, or as letting go and surrendering. But what if we thought about creating space in our yoga practice as a creative process? In the act of relinquishing everything that fills us up, litters the canvass of lives, that ceases to serve us anymore, that distracts our attention, we consciously free up space for light, for softness, for movement. In these spaces, we invite our authentic selves, the true subject of our painting, to appear and to flourish: to live.
If your body were a painting: what wold it look like now?
How cluttered is your painting; is their room to breathe?
What ‘decoration or illustration’ s can you remove?
How can you bring your ‘subject’ to life?
“There are no straight lines in life,” says my friend sitting across from me, resting his elbows on the checkered table-cloth staring out past his coffee mug through the restaurant window. “What do you mean? You’ve had a pretty linear trajectory of success!” I reply, rubbing in the fact that he has just left me in Toronto, for the greener pastures of New York City. “Plus, the lines of these squares,” I say pointing to the red and white table-cloth, “are pretty perfect”.
“That’s exactly it, ” he says, “these lines only look perfect from a distance; and my life looks like a well-executed plan. But from the inside, there are no straight lines. With a microscope you could easily see the imperfections of the lines on this table-cloth, and if you ever sat with me on one of the countless days, when I had no clue where I was going, and was filled with doubt and uncertainty, you would see that my life only looks like a straight line in hindsight: these are all optical and perceptive illusions.”
“Remember when I visited you in New York,” I say, “and we went to hear Henry Rollins talk about his new book of photography. I think he was saying the same thing. Looking back on his career now, everything fits together, his music, his message, his publishing company and now his photography; but amidst this process, he didn’t know what the fuck was going to happen, or where he would end up.”
“Exactly, Rollins was articulating this very same idea; from the outside, we like to look at successful people and imagine that they knew where they would end up, nay, planned where they would be, from the start. This is a perfect way for us to stay paralyzed by fear, to make ourselves feel bad about not knowing where we are going, but the truth is, no one does: there are no straight lines, and that’s perfectly okay.”
I looked down at the table-cloth and noticed how the red and white threads had bled together in the tight weave, almost creating a soft pink blur at where they met, not a crisp line separating the two squares. I looked up at my friend, and saw how I had built up this idea of his life, being so perfect, so planned and so expertly executed, and noticed how I have held this illusion against the map of my life, at times using it as inspiration, but also fueling my doubt and insecurity.
Then I saw the soft blur of both our lives, the red and the white, the successes and failures, the dreams and realities, the dropped threads and the inconsistent patterns woven through decades of wondering, and wandering. There are no straight lines in life, no clear-cut paths, no red and white, we exist in at the soft meeting point of will and surrender, moving though life leaving a luminescent pink blur as we follow our truth.
