6pm

SPIRITWIND ACADEMY 64 OXFORD AVE.

13$

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.

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!

READ THE FULL POST HERE!

I am on a mission for Plaid Magazine to find the coolest, creative yoga classes in Toronto.

Here is number one: Suspension Yoga

You Gotta Fly!

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?

“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.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

This is a picture of me painting.

I am not a painter, and I had no idea this picture was being taken.

a few nights ago I was unexpectedly hurled into an intense moment of unadulterated creative expression that in many ways felt like doing yoga. Here’s what happened…

Art Battle Toronto was created by Simon Plashkes and Chris Pemberton, and is a live art competition where artists have 25 minutes to paint a complete piece in front of a live audience who then votes for their favorite. Each round includes veritable artists, and a guest audience member – which is where I came in. 5 minutes after I dropped my ticket stub in the hat and promptly forgetting about it, my name was drawn, and I was summoned to the easels.

Sweating under the bright lights, I found myself face to face with a blank canvas, armed with a heavy palate of thick vibrant acrylic paint, wondering, “what the hell am I going to paint!?”

No time to decide, the buzzer goes off, and the games begin! I set aside my train of thought, my nervous brain filled with doubt and judgment, because there is no time or need for stories about can and can’t, what and why: I pick up the palette knife, exhale, and let the paint fly.

Like sinking deep into a long pigeon pose, 25 minutes could have been 25 hours. As I dropped deeper into the experience of painting; the colors textures, sensations in my arms and shoulders, the magic of instantaneous, intuitive aesthetic judgments, I truly felt like I was practicing yoga, and very viscerally realized that in these two practices, so much of my inner-landscape appeared exactly the same.

The buzzer rings, the game is done, and I feel elated and energized: like the flooding sensation of free-flowing prana and unraveled emotions when you pull yourself from the inner life of a pose and feel it’s effect. My painting was done. I didn’t care how it looked, just like a yoga pose, it was all about how it felt, during, and after.

Later, my soon to be art patron approached me to discuss my spontaneous creation. instead of asking me about how I chose to paint what I did, he asked, (just like a teacher) “How did you feel?”

“Nervous, charged, liberated, fearless, inadequate…” I replied. “Yes, he said, “I can see that.”

This whole experience was a revelation of yogic and artistic ties, and deepened my understanding and curiosity of the links between these two practices.

My painting was an unfiltered manifestation of my immediate reality, like the blank canvass of a yoga pose splashed with the unique colors of time, place, person and experience.

This experience was an affirmation of the power of the uncensored pose. Like an unplanned painting, unmediated by thought or judgment, every yoga pose is free to become a work of art.

I blessedly fell into the arms of the Starving Artist Yoga Network just one year ago when I moved to Toronto, and am happy to announced that I am now officially part of the team, along with painter and newly certified acupuncturist Julie Gladstone, and the lovely inked Doula, Leah Von Zuben.

We have re-committed and clarified our vision to promote and provide Creative, alternative, affordable, non-corporate yoga classes in downtown Toronto.

We are also amping up to release a winter workshop series to knock your woolen socks off! Get ready for a synthesis of yoga and creative arts unlike anything offered anywhere in Toronto.

Starving Artist Yoga Network is  happily housed at Spirit Wind Internal Arts Center in Kensington Market at the corner of Augusta & Oxford St. on the 2nd Floor above the Vegetarian Restaurant Urban Herbivore.

While we fishing cooking up some delectable workshop fusions of yoga, art, music and other imaginative artistic ingredients, join us every Friday for a relaxing end of the week class for all levels:

Spirit Wind Centre. 64 Oxford St. 2nd Floor 6:00-7:30pm

PWYC FRIDAYS DROP IN 6:00-7:30pm